67 Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, the popular mid-nineteenth century work of crime fi ction which weaves into itself the tale of adventure of three Indian Brahmins, traces the journey of a precious yellow diamond from India to England as a part of colonial booty. Tellingly, the novel ends with the repossession of the gem by the Hindu-Brahmins. The Brahmins pursue the diamond with an unerring determination through to the end and, fi nally, escape with it from England to their native land. It is particularly signifi cant that the novel concedes victory to the Brahmins over the English police and the nineteenth-century systems of Western scientifi c detection. Not only does this confl ictual sense of poetic justice in Collins’s work celebrate the heroism of the Brahmin priests, but these high-caste men are also idealized in various other ways. In forging his Gothic vision of a ‘prehistoric’ Hindu religion, Collins contrasts what I term the ‘Brahmin Sublime’ with English middle-class domesticity in order to question the latter’s comfortable illusions of safety and its all too easy assumptions of moral superiority. At the same time, in its strong ethnographic fascination with the institution of caste the novel emphasizes the caste system as the ‘essence’ of Indian social formations and reinforces the idea of a hierarchical and Brahmin-centred model of caste. While it seems obvious that within the Gothic economy of Collins’s novel the prehistoric and dark ‘otherworld’ of India should be depicted as a site of colonial terror, what is particularly noteworthy is the way in which Collins portrays this romanticized India as a predominantly ‘HinduBrahminical’ society.2 His vision of India reveals the degree to which he draws from then current Orientalist ideologies which defi ned India, as we shall see, largely in terms of its Brahminical traditions to the detriment, and hence silencing, of other ethnic and religious communities.