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

This article argues that Harini Nagendra’s “Kaveri and Ramu” series deploys activism as a mode of engagement with, and a strategy for, empowering disenfranchised women and ameliorating systemic crimes in colonial India. Our attention is drawn away from the plots in these novels and recentred on the suffering of marginalized women, both subaltern and elite, in a rigidly patriarchal and colonized milieu. Nagendra does this in two interconnected steps. First, by broadening the role of the detective’s assistant into the diverse “Bangalore Detectives Club”, these works pose a metafictional challenge to the conventional crime novel. Second, the novels redefine seriality in crime fiction through the appearance of club members as recurring characters throughout the series. These narratorial shifts are energized through the figure of Kaveri Murthy — the detective — whose modernity is indexed by her personal and academic accomplishments, her relationship with her husband, her willingness to reformulate domesticity, and her defiance of intransigent caste and religious taboos.