Moth Smoke

The absurdly named Professor Julius Superb crops up at unexpected times throughout the novel like a red herring—though his insights illuminate some of Daru’s underlying motivations, albeit from an academic distance. Professor Julius Superb is not, strictly speaking, a character in the novel. The reader reviews his ideas and opinions in articles and interviews, passed along secondhand; consequently, he functions more as a symbol than as a personality. Daru was once a student of the professor, and he tells Mumtaz the history behind the unusual name: “His great-grandfather was the batman of a Scottish officer who tried for years to get him to convert. When the Indian Mutiny broke out, the old Scot wound up with a knife in his chest. Julius’s great-grandfather came to him on his deathbed and said he'd decided to become a Christian” (30). Upon hearing this, the officer pronounced the decision to be “Superb”; thus, the name originates from a colonial conversion story. The legacy of colonial influence on the Indian subcontinent reverberates down to Daru’s day.

Mumtaz then introduces Daru to an article by the professor, entitled “The Phoenix and the Flame.” Using the myth of the phoenix—who dies and is reincarnated in a burst of flames—Superb analyzes the message inherent in the myth.