The Making of A Lady Detective

LET ME TELL you a story—a true story. It’s historical, and I only learnt some of this from my research, but it’s a narrative that Kaveri Murthy—my lead protagonist of The Bangalore Detectives Club in the 1920s—would have been intimately familiar with.

As a Princely State, Mysore took a progressive path towards promoting women’s education quite early on. While there were several private girls’ schools, run along caste lines, from the mid-19th century onwards, many of these were later taken over by the Mysore Government to ensure their stability. By the end of the 19th century, there were as many as 136 Government schools for girls, and the Maharani’s High School started the first women’s Fine Arts programme. The Maharani’s High School also added a separate section for women college students, opening it widely, despite the opposition by many powerful men who sought to restrict admission to upper-caste Hindu girls alone.

Yet, as Professor Parimala V Rao of Jawaharlal Nehru University documents in her research, a number of in­fluential male administrators were unhappy with this trend. In 1915, due in large part to the efforts of Diwan M Visweswaraya, compulsory education for girls was mandated in several locations across the state, but this was opposed by the Inspector General of Education, who placed all kinds of ob­stacles in their way. First, he tried to remove key subjects like mathematics and science, and English, from the syllabus for girls in lower classes. Thus, girls found it difficult to proceed for higher study in these disciplines. Then he opposed the construction of hostels for girls’ schools and refused to allow male teachers in girls’ schools—setting up a classic Catch-22 situation. If women could not proceed to college, and only college-educated women could teach young girls, then how could girls’ schools function?

Fortunately, the Mysore Representative Assembly defeat­ed the more regressive of these proposals. But the Inspector General of Education continued to subvert women’s rights to education through various devious means. For instance, he did not permit the Maharani’s College in Mysore to start a BSc in Science, saying that such a course was already sanc­tioned in Bangalore’s Vani Vilas Institute—then sabotaged that programme by pleading lack of funds. Women who wanted to pursue a bachelor’s degree in science could go to Central College, but he delayed the process of construction of a separate building for this programme. Despite the Maharaja and Maharani’s encouragement and funding, it took several years for women to be able to enrol in science undergraduate degrees in large numbers, with an even longer impact on the supply of women teachers for girls’ high schools.

Reading this narrative brings me grief and anger.

Writing about the struggle of women for education in 1920s Bangalore through the lens of fiction via the experi­ences of my heroine, Kaveri Murthy, is my way of coming to terms with these difficult times. Although the women who experienced these times lived more than a century ago, their experiences continue to leave their imprint on us.

My paternal grandmother Satyavathi was born in 1907, in the village of Gobichettipa­layam, in Madras presidency. She lived until her nineties, reading Sanskrit texts daily almost till the end. She was a formidably intelli­gent woman, who could also read English, Tamil, Hindi and Marathi and spoke several languages. But she almost didn’t go to school. Her father was a well-known lawyer who sent his sons to school, but not his daughters—girls from ‘respect­able’ homes were not supposed to go to school, where they would mingle with boys. If it weren’t for her older sister, who decided one day that she wanted to study, and dragged my grandmother along—and a kindly school mas­ter who came home and pleaded their case with their father—Satyavathi might not have been given the chance to read.

My grandmother didn’t study for long. She left school early, and was married by the time she was 12, to a schoolteacher. Her oldest daughter was also married by 13, but her youngest daughter—born 25 years after her first daughter—complet­ed an MA in Literature. So, things do change, for the better. But the pace of this change is often too slow.

My mother-in-law Annapurna was the oldest girl in a family of 16 children. Her education was halted several times—when she completed Class 8, Class 10, pre-univer­sity—each time for a year or two, while she begged, fought, cried, went on hunger strike, and eventually prevailed on her family to let her study further. She was very fond of her father, and he of her—but the idea that she thirsted to study, to work, to make something of herself, was not something that he or the rest of her family understood. In the 1960s, she managed to go from Tanuku to Visakhapatnam to study for a BSc in Botany in a hostel—but that was it. She was married before she completed her degree, and kept occupied with raising three sons.

People often say that I had a ‘supportive’ mother-in-law. She was indeed, but it went well beyond that. She loved com­ing to the Indian Institute of Science campus where her son, my husband, did his PhD—and talking to girls like us who were working on our own theses. My mother-in-law was so proud of everything I achieved in my professional life—because I, born a few decades later, could do what she was unable to.

Towards the end of her life, she had one abiding regret, which she spoke of many times. That she could not study further, or work professionally. She enrolled for a manage­ment diploma when her boys were young, but lacking family support, had to discontinue. I saw her struggle to deal with those painful regrets.

My mother Manjula also had to fight to study further. She managed to get permission to go from Salem to Karaikudi, living in a hostel, to complete a BSc—also in Botany. After that, she got admission into a medical college. Her father was a doctor, as was her older brother. It was her life’s ambition to become a doctor too, inspired by these men, whom she admired so much. But she was not permit­ted to take it up. Instead, she had to get married. My mother is now in her late eighties. Whenever she enters a doctor’s room and finds a woman, her face lights up with joy. She tells them the story of how she also almost went to medical school. I can see the look of sorrow and understanding on their faces, and it feels like someone is pressing on a half-healed scar.

My mother eventually reconciled to what happened, and moved on, as so many women did. She had a good life, and is very proud of her daughters and what they have achieved. But the sadness remains, hidden within. A kore as they would say in Tamil, korathe in Kannada, kami in Hindi—a gap, an absence, a lack.

HOW DOES A writer process these emotions? Ar­chival documents and research papers can give you statistics—the numbers of girls educated, the numbers of women who went on to study medicine. Stories—such as the tale of Kamala Sohonie, to whom Nobel Laureate Sir CV Raman tried to deny admission into the Indian Institute of Science just because she was a woman—don’t make it into these statistics. But fiction can be a way to express some of this sadness, to get it out from the mind where it can simmer and fester—and instead, work it into text, where it can bring a spotlight to the human impacts of such issues.

That’s why my amateur de­tective, Mrs Kaveri Murthy, is a 19-year-old woman who loves mathematics. At the start of The Bangalore Detectives Club, Kaveri hides her maths books in the attic, working on her sums in the afternoon in secret while her mother-in-law naps. She is discovered by her inquisitive neighbour, Uma aunty. Kaveri fears that Uma aunty will give away her secret. But she finds, to her surprise, that Uma aunty is ecstatic—not disapproving. Her middle-aged neighbour nurtures a secret desire to learn how to read and write—her husband disapproved of it, and her son, whom she thought would teach her, mocked her when she asked him.

Kaveri agrees to teach Uma aunty. Uma aunty, in turn, tells Kaveri’s husband Ramu, who convinces his mother that Kaveri should be allowed to study further. With the help of a few other educated women, Kaveri also begins to teach others to read and write, pulling together a heteroge­neous club that includes a policeman’s wife, a doctor’s wife, a young milk delivery boy and an ex-prostitute to read the newspaper and discuss the events of the day. Along the way, they solve mysteries—but only because they work together, transcending boundaries of caste, class and gender to expand the boundaries of their collective knowledge.

I could have made Kaveri interested in botany, like my mother and mother-in-law. From Victorian times, botany was one of the science streams most accessible to women, along with chemistry. Many excellent women-oriented historical mysteries incorporate these professions—like Kate Khavari’s A Botanist’s Guide to Parties and Poisons, starring a woman bota­nist in 1920s London, or Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry, featuring a woman chemist in 1950s California.

But I remembered the now-infamous speech given by Lawrence Summers, who was the President of Harvard in 2005. Summers speculated that there were fewer women in fields like mathematics, physics and engineering because they lacked a certain ‘innate ability’ required to handle such advanced complex subjects.

That decided it for me. I have severe maths and phys­ics phobia, in large part due to the discouragement of some of my high-school teachers. My personal experience supports the point made by critics of Summers—that statements like his are dangerous, because they can become self-fulfilling proph­ecies. We brainwash young girls into thinking that they can’t understand engineering and maths—and then wonder why they drop out of these fields.

And so, Kaveri’s passion is for maths, not botany—even though I, as an ecologist, prefer plants to algebra!

Book 3, A Nest of Vipers, is due to release in May 2024. Book 4, which I am now writing, begins in May 1922. At this point in her journey, Kaveri has completed her matriculation and wants to study further. I would dearly love it if she could quickly complete a pre-university degree and then enrol for a Bach­elor’s degree in Science in Central College. Unlike the real-life women in 1920s Bangalore, I don’t want to make Kaveri wait too long. This poses a dilemma. Should I advance time by taking a writer’s liberty with the real-life timeline, and explain myself to readers? Or do I stick to historical accuracy, and postpone Kaveri’s progress towards the college educa­tion of her dreams?

Whichever of these options I choose, I know one thing. My Kaveri will complete her degree, and fulfil her aspi­rations of being a teacher. This one is for my mother and mother-in-law, and so many women of earlier times with similar stories. Their wings may have been clipped, but they encouraged their girls to fly.

There are more opportunities for women today, but discrimination continues across colleges, and even in the workplace. I hope the stories of Kaveri, Uma aunty, Mala, Lakamma and the other women in the Bangalore Detectives Club can crack open a window to the past. That these stories can help today’s readers understand how history continues to shape the ways in which women fight to live independent lives, study and work in our ‘modern’ times.

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