The Bangalore Detectives Club by Harini Nagendra
A professor of Sustainability at Azim Premji University, Harini Nagendra is a scholar and researcher of international repute.
This cosy style mystery, the first in a series, is set in 1920s Bangalore, in the then princely state of Mysore. The amateur sleuth is 19-year-old Kaveri, a new bride.
A conventionally structured tale of murder, the story plays out against actual and imagined social history. Fortunate to be educated and married to the enlightened and liberal Doctor Ramu Murthy, Kaveri not only involves herself in solving a murder, but persuades Ramu to aid her efforts in helping the police. As she does so, she comes across all manner of social ills.
The burden of a home’s respectability, Kaveri quickly realizes, is placed on the womenfolk.
Parents guard their daughters closely, “searching for and identifying loose women, then warning their children away from any contact with them, to protect their reputations.” While assessing women’s characters seems to be “the favourite pastime of elders, both men and women,” their husbands get away with drunkenness, beating wives and children and forming liaisons with prostitutes.
One brutish suspect in the initial murder is a gang leader: a pimp who adds to his fortune by creating his own opportunities to carry out blackmail. In a society where wives routinely keep secrets from their husbands — fearing disapproval or worse, the gangster has a free hand. Even as he plans a greater crime, he forces a friendless young woman to seduce a married man so he can extort money from the hpless fellow.
Society’s rigid hierarchies of sexism, racism, and general unfairness frustrate the ethical policeman Inspector Ismail, who explains with that when it comes to the arrest and treatment of suspects, his “hands are tied,” even when he knows better than his superiors.
Women are strictly expected to stay home and obey their husbands. And naturally, with India still under the control of the Raj, racial prejudice abounds, even if not all the characters buy into it. At the Bowring Hospital, British and Indian doctors work as colleagues, although the British doctor is the boss. Within traditional Indian society, the hierarchy of caste is so ingrained that a husband fears to introduce his wife to his orphaned nephew — simply because his late brother married someone from “outside the community.”
The intrepid and relatively innocent Kaveri breaks all kinds of taboos: against drinking from the same vessel as a person of low caste, against speaking to a prostitute, against going into the neighbourhood where the cattle are raised. She takes pity on those in trouble and tries to help them. She is also avid student of mathematics who plans to take the college entrance exams in secret — until her husband finds out by accident.
Set only a century ago, when the Indian Congress party is recruiting and Gandhi is beginning to organize strikes to pressure the British to quit India, the story engagingly portrays a very different time and place. Though we have made some progress in the hundred years since, we can still recognize many familiar problems that appear in altered forms today.
I enjoyed reading meeting Kaveri, and look forward to reading the next volume in the series. I also enjoyed the details of geography, plants and food, in particular the habit of serving food on paan or banana leaves, then composting them immediately.
This ecologically sound practice put me in mind of a story told by Canada’s Maude Barlow, a strong leader in the struggle to have access to safe drinking water declared a human right by the United Nations. Speaking at the Whistler Writers Festival, she recalled sitting with women in India to support this effort, and being impressed to see that the healthy snacks given to the demonstrators by well wishers were eaten from natural leaf wraps, leaving behind no plastic garbage.