Hagini Nagendra on A Right Royal Mess

RHYS BOWEN:  Having been to India many times and married to someone who worked for Air India, I was delighted to find the first book in this series, giving a wonderfully different perspective on the days of the British Raj: the narrator is an educated Indian woman, with a forward-thinking husband!

And since I write a lot about the Prince of Wales it is fascinating in this book to see him visiting India. So welcome Harini!

HARINI NAGENDRA:

I’m so pleased to be back on Jungle Red Writers, announcing the launch of A Nest of Vipers, part of my 1920s historical mystery series. The first book, The Bangalore Detectives Club, and the second, Murder Under A Red Moon, were also featured here - it feels like a good luck charm to be back for the third time. A heartfelt thank you to Rhys Bowen and the other terrific Jungle Red writers for inviting me back!

The 1920s were a time of political ferment in India. In April 1919, a peaceful gathering of Indian protesters in a park in Amritsar turned into a bloodbath. Hundreds of men, women and children were brought down by a hail of bullets, shot in the back as they fled. India never forgot or forgave the Jallianwalabagh massacre.  For its part, the British empire refused to apologize, or even to discipline the men responsible.

Shortly after, Mahatma Gandhi launched the non-cooperation movement in August 1921, asking Indians to boycott British institutions and British-made goods. Across India, calls for Swaraj – self-determination and independence – grew louder. At this non-propitious time Edward, Prince of Wales (the very same Edward whom Rhys writes about so entertainingly in her Royal Spyness series, who later abdicated the throne to marry Wallis Simpson), choose to visit India.

Edward landed in Bombay in November 1921. The Prince might have expected to see streets packed with cheering crowds. Instead, he was greeted with hartals and bandhs – city wide strikes – in Bombay, Allahabad, Benares, Lucknow and Calcutta. Terrified of the Swaraj movement, the police threw anyone they suspected of being involved into jail, packing cramped cells with tens of thousands of political prisoners.

Edward hated his visit, complaining that “I am hardly ever allowed even to drive through the bazaars and native quarters of the cities” (because of the fear of violence. By February 1922, the unrest reached its zenith when policemen fired on protestors in the small north Indian town of Chauri Chaura. The crowd stormed the station, and set fire to it, killing over twenty men. Shocked by the transformation of what was intended to be a non-violent civil disobedience movement into large scale violence, Gandhi went on a five day fast, and persuaded the Congress Party to pause the noncooperation movement.

A Nest of Vipers is set in the backdrop of these tumultuous events. Edward traveled to Bangalore in January 1922, shortly after visiting Madras – where he was greeted by protestors who burnt buses, stoned government buildings, and attacked men in uniforms. From newspaper accounts, it seems as though his subsequent visit to Bangalore was relatively peaceful. Shortly after, he left India for Nepal, soothing away the affront to his dignity made by India by going on a classic colonial pursuit - hunting tigers, mounted on elephant back, from a safe distance.

But would the all good people of Bangalore remain quiet? It does seem as though something might be missing from those sanitized newspaper accounts. This is fertile ground for a book, of course. My story opens with a circus performance in Bangalore, a few days before the prince’s upcoming visit. The police are out in full force, watching out for signs of disturbance at all public events. Kaveri’s good friend Inspector Ismail seems unusually serious, refusing to discuss why he is there with her, as he usually does.

Soon after the circus begins, their master magician disappears from a locked cage on stage, in full view of everyone. Armed goons take over the tent, looting the audience of their wealth, as the police chase them, and the performance devolves into chaos. Soon after, Kaveri stumbles on a dead body – Pawan, her friend Anandi’s abusive husband, who is part of the circus team, has been killed.

When the magician’s son approaches her, asking her to find his missing father, she gets drawn into a tangled web of intrigue. Is the independence movement being co-opted by those who seek to exploit it for their own goals? With danger stalking her, her former friend Inspector Ismail now distancing himself from her, and a sinister team of wrestlers following her across the city, Kaveri must find a way to hide from them all and infiltrate the independence movement - to find out if her suspicions are right.

In 1920s British India, it was dangerous to be seen talking openly about Swaraj or to be found going to independence meetings. People developed fascinating ways to signal that they were meeting in secret. As some of the elderly freedom fighters interviewed by journalist P. Sainath describe, in his book, The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom, they found ingenious ways to hide in plain sight. A pat of wet cowdung outside a safe house might signal that a secret meeting was ongoing - but only to those in the know. If the cowdung cake was dry, the meeting was over, and it was safe to enter. Others used twigs of neem leaves.

These fighters found similarly inventive ways to run underground radio stations and printing presses, rob cargo trains of money, hide messages in hair buns and parcels of food. In one especially fascinating escapade, a young woman - 17 year-old Hausabai Patil - faked a quarrel outside a police station, allowing herself to be brutally beaten by a fake ‘husband’. When the police came out to counsel the supposed couple, escorting them to the railway station, their comrades sneaked in from the other side, stealing four rifles. She was inspired by her father, who was a core member of the movement, later sent to jail. Their family paid a heavy price for their involvement when the British seized their property, working as manual labour, and surviving on very little food, not even able to get a handful of salt from the grocer.

While the bravery of these ‘foot soldiers’ of the movement was inspiring to read, their stories were also harrowing. These incredibly brave men and women became masters of disguise, traveling across India to nucleate new nodes of action, but they also sacrificed so much – home, career, health, family – even life itself. Several of the characters I describe in A Nest of Vipers, whom Kaveri meets while infiltrating the movement, are inspired by these fearless patriots. The book is a small effort to pay homage to their incredible lives and escapades – which seem wilder than anything a fiction author could possibly imagine.  

 

 

About the author:

Harini Nagendra is a professor of ecology at Azim Premji University. She is a well known writer and public speaker on sustainability and climate change, and on Stanford University’s list of the top 2% cited scientists in the world. She has published three acclaimed historical mysteries: The Bangalore Detectives Club, Murder Under a Red Moon, and A Nest of Vipers; and a number of non-fiction books including Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present and Future, Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India’s Cities, So Many Leaves, and Cities and Canopies: Trees in Indian Cities. Harini lives in Bangalore with her family, in a home filled with maps. She loves trees, mysteries, and traditional recipes.