Norbu’s The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes: Neo-Victorian Occupations of the Past

Focusing on the Tibetan novelist Jamyang Norbu’s intertextual appropriation of key Victorian texts such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (1887-1927) and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), this article explores the ways that binary formations of identity are decentered in the neo-Victorian novel The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes (1999). Via an overt critique of imperial occupation, I argue, Norbu posits an alternative mode of postcolonial ‘occupation’ as political process.