The Longest Criminal Trial in British India | The Literature Lounge

In this episode of The Literature Lounge, journalist and author Dan Morrison explores one of colonial India’s most disturbing and forgotten true crime cases — a carefully planned murder carried out using plague bacteria.

In a deeply researched conversation, Dan traces how the story found him by accident while researching early medical experiments in India. What began as an investigation into cholera vaccines and healing myths surrounding the Ganga led him to a 1930s murder involving aristocracy, ambition, and the dangerous accessibility of deadly germs.

He unpacks the extraordinary context of the era: a time of rapid scientific breakthroughs, loose laboratory controls, and “gentleman scientists,” when life-saving medical advances could also be misused.

Dan also reflects on the accused — a modern, self-inventing zamindar inspired by cinema and Sherlock Holmes — and how this crime revealed tensions between tradition and modernity.

A conversation that moves between crime reporting, medical history, and social change, showing how one murder became a mirror to an era on the brink of transformation.

What this episode is REALLY about

• Not just a sensational crime.
• Not science as pure progress.
• Not colonial justice as neutral.

It’s about:

• How early medical science enabled new forms of crime
• Plague, vaccines, and unchecked experimentation
• Class conflict and inheritance in colonial India
• Cinema, consumerism, and modern ambition
• Justice under the British Raj

If you’re drawn to true crime, forgotten histories, and stories that make the past feel uncomfortably familiar — this episode is for you.

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