The success of Alexander McCall Smith’s The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series has inspired a host of similar series: set in various locales with lots of local colour and female detectives solving mysteries by using their local knowledge as well as a warm understanding of human behaviour. Mostly, these variants have not been successful, but the latest one to appear in my library was called The Bangalore Detectives Club. My Bangalore antecedents would be suspect if I skipped it, so here we are.
Set in 1920s Bangalore, pre-Independence, the detective here is Kaveri Murthy, a young woman recently married to handsome doctor Rama Murthy. Bangalore is a peaceful small town in the 1920s, and Rama works at Bowring Hospital, and lives in Basavangudi with Kaveri and his mother.
One evening they visit the Century Club (still in existence in Cubbon Park), when a murder occurs. The victim is a pimp, who seems to be no loss to anyone, but the police are likely to target the poor milkman, his abused wife, or the pimp’s women, as is common procedure in novels and real life. Kaveri springs into action.
Kaveri is smart. She has finished high school, and was the best mathematician in her school, but was ‘married off’ before she was able to go to college. That said, there is little in her personality or past to explain why she is so keen to throw herself into a possibly dangerous murder investigation. She is too naive to realize that a scantily-clad, body-baring woman might be a prostitute:
Standing opposite Manju, like the statue of a celestial dancer Kaveri had once glimpsed outside a temple, was the most beautiful woman she had ever seen in her life.
The woman wore a bright red chiffon sari, so thin that it was almost transparent, with a blouse so scanty that Kaveri’s eyes almost popped out of their sockets. She wore her sari low on her hips. A delicate gold chain draped around her waist drew attention to its slimness, and a cascade of red and gold bangles adorned her wrists.
The writing is simple and straightforward, but can approach cliché, as in the paragraph above.
It can also be repetitive: the woman above is described as ‘beautiful’ multiple times in a few pages, and referred to as ‘the beautiful woman’ or ‘the beautiful stranger’ through most of the book. Rama’s boss’s wife, Daphne, is ‘a beautiful woman’. The guests enjoyed ‘the beautiful experience of the melodious music’. The hibiscus flowers are ‘beautiful’. Kaveri’s flute is ‘beautiful’.
Meta-gripes to be briefly mentioned: There is an odd prologue to the book which is completely dissociated from the main plot, involving a ‘stranger from the village of buttermilk’ who is never mentioned again. I remain baffled by this authorial and editorial choice. And the ‘Detectives Club’ of the title? There seems to be only Kaveri.
The novel avoids controversy. Any awkward topics such as the freedom struggle, colonialism, the caste system, Indian patriarchy, or police corruption are handled by giving the characters completely modern attitudes. Even though it is still possible to find elderly Indians in Bangalore who remember the Raj fondly, in this novel everyone is pro-independence. And astonishingly prescient, sometimes:
[Kaveri]: Do you think the British will ever leave our country?
Rama looked grave. ‘I think they must, eventually. How long can they occupy the colonies? But I doubt we will see them leave in our lifetimes. At least, not without a major fight. It’s that mayhem, and the deaths that will follow, that I’m most afraid of.’
Likewise, despite her conservative upbringing in a small town, Kaveri and Rama are not at all caste-conscious, and she thinks nothing of walking into a slum or visiting a prostitute for the purposes of crime investigation. Rama is an incredibly progressive husband, encouraging his wife in all things. The policeman Inspector Ismail welcomes their involvement and admires Kaveri’s determination and independence, to the extreme extent of not going to her aid in a moment of crisis: Detective Ismail has extraordinary faith in inexperienced, unproven, 19-year-old Kaveri. The only hint of a traditional problem is Kaveri’s conservative mother-in-law, who conveniently stays off-scene. This is a novel that is determined not to offend anyone.
The relationship between Rama and Kaveri is sweet, but there is no hint of conflict between the two newlyweds, and thus it remains completely bland.
The plot is, well, thin. The motive for the murder is plausible, but the murderer is rather conveniently explained away as having hereditary madness. It would have been more interesting if the murder had involved something specifically from Karnataka, or Bangalore, or the time period.
I’m no historian, but it seemed to me the author has done a reasonable job of fitting her story into 1920s Bangalore. There are no obvious clunkers, such as a mention of MG Road, for example (central to Bangalore today but only named after Gandhi in 1948). In the novel, fingerprints are just beginning to be used at crime scenes, and there is some excitement around their use. Kaveri does use the word ‘firangi’ to describe the British foreigners, which as a North-Indian, Hindi-origin word seems unlikely for a sheltered young Kannadiga woman, but we’ll let that one go.
The changing mores of 1920 are rather fun to read about. The swimming pool at the Century Club is restricted to women from 7-8 each morning, and Kaveri swims in a sari, blouse and petticoat, somewhat awkwardy described:
grabbing the delicate pleats of fabric in each hand, she hiked her sari up past her ankles, tucking the ends between her legs and tying them into a knot under her petticoat. […] She normally wore an eight-yard sari in the modern fashion — wound around her lower body, pleats fanning out from her waist — but that would never do for swimming.
The younger women, though, wear ‘figure-hugging [bathing] costumes of silk’, and Kaveri promptly gets herself one from the ‘Anglo-Indian lady who runs Greens Store’.
This is not a book to be read for the quality of its writing, nor for the brilliance of its plot. The charm in this book lies entirely in a sort of nostalgia for old Bangalore.
I was amused to see that The Bangalore Detectives Club has the classic faux-Indian cover: the back of a woman shrouded in a flowing garment, silhouetted against the ornate columns of an Indian building, all done in yellows, oranges and red. Not dissimilar to The Henna Artist. Is there a single artist who churns out all of these covers, or are they designed by an AI bot these days?
A gorgeous review!
Did you chuckle at the covers? So many more to add to your analysis in ‘Indian Writing in English and Issues of Visual Representation: Judging More Than a Book by Its Cover’