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| image from Wikimedia Commons |
Harini Nagendra is a professor of ecology at Azim Premji University, and a well-known public speaker and writer on issues of nature and sustainability. The first book in her Bangalore Detectives Club series was a New York Times Notable Book of 2022, and shortlisted for the Agatha, Lefty, Anthony and Historical Dagger. Harini lives in Bangalore with her family, in a home filled with maps. She loves trees, mysteries, and traditional recipes. Learn more about her and her books at her website.
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| Image from Wikimedia Commons |
In my day job, I am an academic and university professor who conducts research on the ecology and history of Indian cities – and I come across many fascinating nuggets of information which I’d love to share with readers from different parts of the world. The Bangalore Detectives Club, my historical mystery series set in 1920s colonial India, was inspired by this desire to showcase the many, very interesting stories and anecdotes that needed to flourish outside the pages of scholarly academic literature. While I write non-fiction, too, it’s sometimes easiest to do this through a story.
Book 3 in the series, A Nest of Vipers, takes us into the world of jadoo—Indian street magic—with sleight-of-hand magicians and rope tricks which have fascinated me since I was a young child, growing up in Delhi in the 1970s, where it was common to see snake charmers, fortune tellers with parrots, and animal trainers with performing bears. Some of these forms of street magic have since been made illegal, especially the ones that involve caging and mistreating wild animals – and rightfully so. But others still survive to this day on the streets of India.
Jadoo had an uneasy relationship to western stage magic in the early 20th century. Indian street performers and circus artists made their way to Europe and America, and public interest in their performances began to attract the attention of Western magicians like Harry Houdini, who dressed in blackface at the Chicago World Fair in 1893 and pretended to be a Hindu Fakir.
Houdini may not have known, but he was following in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessor Charles Dickens, who also stained his face and enacted the part of an Indian magician at children’s parties. Houdini’s biggest rival Howard Thurston travelled to India to learn the secrets of street magicians, which he then exploited on stage, but at the same time, denounced those that he learnt from, calling them charlatans and tricksters.
By 1922, when the Indian independence movement had spread across India, a few prominent circuses had begun to integrate acts that incorporated elements of anti-British sentiment, flirting with danger. The Bengali magician Das, who plays a key role in A Nest of Vipers, disappears in the middle of a dramatic performance, soon after making his distaste for the British Empire public on stage. His story was inspired by all the stories I read about Indian magicians, and by the nimble street acrobats I still see in Indian cities today, who are bold and imaginative, yet languish in obscurity - in contrast to their more successful Western counterparts.
A Bangalore Detectives Club Mystery, Book 3
Death stalks the streets of Bangalore when the Circus comes to town . . .
It's January 1922. The Bangalore Constabulary is on high alert as The Prince of Wales is scheduled to visit the city to redeem his reputation after disastrous visits marked by violent anti-British riots.
Kaveri has none of these concerns on her mind, not when she has just been given VIP tickets to the famous Bangalore circus. But when a celebrity magician, shackled in an iron cage filled with deadly snakes, disappears into thin air, she is stunned to discover her friend and favourite policeman, Inspector Ismail, is telling her to leave the case well alone.
After solving two murder cases, Kaveri Murthy thought she had cemented her reputation as Bangalore's favourite lady detective. But when death threats are left at her doorstep, former friends become foes, and the bodies start to pile up, Kaveri realises she has never been in this much danger…
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