Writer Harini Nagendra’s newest instalment in the best-selling series, Bangalore Detectives Club, sees protagonist Kaveri solving mysteries across 1920s B’luru & the forests of Kodagu

The cover of Into The Leopard’s Den

An elderly woman lies bleeding out on the floor of her ramshackle hut – an intruder turning her home inside out in search of something she refuses to surrender. As this mysterious killer discovers the object and flees, she clutches a picture of Bengaluru’s famous female detective Kaveri. Thrusting it into the hands of a boy who discovers her, she breathes her last with a plea on her lips – find the killer.

Into the Leopard’s Den (`499; Hachette), the fourth volume of writer Harini Nagendra’s best-selling cosy mystery series, Bangalore Detectives Club, dives straight into the tangled knots of this mystery, with the now pregnant 21-year-old detective, Kaveri, determined to unravel them all.

This time, the case leads her to the lush coffee plantations of Kodagu, leaving her motley crew of inquisitive neighbour aunty Uma, street urchin Venu and housemaid Anandi to investigate in Bengaluru. “While staying in the house of coffee plantation owner Lakamma, she learns of stories of a ghost leopard terrorising the place and scaring the workers away. At the same time, an exploitative British plantation owner’s life is in danger from multiple attacks,” explains Nagendra.

As an ecologist, the author’s environmental concerns come to the forefront stronger than in the previous three instalments, addressing colonialism’s ecological destruction alongside the murder mystery. “You get an insight into the time – the British expanded coffee production into the forest a lot but at a huge cost – the exploitation of labour, but also an ecological cost to the landscape,” she explains.

The Bengaluru of a century ago comes alive in these pages as the reader is transported to places that are familiar yet different. Nagendra explains her fascination with the period, nestled between two world wars and intimately associated with detective fiction from Agatha Christie’s Poirot stories to Miss Marple, Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay’s popular Byomkesh Bakshi series, and more. “The 1920s were a very interesting period in Bengaluru because while the rest of India was actively involved in the independence struggle, the Mysore Maharajas had a mediating influence here. While most books about the period have focused on Bombay, Delhi, and Kolkata, I wanted to talk about what it was like to live in Bengaluru at the time.” she explains.

Nagendra also makes it a point to include real women from the time (such as journalist Kalyanamma) or characters inspired by real women, with Lakamma being based on ‘coffee pudi’ Sakamma, an influential businesswoman.

This, with Kaveri’s independent, intelligent, and headstrong character, turns stereotypes of women of this period on its head. “A feminist discussion runs through the entire series because Kaveri is very strongly what we would call a feminist in these times. There were also a lot of independent women stepping out of the house for the first time in the 1920s,” says Nagendra, adding that at the same time, many, like her mother, grandmother and mother-in-law, were denied higher education. For her, imagining a character like Kaveri is partly a way of setting history right.

Kaveri and her doctor husband Ramu’s relationship, from a newly-wed couple to expectant parents, is a sweet and heartwarming thread in the series. Nagendra reveals that this loving yet nuanced depiction of an Indian arranged-married couple was a deliberate decision, keeping both her local and global readership in mind.

“There is often a feeling that Indian relationships are exploitative, always involving subjugation. I wanted to write about a regular but happy marriage of those times,” says Nagendra, adding, “Ramu is a traditional man, raised in a traditional family, married to an independent woman whom he didn’t really understand very well. But he wants to be supportive and over time, he understands her better, I’ve been enjoying seeing their relationship grow.”

source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Bengaluru / by Mahima Nagaraju / July 23rd, 2025