Review: Bhagmati: Why Hyderabad's Lost Queen Is the Soul of the City

Bhagmati: Why Hyderabad's Lost Queen Is the Soul of the City by Moupia Basu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hooter: Queen Bhagmati of Hyderabad - Erased or a myth?

In Bhagmati: Why Hyderabad’s Lost Queen Is the Soul of the City, Moupia Basu stitches together legend and archival fragments with the flair of a poet and the caution of a historian. The result is a book that reads like a love letter to Hyderabad’s old soul. Basu resurrects the figure of Bhagmati; said to be a Hindu devadasi from Chichlam; whose dance in a temple is believed to have first enraptured the teenage prince Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah. One of the most fascinating threads is how Basu re-examines the lore of the Purana Pul, the old bridge over the Musi River, purportedly commissioned in 1578 to allow Quli safe passage to meet Bhagmati across the waters. She also probes the theory that the city was first named Bhagnagar (or Bhagyanagar) in her honor, before evolving into “Hyderabad.” Yet Basu never loses her grip on nuance: she admits there is no definitive inscription, coinage or tomb that confirms Bhagmati’s presence in official Qutb Shahi records. That tension between myth and evidence is exactly what gives the book its heartbeat. For readers drawn to the intersection of memory, identity, and romance, Bhagmati is as much a reclamation of forgotten voices as it is a city’s origin story reverberating through centuries.

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Review: Six Days in Bombay

Six Days in Bombay by Alka Joshi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hooter: Irani chai: strong on taste, weak on consistency.

Set in 1931 Bombay, the novel gives us Sona—a young Anglo-Indian nurse whose biggest rebellion until now was probably serving chai without saucer. Enter Mira, a flamboyant painter, and suddenly Sona’s tidy world turns into six days of secrets, self-doubt, and side-glances. The city itself is the real star: colonial clubs clinking gin glasses while chawls echo with political whispers. You can smell the sea air near Apollo Bunder, hear the protests bubbling under the surface, and feel the awkwardness of being called “darkie” one moment and “halfsie” the next.

The writing is vivid, but also a little guilty of “narrator uncle syndrome”-lots of telling, less showing. Mira feels magnetic but strangely hollow, while Sona becomes so consumed with chasing Mira’s shadow that she forgets to cast her own. The European detour adds texture (and a whiff of Mussolini), but the plot sometimes meanders like a BEST bus on strike.

Still, for six days you do get swept into a Bombay that’s both glamorous and gritty, idealistic and insecure. A good one-time read, not quite the book you’ll be pressing into friends’ hands at Kitab Khana.

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Review: Into the Leopard's Den: A Bangalore Detectives Club Mystery

Into the Leopard's Den: A Bangalore Detectives Club Mystery by Harini Nagendra
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hooter: An ecological whodunnit

As Kaveri continues to blossom into a full-fledged detective, this series is slowly picking up on its mystery genre too. Compared to the previous ones, I felt this focused more on the mystery and less on the history. This time time our protagonist lands up in Coorg in the 1920s India and whilst we get a glimpse of the historical setting - we do get a lot more angles and unknowns at play. We also see a lot more characters getting involved which helps move the story along in different arcs versus the Kaveri centric ones initially. Harini brings in one of her favourite elements into the story this time - nature at its finest.

A murder in Bengaluru of an old lady who had a photo of Kaveri as her dying wish leads our detective to hunt for more clues - all the way in Coorg and lands up with multiple other mysteries to solve including a threat to her life.

This also introduces Kaveri as an expecting mother and how she balances it with solving the mystery and ends with her attaining motherhood (oh! and solving the mystery) so not really a spoiler alert there. It'll be interesting to see how the next one gets set up - does a young mother get into action or will we fast forward a bit. She does have a brilliant support system in terms of a family and extended family to pull this off even if its the conservative 1920s at play. Then again - one other forte of Harini's writing has been highlighting gender inequality and the trailblazers each of her women characters have been irrespective of which generation and which social strata they are part of in the given timeline.

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