“Closer than most sisters”: Crime,friendship,and activism in Harini Nagendra’s fiction

Genre fiction in India

Tabish Khair avers that “pulp fiction” — as he calls genre fiction — first became visible in the bhasha literatures at the end of the nineteenth century (2008: 60). Abhijit Gupta then argues that it was the “economic liberalization of the early 1990s, and the consequent loosening of import and equity restrictions”, alongside the entry of “transnational corporations like HarperCollins, Random House and the Pearson group into the Indian market” (2012: 1030), that had a major impact on the proliferation of genre fiction in India. Priya Joshi, underscoring Gupta’s claim about the economic determinants that inflected this literary development, writes that the “arrival of genre fiction in India serves to index the economic and social changes in the decades since the country liberalized its economy and engaged more fully with the opportunities and perils associated with globalization” (2019: 211). She continues that it was “in or around 2004 [that] something changed” (2019: 203) in the sphere of English genre fiction publication in India with the emergence of Chetan Bhagat. Bhagat’s success, she contends, shows how “genre fiction is indigenized in India” (2019: 204). Emma Dawson Varughese similarly argues that the fiction of “New India” that emerged “from the turn of the millennium demonstrates new departures in writing in English often in genre, form and voice” (2013: 15), and needs to be read alongside a changing definition of the middle class in India.

Following these historical accounts of the emergence of Anglophone genre fiction in India, it would be remiss not to mention the increasing critical attention that individual genres within the larger umbrella term “Indian genre fiction” are receiving. As Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani, and Anwesha Maity astutely point out, Indian genre fiction draws “upon divergent traditions of storytelling” (2019: 5) that are deeply reliant on Indigenous sources like local myths, regional folktales, and oral/performative traditions. By considering genre fiction in several Indian languages alongside English in their edited volume, they destabilize the hierarchy of genre fiction in English and bhasha literatures. In their conceptualization, Indian genre fiction is neither a “monolith” (2019: 12) nor “simply a literature fostering escapism” (2019: 7). In a similar vein, the recent volumes edited by Prem Kumari Srivastava and Mona Sinha (2022) and Gitanjali Chawla and Sangeeta Mittal (2022) testify to the increasing critical attention that different genres are receiving. Taken together, all three volumes showcase a diversity of generic forms across languages, ranging from Bengali science fiction, Hindi pulp literature, Tamil popular writing, flash fiction, the graphic novel, and the crime novel, among others. As Srivastava and Sinha put it, these fictions “often occupy non-hegemonic locations, [as] their characters emerge from non-urban centres and the setting is far from everything that carries the metropolitan paraphernalia or Western import” (2022: 25). This view dovetails with Suman Gupta’s assertion that as “commercial fiction” this body of writing is “consumed primarily within India [and is] seen to display a kind of ‘Indianness’ that Indians appreciate” (2015: 19). The specific emergence of crime fiction in India, then, needs to be read through these historical and sociological parameters as a genre that is increasingly visible.

Crime fiction in India

Crime fiction in India, as it was “introduced” from Britain, has adopted local features since the nineteenth century (Orsini, 2009: 226). This is evident as crime fiction has been written in many regional languages like Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Urdu, and Malayalam. As Francesca Orsini and Laura Brueck point out, late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indian crime fiction is “intensely translational” as it is translated not only from English to various Indian languages, but between regional languages, and from regional languages like Hindi and Tamil into English (2022: 141). This multi-directional criss-crossing between languages, they suggest, “disrupts the neatness of the categories that continue to inform contemporary ‘world literature’ discourse with its binaries of Anglophone and non-Anglophone literature, domestic and foreign, and local and global” (2022: 141). When viewed through this complex translational dynamic, Indian crime fiction demands a serious critical investment that it is beginning to receive.

The emergence of Anglophone crime fiction in India, in roughly the last two decades, makes it a relatively recent sub-field within the larger rubric of Indian genre fiction. Indian Anglophone crime fiction fits what Louise Nilsson et al. describe, in their definition of world crime fiction, as a “highly stylized and intensely localized”, as well as “preeminently ‘glocal’ mode of literary creation and circulation” (2017: 4). ² Anglophone Indian crime fiction has been analysed through many intersecting critical lenses. For instance, while fiction by authors like Kalpana Swaminathan and Kishwar Desai has been read to understand the emergence of the “New Indian woman” (Meyer, 2018; Morgan, 2022; Pandey, 2024; Pandey and Bhattacharya, 2023), Anita Nair’s “Inspector Gowda” series and Zac O’Yeah’s “Majestic Trilogy” have been read as critical commentaries on cities like Bangalore and the position of women in neoliberal India therein (T. S. and Bhattacharya, 2022; Bhattacharya and T. S., 2022). Alex Tickell, similarly, focalizes the question of infrastructure in the modern city through crime narratives set in Mumbai and Delhi in his chapter “Crime Narratives and the Mobile City” (2025). Historical crime fiction ranging across different periods from Mughal India to postcolonial India of the 1950s is an important parallel trajectory in the development of the genre. ³ The ability of historical fiction to reactivate memory to suit differing ends, as seen in the fiction of Abir Mukherjee and Sujata Massey, has been recently commented on (Parel, 2025).

Somdatta Bhattacharya and Navami T. S. argue that “[w]hile the Indian metropolises Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, and Kolkata have long been fertile landscapes for Indian writers of crime fiction, Bengaluru is a new and late addition” (2022: 244). ⁴ As many tech companies set up bases in Bangalore in the 1990s, the city attracted a younger, tech-savvy, English-speaking, middle-class mobile workforce from various parts of India. Crime fiction set in Bengaluru showcases the dark underbelly of the city and foregrounds various social issues ranging from the environment, the challenges of urban development, and the complexities of gender (to cite just a few prominent themes). ⁵ Nagendra’s “Kaveri and Ramu” series, then, needs to be read through the intertwined critical and historical trajectories of genre fiction in India that I outline above.

The role of assistants and functions of seriality

In the Anglo-American tradition, the detective is conventionally assisted by one person, who, as Lucy Andrew and Samuel Saunders argue, has been seen as the hero-detective’s “stupid” friend who often is an “upwardly-gazing, intellectually inferior character” (2021: 4). In Nagendra’s fiction, the figure of the assistant is multiplied. It is embodied by the different people (men, women, and children) who assist and advise Kaveri in the process of detection. It is this expanding circle of intelligent women and men who form the eponymous “Bangalore Detectives Club”.

The idea that a detective uses many people to help them in the process of detection is not new. While the “Baker Street Irregulars” appear in the Holmesian canon, in Golden Age fiction this idea was used most memorably by Dorothy L. Sayers and her detective Lord Peter Wimsey. In A Strong Poison (1930), Wimsey is aided by “The Cattery”, a private inquiring agency of women disguised as a typing pool, headed by Miss Climpson. These women “engage in serious private investigation roles that often involve seeking out justice for other women” (Hoffman, 2016: 43). They go into social settings where Wimsey cannot go and use the skills and resources available to them as single women to gather evidence that is vital for his cases. What this achieves is a “dispersal of the investigative activities which had conventionally rested entirely on the shoulders of the heroic detective”, as Lee Horsley puts it (2005: 51).

Compared to the women of “The Cattery”, the women and men who form “The Bangalore Detectives Club” stand out for two reasons. First, while the women of “The Cattery” remain Wimsey’s social inferiors, there is a concerted effort made by Kaveri to dismantle social hierarchies and create spaces where equality is a treasured ideal. Second, Nagendra also makes the female detective (Kaveri) an empowered and empowering figure. The aim of creating more equal spaces becomes clearer when we consider the social heterogeneity of “The Bangalore Detectives Club”: Mala is a former sex worker; Narsamma is Mala’s friend who was taken in by her when Narsamma was abandoned by her family; Anandi is a maid who has been the victim of violent domestic abuse; Uma is Kaveri’s elderly upper-caste neighbour; and Mrs Ismail is a policeman’s wife. As they are individually helped in different ways — and introduced to each other — by Kaveri, there is a “sisterhood” that is forged among them. The power of these affective bonds that unify them allows them to look beyond the many entrenched social differences that would (in 1920s India) have raised insuperable barriers to such solidarity. They, thus, stand out for the ways they overcome rigid social signifiers like caste, religion, and class. As regular visitors to Kaveri’s drawing room, they are often found drinking coffee and eating snacks. This bonhomie creates bonds that allows Kaveri to suggest that they have become “closer than most sisters” (Nagendra, 2022: 272), with an apparent absence of a social hierarchy that effectively creates a self-sustaining parallel affiliative network that bypasses the many patriarchal strictures that had circumscribed their lives thus far. Nagendra’s reasons for creating this collaborative collective become clearer when she responds in an interview to a question about the two different subtitles of her novels, saying:

In real life, it is rare that one hero, or heroine, achieves something completely on their own — there is always a collective that works together, often behind the scenes. I wanted to bring that collective collaboration into focus and Kaveri’s women friends are such fun to write — they support each other, and hold each other up in so many different ways. It’s a very positive way of tackling change, especially for young women who may be reading these books. (Donthi, 2024: n.p.)

In these novels, the figure of the assistant, then, is not just multiplied to achieve a female-centred plurality, but is also actively de-hierarchized, as becomes evident in the stress laid on “sisterhood and solidarity” to bring these women together as collaborators for social justice. In doing so, Nagendra challenges and modifies the otherwise typically hierarchical relationship between the detective and their assistant. Moreover, the model of “collective collaboration” that is borrowed from “real life” gives this fiction its activist aspirations that go beyond entertainment and social commentary.

The second critical innovation that Nagendra ushers in is to challenge the logic of seriality. Seriality, here, is characterized by more than just familiarity with characters and places, and the focus goes far beyond tracing the evolving relationships of the detective and their family. Once characters like Mala, Anandi, Muniamma, Manju, and Venu are initially helped by Kaveri, they are not forgotten as minor characters but continually reappear in subsequent novels. For instance, Venu and his family, around whom the plot of Bangalore revolves, are consistently brought back in Moon and Nest to help Kaveri solve those cases. Similarly, once Kaveri helps to free Mala from jail where she had been unjustly incarcerated because of a false allegation levelled against her by the murderer (in Bangalore), Mala and Narsamma become Kaveri’s friends who feature again in later novels. Similarly, in Moon, after Anandi’s rescue from an abusive marriage, she is given shelter by Mala and helps in solving that novel’s central mystery, and then reappears in Nest, where she gets unwittingly implicated in the main action of the plot. These characters are embedded in Kaveri’s expanding and capacious social life as they settle into their enlarged roles as friends, advisors, and collaborators. As readers, we get to follow the formation, development, and deepening of this entangled network of relationships that continue through the intradiegetic world of the series. In parallel, these friendships become a political testament to the ways in which social and religious divides can be overcome.

Kaveri’s modernity

Speaking broadly of female detectives in Indian crime fiction, Neele Meyer critically observes that while the detective is generally a “liberal” woman who “lives relatively freely from familial or societal constraints”, the crimes they investigate entail women “who are usually from a middle-class background but oppressed or rejected by society or their own families” (2018: 111). When discussing Nagendra’s fiction, however, Meyer’s point needs two pointed qualifications. The detective, Kaveri, may appear “liberal” but this position is arrived at after demanding processes of negotiation with others (her parents and in-laws), and unlearning prejudicial behaviour for herself. The women she “rescues” are mostly marginalized women who initially play relatively minor roles in the plots but go on to become agential actors in subsequent novels, as I discuss below.

In Bangalore we see Kaveri as a 19-year-old woman who is married to Ramu, a doctor who works for the colonial government, and has just relocated to Bangalore from Mysore. Though married at 16, she moved to Bangalore three years after finishing her schooling, and to achieve this end she had “kicked and screamed, begged and pleaded, and even went on hunger strike” (Nagendra, 2022: 44). Once married, she refuses to be entirely shackled by the conventional domesticity that is expected of her by her mother-in-law. However, she does not disdain the kitchen and its chores, and, aware that her cooking needs to improve, she makes a concerted effort to learn new recipes from her elderly neighbour (Uma) “to feed Ramu well” (Nagendra, 2022: 57). Intellectually, as a budding mathematician, she initially solves complex maths problems secretly to calm herself, but aims to eventually get her B.Sc. degree in Mathematics and become a teacher (Nagendra, 2022: 100).

Outside the domestic sphere, she learns Kalarippayattu (a South Indian martial art that is mostly learnt and taught by men) for self-defence; Ramu teaches her how to drive a car, and she becomes the “second Indian woman to possess a driving license in Bangalore” (Nagendra, 2023: 3). Furthermore, encouraged by Ramu, she is not afraid to expresses her modern sartorial taste by wearing a “sleeveless blouse” (Nagendra, 2022: 198) and a swimsuit (after initially swimming in a sari). These are just some instances that index Kaveri’s modernity. She is presented as a multi-faceted character, defined by her resolute defiance against being imprisoned by the domestic sphere, and by a simultaneous openness to challenge customs and engage with technologies that lie beyond the domestic world.

As the series progresses, Ramu becomes an important emotional and intellectual structure of support for Kaveri. He enables and encourages her by advocating her causes to his mother and assists in the resolution of some cases. Refreshingly, he challenges patriarchal stereotypes that dictate behaviours for men. For instance, having overslept one day, Kaveri finds Ramu making coffee for her. Her befuddled reaction is silence since “she did not know what to say” because “she had never seen a man making coffee before” (Nagendra, 2022: 161). The thought of “what [their] mothers would say” results in a “deal” where Ramu offers to make her coffee on Sundays to allow her to sleep late (Nagendra, 2022: 162). Later, in an argument with a colleague, Ramu proudly uses this domestic fact (that he makes coffee for his wife) as a progressive taunt. These actions, modern for their day, give us a clear glimpse of an ingrained patriarchal system that Kaveri and Ramu decide to tackle together by enabling each other.

Their progressive politics is also seen in their unequivocal support for the nationalist cause that was gaining momentum in the 1920s. Though the nationalist agenda is relatively muted in the first novel, it gains a dominating presence as the series progresses. They are aggrieved by the news of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and enraged by instances of racial discrimination when they are not allowed to enter the British club. When Gandhi calls for a strike, they support the strikes, and unlike their neighbours pay their domestic staff for days of work missed due to the strike. In Moon, Mrs Sharma is a suffragist who met her husband at a nationalist gathering for Sarojini Naidu that was held in his mill (Nagendra, 2023: 260). As a wealthy industrialist and an ardent nationalist, Mr Sharma treats his workers well and donates the jewellery that the couple bought for their honeymoon to the independence movement “to finance our brave young patriots” (Nagendra, 2023: 264). Nest, similarly, features a plot about a magician whose disappearance and reappearance are closely connected to the nationalist movement, and Kaveri’s main aim is to prevent a smear campaign against the movement that is being orchestrated by senior members of the British police. In other words, it is through an ardent nationalism that the progressive character of the protagonists is indexed in the series.

Alongside nationalism, Nagendra also addresses caste in this series. Aditya Premdeep in his discussion of writers like Bhagat, Amish Tripathi, and Anuja Chauhan has convincingly shown how upper-caste writers of genre fiction avoid the question of caste by “cloak[ing] caste in a discursive intellectuality that is nothing but a renewal of age-old profits from the new political, economic and technological regimes” (2022: 261). He shows how the erasure of caste in the work of these writers is attuned to their readership, which is upwardly mobile, upper caste, and middle class in a neoliberal economy. In Nagendra’s novels, however, Kaveri moves out of the socially acceptable confines of the upper-caste, upper-class home. She is compelled to traverse areas of the city (like Hiramma’s and Mala’s house in Bangalore) that would otherwise have been out of bounds for women of her status. As she does so, there is a concomitant redefinition of internal boundaries that had been set in place by unsaid convention. There is a moment that bears some attention on her visit (with Uma) to the Halasur cowherd’s colony, an area “that women like them would not dream of entering in normal circumstances” (Nagendra, 2022: 118). When they enter Mala’s house, Mala admits that she knows that upper-caste women like them would not accept water from a lower-caste woman like her. On hearing this, “[s]omething inside Kaveri winced” (Nagendra, 2022: 127). She chooses to gratefully accept and drink the water offered by Mala, “ignoring Uma aunty’s pointed glare” (Nagendra, 2022: 127). The drama of this moment captures the rejection of subjective social codes — of caste, class, and spatial boundaries — that Kaveri had internalized. While these internal boundaries are redrawn to become more inclusive, Uma’s refusal to accept water from Mala, and Mala’s placid recognition that they would not accept water from her, shows that this rejection of internalized limits is neither easy nor does it come naturally. This is a pivotal point that subsequently allows for the redefinition of the domestic space. Kaveri’s drawing room is also figuratively enlarged to welcome people from lower castes, lower classes, and other religions that would have been impermissible earlier given the strict demands of social custom that regulated the ingress of people inside the Brahmanical home. For Kaveri, then, modernity becomes a metonym for resistance that is marked by its “fluid, wide-ranging and polysemic nature” (Mirza, 2023: 8). This is showcased in her personal acts of defiance, internal acts of acceptance, collective acts of provocation with Ramu, and an openness to challenge entrenched social custom.

Activism

In her discussion of women in crime fiction, Nicole Kenley highlights how many women writers portray crimes that “arise from broader societal, systemic inequalities that disproportionately disadvantage and injure women” in what she terms “system focused novels” (2022: 100). System focused novels, Kenley argues, “present the relationship between women and crimes stemming from these varied inequalities from multiple angles: women as the victims of these crimes, as detectives solving them and as criminals exploiting a corrupt system” (2022: 101). Nagendra, however, is doing more than writing a “system focused” series. In actively seeking to address the marginalization of women by various forms of patriarchal oppression, she foregrounds the role of activism as an expression of solidarity, in which the detective’s actions go beyond the principle of ratiocination and the characters are animated by a desire to further social causes. Instead of the resolution being “a didactic homily given by the detective” (Cook, 2011: 13), the endings in Nagendra’s novels (re)focus our attention on larger systemic crimes that have no immediate solution, pointing us towards what Sam Naidu calls “genre activism”:

Genre activism refers to the co-option of the crime fiction genre as a form of activism against certain social ills and injustices […]. Authors, who also engage in other forms of activism, write crime fiction texts which foreground a detective-activist figure and activist characters. As a consequence, their texts instigate and encourage activism on the part of the scholar and the reader. This genre activism goes beyond social critique. It constitutes, represents and engenders activism in response to a range of micro and macro crimes. (2025: n.p.)

In what follows I attempt to demonstrate how activism becomes a mode of empowerment and resistance that is championed by most women in this series.

Nagendra’s novels critique a patriarchal system that subjugates women and forces them to internalize their own oppression by foregrounding two concerns in particular: illiteracy and sexual violence. One of the main functions of the club — other than gathering together to discuss the cases that Kaveri is solving — is to teach basic reading and writing skills to women like Mala, Anandi, Uma, and Mrs Ismail. This begins with Uma asking Kaveri to teach her how to read and write. Married off when she was eight, Uma had no opportunity to achieve literacy: As she poignantly recalls, “[f]irst my father refused me, then my husband, then my son” (Nagendra, 2022: 101). Her dilemma showcases the hierarchy of patriarchal affiliation on which she was dependent, and how her desire for literacy was successively delegitimized by generations of men in her family. Uma’s request to Kaveri serves as a repudiation of this delegitimization that she has suffered, and a turn towards an affirmative female affiliation that proves stronger than the patriarchal familial bonds to which she had been subservient. Further, it is important for her to break this chain of patriarchal disenfranchisement because she does not want her grandson to grow up “sneering at illiterate women” (Nagendra, 2022: 104). As the plots progress, more women join the club to learn and to teach others. Kaveri is joined by Mrs Reddy, who after overcoming her initial shock over the social diversity of the group, agrees to assist Kaveri in teaching the women twice a week (Nagendra, 2023: 74).

Education, however, remains a privilege that is granted by men. The story of Kaveri’s school friend, Ambujakshi, serves as a case in point. As a student, Ambujakshi was exceptionally talented. Married when she was 14, she was soon after thrown out of the marital home for “failing to give her husband children” while no one pointed to the drunk husband who kept a “pleasure woman […] in a separate home” (Nagendra, 2022: 140). When she returned to school “for a day” it was the “fathers” of the other girls who said that it would “bring shame on their own daughters to be associated with such company” (Nagendra, 2022: 141), and she was sent to the village to live with her aunt as “a child widow” (Nagendra, 2022: 141). As is evident, both Uma and Ambujakshi — at different ends of the age spectrum — are women whose privileged upper-class and upper-caste status does not protect them from ingrained patriarchal prejudices.

The forms of activism that began in Bangalore are also present in Moon. When it is discovered that Swami Vaninanda is running an ashram for destitute women but using it as a front for smuggling cocaine, Shanthi takes the lead to set up the “Shanthi Women’s Home” for the rescued women (Nagendra, 2023: 270). Once they are weaned off cocaine — to which they had been forcefully addicted — Kaveri and Shanthi devise a plan to educate them (with Ambujakshi as their teacher). Their aim is to make the women employable so that they are “independent and self-sufficient” (Nagendra, 2023: 273). These initiatives to empower women are examples of crime fiction going beyond the ludic to become a genre that can flexibly engage with activism as a form of solidarity.

Nagendra’s systemic critique of patriarchal oppression also extends to addressing domestic violence. Mala, for example, was sold into prostitution by her brother when she was 12. At various points Mala’s beauty is described in hyperbolic images: “like the statue of a celestial dancer” (Nagendra, 2022: 36), “an apsara” (Nagendra, 2022: 39), and a “gorgeous peacock of a woman” (Nagendra, 2022: 157). These images, at the risk of exoticizing her, also come across as unsuccessful attempts by Kaveri to exorcize her upper-class guilt and an attempt at allowing Mala’s beauty to overshadow the perceived ugliness of her profession. Nonetheless, it is the representation of Mala’s embodiment and enactment of agency that is crucial. First, on learning that the pimp, Ponnuswamy, forced her to have an affair with Manju to defraud a hospital, Mala forces Manju out of a relationship with her, and sells some of her jewellery to anonymously gift Manju a sizeable sum of 120 rupees. This donation helps to free him from his debt to Ponnuswamy. Second, after Ponnuswamy’s death, she and Narsamma take over his business where they now run “a large gambling and lending business […] putting a stop to the prostitution and cleaning up the lending business and making it legitimate” (Nagendra, 2023: 74). Mala, as a subaltern woman, then, is not rendered powerless, destitute, or devoid of agency. The entrepreneurial turn, in fact, attests to her ability to enter the world of public business and run it as a more just system.

Similarly, despite Anandi’s face that is smashed in and her dislocated shoulder due to the violence that her husband had wreaked on her, when she is first found she looks “like a princess” to Mala (Nagendra, 2023: 82). She had been raped by her husband (before marriage), was thrown out by her parents, and thus had no choice but to continue living with him despite the constant domestic abuse. Looking at her, Mala makes a telling comment: “Women like us are used to pain […]. Her mind has retreated inside of itself, to its safe place. She will stay there while we treat her, separating her mind from her body. That is how she survives the violence. That’s how all of us survive” (Nagendra, 2023: 84). Here, the unspoken connection that is forged between Mala and Anandi, who are essentially strangers to each other at this moment in the plot, brings home the quotidian reality of domestic violence, and attests to the normalization of violence in a patriarchal culture. To survive this violence, they need to resort to this apparently resilient and heroic ability to separate mind from body. In this case, however, this acceptance of violence pushes them to find ways to help Anandi move out of its vicious grip — first, by getting her to live with Mala while she recovers from her injuries, and later by finding her a job as a maid in the Sharma household. Not surprisingly, when Kaveri suggests that they need someone to enter the ashram unobtrusively, Anandi voluntarily offers herself because she wants to use her life “to protect other women in danger” (Nagendra, 2023: 235). Mala and Anandi, then, despite their personal histories, are not written off as victims of abuse but are able to reclaim their lives in some measure. Moreover, they become politically empowered agents who wish to be instrumental in bringing real and visible change for other women.

Even as the women become agents of change for others, they do not shy away from articulating challenges to a system that seeks to bind people through a rigid prescription of codes of social conduct. Anandi, Mala, and Narsamma unashamedly voice heterodox opinions about men, female beauty, and marriage. Early in Moon, when discussing reasons for why Shanthi married late, Narsamma sardonically comments, “A beautiful woman is cursed” (Nagendra, 2023: 78). This she believes because, in her experience, a beautiful woman is either confined by her in-laws “because she is too pretty, or her husband will beat her, afraid that she might have an affair with someone” (Nagendra, 2023: 78). Similarly, while discussing the possible motives that both Shanti and Chitra had to murder Mr Sharma, Mala adds that Shanthi could have murdered her husband “to be free again” (Nagendra, 2023: 79). When it emerges that Chitra and Shanthi bolted their respective doors to be safe from one another, Mala cynically comments that if she could lock doors, she would do so to stay safe “from the assaults of men” (Nagendra, 2023: 209). Displaying a similarly nonconformist opinion, Anandi defends Chitra and Shanthi when it is unclear whether it is Chitra or Shanthi who secretly leaves the house at night, arguing that either Chitra “wants to have a brief time of pleasure before she has to do her duty” or “who can blame [Shanthi] for seeking pleasure outside the marriage bed?” (Nagendra, 2023: 232). At the end of the novel, just as Kaveri is recounting how comfortable she is with Ramu, Anandi and Mala chorus together, “We sleep better now that our men are no longer with us” (Nagendra, 2023: 272). These dissident opinions allow alternative choices to emerge, and become important examples that subtly decentre Kaveri and Ramu’s heteronormative, monogamous, upper-class, and upper-caste companionate marriage that is set up as an ideal worthy of emulation.

As is evident, activism in Nagendra’s fiction is given many socially curative roles. The defiantly Brechtian overtones in this series alienate the readerly joys found in the passive consumption of the crime novel and force us towards a more active engagement with pressing social issues at hand. Thus, through a metafictional rupture of the conventional crime novel, activism becomes the necessary condition for the amelioration of societal ills, even as it becomes a critique of the colonial state and reinforces a feminine solidarity that is rooted in a common cause.

Conclusion

In his discussion of historical crime fiction, John Scaggs argues that “the simultaneous awareness of past and present” in the genre “seems to offer a means of gaining a new perspective on the present through the lens of the past” (2005: 134). This observation is borne out by Catherine Barbour and Karunika Kardak in their recent discussion of women’s historical fiction from the Global South, where they reiterate the point that historical fiction “offers women writers a means to conceptualise overlooked lives” (2025: 5), even as it functions “as a space for them to resist the patriarchal archive and utilize these her-stories to confront feminist concerns in the present” (2025: 7). In contemporary India, there has been a recent increase in violence against religious minorities, women, and Dalits (Allie, 2025; Deshmukh, 2023). Nagendra, I contend, reframes crime fiction not only for the purposes of social commentary, but also to piquantly reflect on Indian concerns via the historical novel through her critique of a patriarchal, casteist, and classist colonial justice system that privileged the rich, elite, and powerful at the cost of the marginalized. This is achieved through Kaveri’s utopian modernity, where we are nudged to look beyond the plot — and the books themselves — towards activism as a strategy to initiate a process of tangible social change in both private and public realms. With bonhomie and sisterhood as its trademark, the detective’s club, through the activism that it engenders also gestures to the formal limits of the conventional crime novel by pointing outward and beyond.