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Harini Nagendra, "Into the Leopard's Den: A Bangalore Detectives Club Mystery" (Pegasus Crime, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Marshall Poe
Go beyond the verses and achieve a deeper understanding of Scripture with the Rebind Study Bible App. An audio experience of the Bible interwoven with expert commentary. The Rebind Study Bible App reads Scripture to you, enriching your comprehension with insights from the world renowned New International commentary on the Old and the New Testament in an accessible podcast episode format. Be not therefore anxious for the morrow. Matthew chapter 6 each day will have.
- [00:27]
Harini Nagendra
Its troubles, but by God's grace they can be survived.
- [00:31]
Marshall Poe
Use the Rebind Study Bible App's chat function to ask questions and get answers in real time. That's thought provoking discussion and analysis rooted in decades of research and wisdom from more than 40 scholars at your fingertips. The Rebind Study Bible App is a new way to experience the Bible with enhanced depth, at your own pace in the moments you have. Search the Apple App Store for Rebind Study Bible or go to rebind app.com newbooks network for a free seven day trial. Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Production. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:08]
Nicholas Gordon
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books Podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in around and about the Asia Pacific region. Into the Leopard's Den, the latest novel in the Bangalore Detective Club series by Harina Gendra opens with A home invasion gone wrong. An elderly woman in 1920s India murdered by a mystery assailant during a robbery. Kaveri Murty, amateur detective takes on the case and soon uncovers a whole array of other mysteries in the coffee plantations of Khorg, a ghost leopard stalking the woods and a series of murder attempts against a widely disliked colonial plantation owner. Hareem joins us today to talk about the latest novel in her mystery series. And we're also joined again by Prasanna Prakash Hartana. Could you introduce yourself to our audience?
- [02:55]
Prarthana Prakash
Yeah. I'm a journalist and I've been writing about business and culture over the last couple of years. I grew up in the southern Indian city of Chennai and I'm currently based in London.
- [03:06]
Nicholas Gordon
Harini, the professor of ecology at Azim Premji University and a well known public speaker and writer on issues of nature and sustainability. Her non fiction books also include Nature in the City, Bengaluru in the Past, Present and Future, Shades of Blue Connecting the Drops in India City, so Many Leaves and Cities in Canopies, Trees in Indian Cities alongside her work in fiction which we're going to talk about today. So Harini, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Before we talk about this book, I'd like to ask you about the broader Bangalore Detective Club series. When did you start writing this series and what got you started writing detective fiction?
- [03:43]
Harini Nagendra
So let's say that I had a visitation and I'll explain what I mean as you described so well. I'm an ecologist and a lot of my work has been on the urban ecology of Bangalore, which is the city which is sort of the setting for the Bangalore Detectives Agency. And also for me, a character very much in the series of books. And I start I was writing my first nonfiction book, Nature in the City, which is about the ecological history of Bangalore and diving deep into the archives of what ecological transformations had taken place during the colonial period. Maybe I perhaps was reading about women or about a number of interesting issues that took place that I couldn't feed into the nonfiction book because they were not related to ecology at all. I can't explain what it was very objectively, but what it, what I know what happened. I'm sitting in my mother's house surrounded by a pile of documents and the main character, Kaveri, she was called something else. She was called Bhagirathi at the point, but she was a young woman set in colonial British Bangalore and she absolutely parachuted into my head, completely formed as a character and demanded that I write a book. About her. So in fact, when I had a recent book talk at a bookstore, someone commented that I had a visitation. So you can say I had a visitation from Kaveri who said I needed to write about her. Now what form would this book take? Was something I considered for a while. I like reading fantasy and I like reading mysteries. And historical mysteries are one of my favorites. And since I knew that Bangalore itself would be a rich part of the setting and the backdrop to this, it wasn't going to be a fantasy. So I knew it had to be historical mystery. That. So this is in. We're talking sometime in May 2007. And the book was first published in the first year book in the series was published in 2021. And because I hadn't written a mystery from start to finish, I wrote and rewrote the plot three times. And it took me a while to figure out how to finish the first book. Right. So that's why it took me that many years to get started. And an interesting anecdote by the side is that I was pregnant with my daughter in 2007 and by the time actually wrote the final version of the plot, she was 11 and helping me read and edit and comments of the book. So it's been quite a journey.
- [06:06]
Nicholas Gordon
So why did you pick 1920s India and the Bangalore c. Like as. As you're setting, you know, why did you pick this period of India's history as a part for as as opposed to maybe some earlier period or some later period? Why 1920s?
- [06:21]
Harini Nagendra
Right. So when I started out, I actually had the 1890s in mind. And that's because my original idea, when I was like, I mean when, when Cauvery parachuted into my head, I didn't know what period it would be. But Ronald Ross, who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery that malaria caused mosquito is caused by mosquitoes, was the health officer in Bangalore in 1892 when there was a large outbreak of cholera. Right. And he was part of a lot of reform changes in Bangalore's physical structure, sanitation structure. And I thought it would be really, really cool to have a medical mystery with a lot of history in the backdrop. But I struggled with that for a long time. It didn't go anywhere. And as my agent later helped me realize, partly because I'm writing a more lighthearted mystery and around the time of the cholera and plague, about a third of the city was dying from, you know, cholera, plague, number of other epidemics around the time. It was not the right setting for the kind of mystery I had so once we removed that plot from, from the Reckoning, I was then wondering whether I needed to stick with the 1890s. The problem with the 1890s is it's very data poor. There's not that much about, you really don't know about what houses looked like, what paints looked like, what kind of clothes people wore. You know, all the other minute details that comprise daily life. And 1920s are a classic golden age between the First World War and Second World War. That's why all so many historical mysteries are second this time. And for India especially, it was really interesting because that's the time when the Indian independence movement picks up steam. That's the time when women start stepping out of the house and into spaces of education, spaces of business across the country. You know, in Mysore, for instance, in. And in Bangalore, Bangalore being part of Mysore Kingdom, women actually a few years later, so 19, 23 and 24, get elected into the representative assembly. There are a lot of issues with commerce and the commercial expansion of forests into coffee. You know, there's so much going on. It's a really, really interesting time. And so I thought, okay, 1920s is. It is because there's information that I can write about, plus there's all these interesting backdrops that, you know, women's emancipation or education or business issues and the, you know, colonial tensions, tensions with wildlife and ecology. So, so that's, that's what decided it finally.
- [08:46]
Nicholas Gordon
So you mentioned that kind of recovery kind of emerged as a character, you know, fully formed in your mind as you were writing this series. But, you know, who were some of the, maybe not role models, but what, what were like, what other sorts of detectives and characters did you want to emulate in creating your main character?
- [09:06]
Harini Nagendra
That's a lovely question. It wasn't. So it was a mix of detectives and things that I had seen and read about real women in India. In terms of detectives. Well, of course, course, Ms. Marple, I like the idea of historical novels because I think so much of detective fiction then is about psychology, knowing people. Right. And so you don't have to get. I mean, of course Cauvery is sleuthing and looking at fingerprints and footprints and blood typing. And so there's science that she's using, but science isn't as advanced as it is today, obviously. So there's a lot that you have to figure out which is just old fashioned, plain, you know, detection by knowing people and who does what. So I would say, Ms. Marple, in that direction, if you look at Tommy and Tuppence again an old Agatha Christie set of characters, the husband and wife series, that was something that was very much an inspiration for me. And also Ms. Silver, which is Patricia Wentworth series of an elderly governess, but again, who solves mysteries by understanding how people's domestic lives worked. So I was thinking of this couple where Kaveri would be the one who knew through her access to women's networks what was going on in people's homes, who fought with whom, who liked whom, what was going on in the house. And her husband Ramu, being a doctor and also working with the British, would know what was going on in the professional spheres and so they could work together to solve mysteries. And that was sort of the broad idea. But on the other front in terms of inspiration, you know, India went through so much of transition in terms of, you know, women's access to education, empowerment. And I've been thinking back a lot to stories that I've read. For instance, one of the inspirations for Lakkamma, who's a character in the book, is this coffee entrepreneur, real life coffee entrepreneur called Sakama, who was a young widow and left with her husband's empire and then adopted her husband's cousin's 10 children because their father passed away and they were going to become wards of the state. And she single handedly rescued this enlarged coffee empire from being broken up and taken away by the men in the family and then set up a factory, you know, supplied the Maharaja of Mysore, really became commercially successful. There was a woman journalist. So I was inspired by all these women and wondering how they did what they did in the 1920s. And finally I have sort of personal motivations because if I think of my own families, my mother and mother in law, who were born in the 1930s and 40s, you know, wanted to study and actually did two undergraduate degrees in hostels outside home, which was quite revolutionary for those times, but could never work after that because it wasn't part of societal expectations and their struggles to reconcile with this much later in life, you know, the grief of not being able to do what they wanted to do, I think has lingered in my mind. And my own grandmother, my father's mother was actually born in 1908, so she would have been around the age of Cauvery and could write and read and speak seven languages. Brilliant woman, almost never made it to primary school. Eventually after fighting with her father and the school teacher agreeing they could go to primary school, got married at 12, had eight children, you know, lived a very different life, married a school teacher, but, but Owen was so intelligent, one of the most formidably intelligent people that I knew and, you know, would have made a great entrepreneur herself if someone had given her the chance. And I think all of these, these ideas in maybe partly it's catharsis that I'm writing these stories of a reimagination of Cauvery along the lines of there were a few women like her, but a lot of women couldn't do things like the way she did, right? So. So I think it's that plus the fictional characters that I read as inspiration.
- [12:59]
Nicholas Gordon
So we're going to ask you some kind of deeper questions about the plot of the book. But before we get to that, I mean, maybe there's a short reading you'd like to do from the very beginning of your novel.
- [13:11]
Harini Nagendra
Sure, I'd love to. So Chapter 1 Prelude to Murder Bangalore, 2nd April 1922 the moon appeared through the clouds, its pale silvery light shining through the open door, glistening onto the old iron box. Below the box, the edge of a broken lock peeked out. A mouse scurried into the hovel, sniffing around the lock, disappointed to discover there was no food inside. The door of the ramshackle hut creaked as it swung in the wind calling it. A door was a stretch. It was a few boards of rotting wood held together by rusty nails. Kupama had tried to block the gaps through which the frigid night air whistled with a makeshift curtain her husband had made from discarded gunny sacks. Rags of cloth cobbled together from bits of old saris in torn petticoats were wedged into the gaps between the wood. But today there was no stopping the wind. The intruder had left the door ajar. The draught was cold and furious. Little swirls of air rose up from the floor, blowing dust into her eyes, mouth, the bleeding wound in her scalp. An ant crawled on the floor, pausing when it encountered the trail of sticky blood, twitching its antennae and cautiously investigating the foreign substance. Kupawa's hand fluttered a few inches from the ground and fell back onto the dirt floor. She hated ants. Each morning she neatly swept the floor with a coconut broomstick, sprinkling water from the mud pot and evicting the insects. She turned her fading gaze to the pot, now lying broken in the corner, destroyed by her intruder, who still raged through the hut, tearing down the flimsy cupboard her daughter had built for her from empty crates, flinging her aluminium vessels to the floor. Life had lost its savor. Three months back, after her husband died, the thief had done her a favor by Bringing Yama to her doorstep. She didn't care that she would soon be dead. But why did the intruder seek to destroy what little she owned? Her daughter had wanted her pot, but now it was broken. Anger rose in her, hot and sour, along with a small hard knob of satisfaction. She had hidden what the thief was looking for. It would never be found. Kaveri would find it. Where do you keep it? Tell me. Her visitor let forth a volley of oaths, leaning over Kupama's crumpled body. Spittle landed on her face. But she kept herself from flinching, eyes closed, breathing as shallowly as she could manage best if her assailant believed she were dead.
- [15:28]
Prarthana Prakash
Thank you, Harni. So you set the scene really well. The story does start with Kupama, you know, she's attacked in her little hut. And we've touched on Kaviri's character who at this point is pregnant and she's under her mother in law's care. She gets roped into this investigation just a few pages into the book and a lot of other characters enter the fray. As we go through the plot, I'm curious to know how you as the author make sure that the plot gets its layers without also digressing from what the main crime was, which you narrated a part of just now.
- [16:08]
Harini Nagendra
I don't have the most clear of processes. I'd say Prathana, because I am more of what people would call a pantser. So I dive into the plot, I have a broad idea of what I have a broad idea of, let's say the opening scene. And I try to do the opening scene. This one was the first of the four books now which is opened with the murder. But typically I know the opening scene, I know what the first crime will be and then the characters take me where they go. And it is a very character driven series in that sense. And so I go forward and sometimes then I get a little confused and I come back a little bit and I wonder what's going on, which is something I'm doing a lot in book five, which I'm writing right now. And so the first, the first version that I finish is a patchwork of things that I have written notes to myself then saying, go back and fix this actually chapter, this chapter happens before that chapter, make sure that this person, you know, sometimes along the way I might combine two characters saying, okay, there are too many characters in this book. And so I say remember that these two are actually the same person and combine the plot. So the first version is a mess, but I sort of. I know where I'm going with it. It's the second version that I clean up and then the third version that I come back and do the layering know make sure that the. If there is a clue that it's hidden or it's marked and called out, but in a subtle way, it's hidden in plain sight, so to speak, that loose plot threads are tied together. So this. So it, it goes through at least three revisions. And then it goes to my first set of readers, which is my husband and daughter, who helped me figure out because they've been re. They've been with me from the beginning of thinking through the characters. So they're really useful for helping me brainstorm. But would this character really do this? I'm not so sure if she would or he would or not. And then it goes to my agent and my editor. So, you know, I think, and I think in the process of all of this editing, the layers come in. Yeah.
- [18:07]
Prarthana Prakash
And just on the subject of characters, there's a so called ghost leopard who is quite an important theme running as the plot develops as well. And of course there's these elements of myth, fear and also just the subject of ecology that comes up at various points in the story.
- [18:27]
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- [19:28]
Prarthana Prakash
The reason this is relevant and I would love your perspective on this is because you're an ecologist by training and you managed to weave in elements of environmental history and also just the environmental impact of a lot of the actions that some of the characters take. So how do you manage to do that, first of all, like, keep all these elements alive and, you know, very much relevant to the plot. And also, when you're writing anything in the realm of thriller, which is so human character focused, how do you also manage to, you know, send out a message on these various subjects?
- [20:06]
Harini Nagendra
Lovely question. No, what I said. So the way I do it, Prathana, is every book has an overarching theme. So for instance, with Murder Under a Red Moon, it was issues of women's rights. With this, you know, the, the book into the Leopards Den, it is the British exploitation of nature for commercial use. You know, so, so that. So I know the. I know the main background. And so for me, the main backdrop was the exploitation of the forest by the British. And this is something I've been wanting to write. It is the most ecological of the books in the series and it's something that I've been wanting to write for a long time. So I dived into a lot of literature and there were a few themes that I knew. I wanted to talk about invasive species, human animal conflicts. And I was struggling with how to deal with a human animal conflicts. You know, you. You know, in theory, that people have cut down forests for commercial exploitation of coffee, right? And as a commodity crop. But on the other hand, you can keep talking about, let's say, birds nests cut down and animals rendered homeless. But where's the interaction with the animals that they see? And that had to come into the book because otherwise people don't see it. They hear Cauvery or some other secondary character telling Cauvery about human wildlife conflict. And that's too distinct for them to feel. And so that's when the ghost leopard came in. I said, you know, Ramu was walking. I mean, it sounds. It sounds so well planned when I say it. But actually what happened was I was writing chapter one and Ramu was walking down the road in Coorg, because chapter one has three sections, three characters. And when Ramu Kaveri's husband is in Coorg, he's walking down the road. And I wanted this element of intrigue. And I said, let's have an animal crosses path. And so this animal crosses path. And then I guess I was also thinking at the back of my mind, how do I make this real? How do I make the emotional connect to wildlife and so the animal became a ghostly form at night, and then it became a ghost leopard. And yes, a lot of the book is trying to figure out what this ghost leopard is.
- [22:11]
Prarthana Prakash
Yeah, well, I for one was doing that as well. So, yeah, it definitely happened while you read the book.
- [22:18]
Harini Nagendra
That's great. And how I sort of weave it into the story. I've gotten better about it. You know, the very first book, the Bangalore Detectives Club, I had so much of ecology about Bangalore. You know, almost in every chapter I have like a page on ecology. And one of the things the editors told me was there was too much ecology love going on in there. So I've learned, you know, when I write, I might write a page, and then what I do when I edit is I take the page and I cut it out into like, maybe half a page. And then I split that into like three, four paragraphs. And I find scenes everywhere where I can take this paragraph and plug it in. So it's not so much in your face as a reader. It doesn't feel like I'm interrupting the plot with description, but rather that I'm layering it in. And then I might find a few other favorite things that I see that I don't belong anywhere. And I'll just stick a sentence in there somewhere, you know, so. So it's. It's layering that I go back and do. But when I write, I write it as. As a section. Yeah.
- [23:15]
Prarthana Prakash
When Kaveri lands up in Coorg with time, we start to see characters like Colonel Boyd, who, you know, has a very extractive approach to running a plantation. He's also not the most respectful of labor, is very harsh with, you know, giving them time off because they lose pay. And there's, you know, a lot more kind of in that vein. And then that's contrasted with how Lakkama runs her own plantation and, you know, pays her laborers a fair wage, for example. Some of your other books also touch on anti colonial sentiment in different ways. But I'm curious to know why this was important to your style of storytelling. And how did you kind of look at historical resources and do any kind of archival research on this when you were trying to develop the plot.
- [24:09]
Harini Nagendra
So because of the work on ecology, I'm very fortunate to have already collected a lot of archival material. Archival material in India is not easy to get. And so I have things like, you know, maharaja speeches, newspaper accounts, but I also have gazette notifications, ledgers, financial documents that tell you how much would, let's say, the British spend on something Versus the. An Indian planter on something. What were the ways that an Indian would grow coffee? Versus the ways a British or a German would grow coffee, which are more scientific methods, but they focus a lot on, you know, application of chemicals or use of technology, for instance. And what were the pluses and minuses of that, which methods led to the expansion of, let's say, Lantana. So, for instance, one of the things the British did in Ceylon, in Sri Lanka, what is Sri Lanka now, is to cut down a lot of the. The trees, the forest trees, and stop growing shade, GR. Shade grown coffee, which was a local practice, and move it to sun grown. You know, so expose the coffee plants to the sun and they were more productive initially for the first three or four years, and then it collapsed because the borough disease, this boro worm arrived and, you know, there was this disease and most of the coffee plants died. And in the south of India, then this led to Lantana expansion. Expansion, which is an invasive course. And so there were these which are real life, some of them are from Sri Lanka and have transposed these experiences to K. The. In fact, Boyd is. Is modeled along the lines of equally exploitative British planters, but who were there about 20 or 30 years before him. So I've transposed the period a bit. You know, they. They were exploitative planters even in the 1920s. But the first exploitation started small in some patches, as far back as the 1880s and the 1870s. Right. So I've taken some. Some material from planters, diaries from travelogues. And so you have all this material and it's very easy to look at it as a pattern that you see Indian. Not that all Indian cultivators were benevolent and nor was it that all British cultivators were exploitative. But if you have, you know, people that you're using to make your point, you must have the extremes in fiction. But the fact that broadly there was this pattern of the British being far more exploitative of any resources, labor, commons, collectives, anything else that they found for commercial profit, because they were really what would be the equivalent of modern day pirates. They were going to be there for a short time. They had to make their fortune, take their fortune out of the country and leave. They had no social, cultural ties. They weren't trying to do good for their fellow countrymen. Right. And so I'll give you one example which is from a completely different time and context, but it's the setting. If you had. So you had a famine in India, in Bangalore, well across all of India, in the 1880s. And what the King of Mysore did was he threw open his forests for the cattle to graze. Because he said that, you know, these are the forests, but cattle are dying and people depend on the cattle both for meat and for milk. So you throw open the forest, at least people will have milk and meat to survive. Right? And some. Some possibility of commerce with that. So he threw open the forest. What the British did was they closed off everything and increased the prices of food or called them fair prices and said that they would supply food at for free, but in exchange for labor. So a lot of people died in labor camps trying to work in exchange for food because they didn't have the physical capacity to work for food when they were starving. And so you see these differences which are visible in the archives about how the British treated people versus Indian rulers, Indian business owners treating their people. Like I said, I mean, there's a variation in terms of types of people along the spectrum, but Colonel Boyd was really born out of a lot of examples that you could see through the literature of a certain kind of person. And so I used him as an archetype.
- [28:00]
Nicholas Gordon
So I want to kind of return to kind of the characters of your book. And, you know, one thing it seems like your book doesn't have. It doesn't have a. A Watson type character. And I'm using. I'm using Watson in the very kind of reductive way where basically, I mean, kind of the dope that serves as a foil to the genius detective. And Kaveri, you know, she works very closely with Ramu, her husband, Inspector Ismail, the constable, and kind of, you know, did you, did you. And it feels like it's a very kind of equal relationship. It's a very kind of everyone is helping each other. I mean, did you want to avoid that specific trope where again, you had the genius detective and kind of the not as smart hanger on who is the one that detective always has to explain the case to.
- [28:48]
Harini Nagendra
Right? No, I'll tell you. So one of the things is that Inspector Ismail was not an original character in the book. So there's Kaveri, for instance, who came full formed with her husband. But there were also characters who landed up on the page. And Uma Aunty, who's her neighbor from the back house and is a part of the club through the books as well as Inspector Ismail landed up on their own. They walked into the page. So with Inspector Ismail, I had a scene where Cauvery, there was a dumb cop. You know, the, the. The not the Watson, but a. A cop that wasn't very bright. And there was his first murder. And he was, I guess, inspired by Mr. Goon of the Five Pine Daughters, Enid Welton. And you know, he was laboriously stepping on his pencil and scroll, scribbling in this book and looking very confused. It was supposed to be a comic scene, but it was boring. And as I was writing it, I was feeling bored. And Inspector Ismail just sort of paused and thought, the scene is really boring. What do I need? And Inspector Ismail walked onto the page and then he took over the next few pages. And as I was typing, I was thinking, gosh, I really like this man. I think I'm going to keep him and boot out the dumb cop. Right. So that's what happened. But coming to your larger point, I didn't explicitly decide not to have a Watson type of character, but I was aiming for a club. And this is part of the philosophy of the way I choose to write. It's also a reflection of the kind of science I do. So I work on. A lot of my work is with the idea of understanding how people, when they come together, can be a positive force for the environment. Right. So I'm looking at collective action of people coming together as for commons for commoning. And I worked for many years, for instance, with Eleanor Rostrom, who got the Nobel Prize for her work on the commons. And so a lot of my work is really looking around at collectives. And in the typical hero story, which is such an archetype again of writing fiction, you have the one hero who could be male or female, the gender doesn't matter, but it's this one sole hero who solves and saved the day. And I was very clear that this would be more like a heroine story where you have a group that comes together. And so the idea of the club where everyone plays a role and everyone is not at the same kind. People come from very different backgrounds with very different strengths. Some are looked down upon by society, especially society of those times. Some are revered, but each has their flaws and each has their strengths. And it's when you get the collective that you get something that is far greater than the sum of its original parts. Right. And so that's really what I was aiming for, this very respectful, mutually, a mutually accepting relationship which doesn't always start off, I mean, in the Bangalore Detectives Club, it takes a while for Cauvery and Ramu to understand each other. In Murder Under Ragun, it takes a while for Kaveri and her mother in law Bhargavi to get this relationship going right. And it's not smooth always between all the characters. There is some tension at different times, but at the end, it's a club and they respect each other and their points of view add to the information that you get.
- [31:51]
Nicholas Gordon
So I want to end our conversation with what you have at the very end of your book, which is a collection of recipes. Why did you want to end your book with that?
- [32:01]
Harini Nagendra
So I have had recipes all through all books, and again, it's, I guess, the sense and smell and sounds of the past. India is a very. Is a culture that is not so much about the visual as it is about the taste and the smells and the sounds. This is just sort of a snippet to the side. You can see this in the urban ecology of Bangalore, that the trees that the British planted are the showy ornamental blossoms, which look really good but don't smell. And the trees that the Indians chose to plant are the trees with the flowers that you use for worship, which might be typically white, don't look all that pretty. But they smell amazing, right? They smell really nice. Really. They have this amazing fragrant smell. So the way in which you experience India is a lot through smells and sights, smells and sounds, not so much through sight. And food is, again, an incredible part of India. And I'm writing about a city that is my favorite city, but also about South India, which many people outside India don't know about. You know, typically what you have in terms of your exposure to food is North Indian food of a certain kind. You go to a North Indian restaurant or typically a Punjabi restaurant. And I wanted to have. I'm also fascinated by old recipes. So, I mean, in general, I collect old recipes and I'm very interested in food. So with the first book itself, I had a lot about Indian food, how it was cooked with, and I thought that would really bring the atmosphere alive. And then I was going back and forth with my editors about, you know, what do I do with these. With these many. Most people haven't even heard of these kinds of the food, the dishes that I'm using, the recipes that. They're all unfamiliar. They're the same set of spices you'll see in North Indian food, but used very differently. So I started with book one, where I had a set of recipes, and I've taken old recipes, but modified them so that people in contemporary settings living outside India could use these and cook easily. I'm also not a. I like cooking with old recipes, but I like modifying them. So you don't have to spend, you know, five hours slaving in the kitchen because no one likes that. So I done that throughout. In books one and two, I had a set of recipes about Bangalore. Book three, which was a nest of white, was. I looked at Cauvery's beauty regimes and how again, she uses common items in the kitchen for a beauty regime. So book four, I decided to go back to the recipes and Coorg is especially fascinating because Kurt has these really interesting recipes that are based on, I mean, the, the community that lives there is. Believes themselves to be a tribal community with indigenous roots. And so they have a cuisine which is very special to that region area. But it's also got a lot of British influences. So there's. It's similar to Anglo Indian cuisine but not quite. And many people from the outside don't know about this food. So I thought it was just so interesting I had to put some of the recipes in here.
- [34:58]
Nicholas Gordon
So I think that's a great place to end our conversation with Harini Nagendra, author of into the Leopard's Den. Harini, I actually have two final questions for you, which are where can people find your work? Not just this book, but all of your work and what's next for you? What do you think the next project might be? You already talked about writing book five in this series, right?
- [35:22]
Harini Nagendra
So they can find out more about me and links to buy all my books at my website, which is just www.harininagenza.com. my full name. H A R I N I N A G E N d r a harininagendra.com Right. So that's, that's a place to find links to everything I've written and including my scientific academic work and my non. My fiction writing and my nonfiction writing. And as for what's next, I have a contract to write. I had a second contract to write books four, five and six. Book four is into the Leopard's Den. I'm writing book five, which is set in Mysore in and has Cauvery interacting with the Queen of Mysore and solving mysteries there. And I'm in the middle of writing that right now and then I'll write book six next year. So I'm doing a book a year and then I have to figure out if the readers keep reading, I'll keep writing. And that's where we are.
- [36:15]
Nicholas Gordon
So you can follow me, Nicholas Gordon on Twitter ICRI Gordon. That's N I C K R I G O R D O N. You can go to asiareviewbooks.com to find other reviews, essays, interviews and excerpts. Follow them on Twitter ookreviews Asia. That's reviews plural and you can find many more author reviews at the New Books Network and NewBooksNetwork.com Parthina where can people find you?
- [36:35]
Prarthana Prakash
I am Prartana Prakash on LinkedIn.
- [36:38]
Nicholas Gordon
We're on all of your podcast apps, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, rate us, recommend us, share us with your friends. Interviewing those running in, around and about Asia. Next week joins for an interview with Justin Marozi, author of Captives and Companions, a history of slavery and the slave trade in the Islamic world. But before then, Harini, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
- [37:00]
Harini Nagendra
Thank you. It was such a pleasure talking to Bodhik.