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The Muzaffar Jang mysteries consisting of four books—3 novels and 10 stories—take place in a span of a year. Beginning in 1656, the year Jama Masjid is completed, and if we are to go by Madhulika Liddle’s narrative, the area surrounding the Masjid is already teeming with sellers, buyers, eaters, listeners, dastangos, and general busybodies. Trade flourishes: there is couture from Kashmir and traders from Surat, comestibles from Kabul, jewellery, and art from across the seas; the markets of Chandni Chowk, bazar-e musaqaf and others are as busy as today…

Early 2021 saw the Aleph Book Company bring out a dark hued hardcover with a centrally placed Mughal motif in sandy gold. Raza Mir’s novel Murder at the Mushaira felt pleasantly hefty on store shelves.The nicely produced volume looked rich and piqued curiosity. The excerpt at the back promised to be the forerunner of a seriously good read.The author is a teacher of Management at an American University and has been a champion of Urdu. He has in the past, through his digests, regurgitated bits of poetry from Ghalib to the Progressive Writers Association. His target reader being both the yet to be initiated, as well as those of us who have over generations, forgotten the magnificence of the Urdu opus…

Detective fiction, like spy thrillers and crime fiction, is a genre concerned with crime, and has had its origins in the rationalist impulse of modernity. Like all crime fiction, it was used to mediate and contain the anxieties brought about by the experience of modernity. Even as serendipity as a concept might have had its origins in the Indo-Persian literary work of Khusro, Hasht Bahisht (‘The Three Princes of Serendip’) and may have travelled to Europe via translations, the detective genre was imported readymade into India. Urdu literary sensibilities, however, much like their response to modernity, resisted the European version and inflected it with their own tradition of ajaib and gharaib with emphasis on thrillers…

I vividly remember when I was learning Hindi in Varanasi in the early 1980s being fascinated by the bookstall outside the Lalita cinema in Bhelapura. In the evenings as the light poured from the foyer windows crowds would gather around the bookstall outside the cinema.

People would browse through what was new and what was on offer, and after hovering for a while pounce on a publication and snatch it up for a quite low price mostly, and then take it away to devour later. There were all sorts of publications on offer, mostly in Hindi, Bangla, and English but also in many other regional Indian languages. The biggest and glossiest publications were probably the broadsheet newspapers that hung like banners in my memory from the opened shutters of the stall…

The continuing appeal of a detective novel comes from our need to know. We read detective fiction to affirm our ways of knowing as valid, rather than subjecting them to a thorough critique. A typical detective story has a crime usually seen as a symptom of evil-personhood rather than social injustice, and the detective is shown as a master of deductive reasoning. The truth in these novels may be elusive, but always worth knowing. The hero’s goal is to right the wrongs by uncovering facts. And we as readers, vicariously, live the uncovering through the eyes and mind of the detective…