Indian Crime Fiction Writers

[Giorgina Makara]

Language is but one aspect of diversity. When we start considering multiple religions, castes, climates, beliefs, prejudices, cuisines, customs, festivals, clothing, social mores, music, art and architecture, the complexity grows even more interesting. With variations aplenty, each state has its own peculiarities.

Add to this the wide economic spectrum (from slums to opulent mansions coexisting side-by-side), access to education (from the illiterate to Nobel Laureates), politics (heaven knows how many parties we have), the impact of globalization, soaring aspirations and prosperity, a vibrant corporate world, unbridled greed and what not, and the mosaic becomes truly fascinating.

Finally, consider the locale. What if we move the setting from a city to the sparsely populated hills (A Will to Kill) or a forest or a riverside in the hinterland (A Dire Isle)? Or to a castle or resort in the Himalayas (Praying Mantis)? Or to a poverty-stricken village? To a temple or mosque? To any of the myriad festivals that dot our calendar? On Holi, for instance, when revellers splash vivid colours on each other, fresh blood would go unnoticed. Gunshots would be missed among the firecracker blasts on Diwali.

The last decade has witnessed an explosion of sorts in Indian writing. Large numbers have taken to writing all sorts of fiction. Ours is an old civilization with a very long history of storytelling. What is new now is that people are writing in English.

Crime fiction, unfortunately, comes a distant third after these two genres. Writers and publishers alike find it a tough sale compared to the two larger genres. Even so, the numbers are not insignificant. With no reliable public statistics about Indian fiction, one must rely on anecdotal evidence. In the last few years, I have sampled over a hundred Indian crime writers. Even so, I have read but a minority of the new writers. It is on this sample (and on some conversations) that I base my impressions.

The big-city, violent thriller is popular not just among readers, but also with filmmakers. These stories seem to satisfy the demand for fictional violence in familiar urban surroundings (which is where most of our writers and readers live). They are often set in metropolises like Mumbai and Delhi, tend to be dark and sordid, and frequently explore the underbelly of these cities. They often involve organised crime and politics. The recent success of one such story on Netflix has spawned a new wave of violent thrillers.

Into this gap have stepped in a slew of vanity publishers. These firms make their money by charging writers, and not by selling books to readers. They earn their profit even before the first copy is sold. There is no barrier to entry for the writer who is willing to pay their fees.

So, this is sketch of the nascent crime fiction scene in India. Stories and writers are not in short supply. Nor are publishers. But readers are. We are lamentably short of readers. For the Indian crime fiction scene to flourish, we need more people to read for pleasure. However, we do have a silver lining: there is fresh interest from overseas publishers for Indian mysteries. How much that will help remains to be seen.

With luck, the new readers who currently consume romance and mythological fiction will expand their patronage to crime fiction and provide the genre the necessary boost. Just as British mysteries and Scandinavian noir have carved niches of their own, we might see Indian noir carving one for itself in the coming years.

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David, thank you for writing this post. You've added to my TBR.

I'm so glad Linda Rodriguez is mentioned in the comments, her Skeet Bannion is a wonderful character, and now she has added Sara Sue Hoklotubbe to my TBR.

Has anyone come across any Crow Nation crime/suspense authors? I've read all of the "dictated" biographies by Linderman, et al, and Alma Hogan, Beautiful Blackfeather's grand-daughter, but have not come across any novels, per se. Would LOVE to find more. Thanks!

Sharon Buchbinder

There is also: David and Aimee Thurlo co-authors of the Ella Clah series, the Lee Nez series of Navajo vampire mysteries, and the Sister Agatha novels. Her other works, co-written with her husband, David, include "Plant Them Deep", a novel featuring Rose Destea, the mother of Ella Clah. James D. Doss was the creator of the popular fictional Ute detective/rancher Charlie Moon. Our Native American Dorothy Black Crow who wrote The Handless Maiden: A Lakota Mystery

Nevertheless, when these novels made their way to India, first translated into Bengali and then other Indian languages, they were almost immediately a commercial success. Particularly in Bengal, the colonial education system had, over generations, cultivated a class of English readers and an atmosphere of Anglophilia. Soon, Bengali writers were creating their own detective characters. Perhaps most notably, in the early 1930s, Saradindu Bandyopadhyay began publishing stories featuring the iconic character Byomkesh Bakshi, a bourgeois Bengali intellectual who trades the pursuit of justice for the pursuit of truth.

Soon, pulpy paperbacks with covers festooned with scantily clad women and steely eyed men brandishing guns provided vicarious thrills for upwardly mobile youth moving from villages to towns and cities. Often, they attracted male readers who had long hours to kill on buses and trains as they traveled between their jobs in the city and their families back home in the village. These novels thus came to inhabit not just a linguistically vernacular space but a physical one as well. To this day, you cannot find them among the well-heeled bookshops of the big cities; instead, you must head to the A.H. Wheeler book stalls and carts on the platforms of railway stations or the sidewalk sellers near bus depots.

Despite the rampant popularity of these novels, English-language newspapers such as the Times of India sneered at the genre, suggesting that it was relegated to the lower classes, even inspiring criminal activity.

So, on that day in 2017 when Pathak uttered the death knell of Hindi, he might not have been reacting to the end of the genre so much as mourning the way that vernacular novels and their authors are marginalized by their glossier, highbrow Anglophone counterparts. But a closer look at the global Anglophone register of the novels of an author like Chandra gives a more nuanced perspective on the multilingual, multimedia landscape of popular Indian crime literature.

Thus, Chandra echoed the concerns of literary scholars like Emily Apter and Aamir Mufti who have decried the ways that the postcolonial Anglophone novel, in this case the kind of Indian novels that regularly grace the Man Booker and other international prize lists, have obscured the rich diversity of literatures written in dozens of regional languages. Chandra is not irritated that he is being barred from the Anglophone center of the world republic of letters, to borrow a phrase from the literary critic Pascale Casanova, but rather that he is denied full participation in its vernacular periphery.

RV Raman: The golden age takes me back in time to a world, which I did not, I have not seen. So that was one huge attraction. Second is that almost all of them are cerebral puzzles and I am a person who was a little, I give favour to that. I like cerebral things rather than necessarily emotional stuff. And golden age is very much like that.

Within two years, I found that I had a four book series of fantasy, which I self published on Amazon. Then I realised that I could write, and I decided that I would take a shot at something a little more contemporary. I wanted to do Christie kind of a thing, but really good mysteries are very difficult to write because logically they have to fit very, very well.

So that was something I had decided. And as I was writing my corporate thrillers, there was this mystery bubbling up inside me. So once I finished the fourth book, I said, okay, now I want to take a shot at it. And I started writing A Will To Kill. And what was really interesting about that book is that I managed to write it in something like seven weeks max, about 50 days.

I usually take about six months to eight months to write a book. But this thing, because of those bubbling in me and everything, then in my head, it just came out and it became a well, I was just lucky that when my agent showed it to a publisher they picked it up immediately so I was quite happy with that.

Caroline: Well, I hope that does start to change because it does seem like there should be, you know, teenagers out there having the same experience you did getting into crime fiction and wanting to read about where they are.

Thanks to R. V. Raman for sharing his experience of crime writing in India with us. His first whodunnit, A Will to Kill, is out now in the UK and the US, and the second in his Harith Athreya series, A Dire Isle, is coming soon. There are links to his books in the episode description and to his website, where you can learn more about him and his work.

This episode was hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. Find links to all the books we mentioned and other information about this episode at shedunnitshow.com/amysteriousglossary. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

An interesting fact to note is that most of the recognised and globally awarded work by Indian or Indian-origin writers comes under the aegis of literary or historical fiction and is helmed by wildly popular names such as Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry, Chitra B. Divakaruni. This trend, to a certain extent, might influence the reading and even writing choices of those who have been conditioned to assume that anything championed by the West is best, and the rest not worth their time.

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