AUTHOR HARINI NAGENDRA WEAVES INDIAN COLONIAL HISTORY INTO CRIME FICTION

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Harini Nagendra is a professor of ecology at Azim Premji University. The Bangalore Detectives Club, her debut crime novel, was on the New York Times Notable Books of 2022 list, and nominated for a Lefty and Agatha award. Harini lives in Bangalore with her family, in a home filled with maps. She loves trees, mysteries, and traditional recipes. Learn more about Harini and her books at her website where you can also find links to her other social media.  

Weaving India’s Colonial History into Crime Fiction

My day job as a professor of climate change in an Indian university involves the use of history, to understand how the ecology of Indian cities has changed over time. Surrounded by maps, archival documents, old letters, photographs, and other glimpses of the past – I often feel like a kid in a candy store. There is so much information, some of it hilarious, terrifying, or just plain weird – which I can’t use, because it doesn’t really fit into my research. Rarely, if ever, are the archives boring. When my colleagues stumbled upon the unbelievable adventures of William Edward Ashton James, assistant superintendent in the Mysore Revenue Survey in the late 19th century, I knew we had to write an article about him. James was stoned by local villagers, cheated by cartmen who gave him ‘unserviceable bullocks’ – and then, having completed his survey under very difficult circumstances, harassed by auditors who wanted to know why he spent so much money. 

We came across many other stories, and I itched to write about them all. But I couldn’t - many had nothing to do with ecology. How could I tell people about the inspiring story of Coffeepudi Sakamma, a young widow with an infant son, who took over her husband’s coffee plantations and built a coffee empire, serving the Maharaja of Mysore in the early 20th century? Or about Kalyanamma, a child widow from Bangalore who became one of India’s pioneering women journalists, founding a school for women in 1913?

Writing a historical crime series, set in the 1920s, satisfied my desire to share these incredible stories of inspiring people with the wider world. Through The Bangalore Detectives Club, my first novel – set in colonial Bangalore in 1921 – I was able to explore some of the ways in which Indian women sought to navigate the Golden Age, which was a time of great possibility for them, but also a time in which they faced significant restrictions on their freedom. In Murder Under a Red Moon, book 2 in the series, I paid tribute to Coffeepudi Sakamma, Kalyanamma and other women of those times, who did things that I would not have believed to possible for women living in back then – had I not read about them. 

My grandmother was born over a century ago. She could read and write in at least three languages – Sanskrit, Tamil and English – and could speak many more, including Kannada, Marathi and Telugu. Despite being the daughter of a lawyer and the wife of a schoolteacher, she didn’t get to be this well educated without a struggle. Her elder sister staged a revolt, going to the local school (then attended only by boys) and taking my grandmother with her - when they were between six and eight years old. She fought against societal expectations – and blazed the way for others to follow. Writing about lives of other women of the 1920s, in colonial India, inspires me – it brings hope that society can change, for the better. I’m so glad that I now have a place to embellish and embed these wonderful stories, in historical mysteries.

 

Murder Under a Red Moon

A Bangalore Detective Mystery, Book 2

When new bride Kaveri Murthy reluctantly agrees to investigate a minor crime to please her domineering mother-in-law—during the blood moon eclipse, no less—she doesn’t expect, once again, to stumble upon a murder.

With anti-British sentiment on the rise, a charismatic religious leader growing in influence, and the fight for women’s suffrage gaining steam, Bangalore is turning out to be a far more dangerous and treacherous place than Kaveri ever imagined—and everyone’s motives are suspect.

Together with the Bangalore Detectives Club—a mixed bag of street urchins, nosy neighbours, an ex-prostitute, and a policeman’s wife—Kaveri once again sleuths in her sari and hunts for clues in her beloved 1920s Ford.

But when her life is suddenly put in danger, Kaveri realizes that she might be getting uncomfortably close to the truth. So she must now draw on her wits and find the killer . . . before they find her.

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SOUTH #INDIA WITH GUEST AUTHOR SUSAN OLEKSIW

A lane in Kovalam, India

Susan Oleksiw writes the Anita Ray series featuring an Indian-American photographer living in her aunt's tourist hotel in South India. She also writes the Mellingham series featuring Chief of Police Joe Silva. Her stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and various anthologies. Learn more about Susan and her writing at her website. 

Setting Versus Place

A successful novel comprises a number of elements—character, plot, and setting are the most obvious. In some mysteries, the setting can be more generic than specific, such as a small town without any distinctive geographical or historical features. But setting can be much more than a location for the narrative.

Cara Black sets her series in Paris, and the reader looks forward to exploring one of the arrondissements in each book. Louise Penny sets her series in a small village in Quebec, Canada, and its environs. Sara Paretsky gives us Chicago’s South Side. In each of these series, and many more, the setting becomes a character, enriching the novel with detail and depth.

In any novel that includes setting as more than a generic place, we learn about history, economic climate, the people and their social world, even the way a place smells and looks and feels. This is the ideal for setting in fiction.

The Anita Ray mysteries are set in South India. Since most of my readers never expect to travel there, I try to include details about this world. Anita Ray lives in Hotel Delite, her aunt’s tourist hotel, located in the beach resort of Kovalam. In the evening she strolls along the beach Promenade, past the open-air restaurants with their tables of fresh fish awaiting customers and the smells of Indian curries cooking. She chases a suspect down a dirt lane lined with colorful saris and cloth purses. She takes a narrow path to the edge of the resort area, where the residents live and the old irrigation canals are thick with weeds.

The city of Trivandrum is nearby, and Anita rides the bus or takes an autorickshaw, a three-wheeled vehicle with more noise than power. The resort might grow with a new hotel and more shops, but the real change is happening in the city. When I lived there in 1976, in a flat that was considered to be in the middle of the city, I walked to a bus stop located across the road from a lumberyard. Huge teak tree trunks were piled in the yard. Just past the yard were narrow lanes with one-storied buildings, where advocates (or lawyers) had their offices. Across the street, next to the bus stop, was the courthouse. The lumberyard is gone, the street has sidewalks, and the courthouse was abandoned for almost thirty years. It’s now being refurbished and reopened.

To make sure Anita Ray’s activities make sense, I travel around the city, exploring neighborhoods, checking out restaurants, and searching for quiet lanes where my characters carry out their criminal deeds.

No novel can give a true or full picture of the culture of a foreign country. But I strive to bring the flavor of India (its colors, smells, tastes, and people) into the story, to keep the setting vivid.

When Krishna Calls

An Anita Ray Mystery

In the glorious beauty of a tropical night, a young woman abandons her daughter in the Hotel Delite compound and flees into the darkness. In the morning Anita Ray recognizes the child as the daughter of an employee, but before she can track her down, the police arrive at the hotel looking for her. She is the main suspect in the stabbing death of her husband. This seems impossible to Anita, but so does the discovery that Nisha and her husband were involved with unscrupulous moneylenders from their family's village.

Anita is ready to let the police do their work as she prepares for a one-woman photography show in a prestigious gallery, but fate conspires against her. An accident wrecks her schedule as well as her car. She sets up her camera for one last shot, but it fails to work. When she inspects the camera she finds a piece of paper wrapped around the batteries and someone else's memory card inside.

Whether she likes it or not, Anita is drawn into the frantic search for a young mother and the murky world of moneylenders and debts of honor, a hidden corner of life in South India.

When Krishna Calls asks how far will a woman go for love and family? Anita Ray thinks she knows how Nisha would answer, but before it is all over Anita must also answer that question. How far will she go to protect her family and her home?

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