Two-day festival at Bangalore International Centre examines crime through history, gender, power

Bengaluru: Dead Write, a two-day crime literature festival, kicked off on Saturday at the Bangalore International Centre (BIC), Domlur. The festival framed crime not as spectacle, but as a structure embedded in the city’s everyday life, archives, and stories about people, power and justice.

As visitors entered the festival, they were greeted by several interactive installations, including a mugshot-mimic booth, a chalk-line crime-scene setup, “make your dead” postcards, and a “sketch the killer” activity. The morning sessions explored the intersections of crime, journalism, science and policing.

The afternoon session, “In Cold Blood”, opened, paradoxically, with policemen Neeraj Kumar and Maxwell Pereira, alongside former underworld participant-turned-writer and filmmaker Agni Sreedhar. The discussion explored how crime survives within the ordinary: police stations dealing more with morally messy realities than heroic narratives, and the ways power and systems shape who becomes a victim and who becomes a criminal.

In “Daggers and Darogas”, panellists Madhulika Liddle and Shampa Roy discussed how crime fiction can re-examine history through the lens of caste, gender and nationalism. Liddle noted that historical crime fiction is “more about regular, everyday people”, unlike dry history textbooks, while Roy spoke about how older crime narratives often demonised women. Through murder investigations set in Mughal Delhi and colonial Bengal, the speakers explored how fiction can uncover silenced histories.

Reflecting on the Swadeshi period, Roy described it as “a Hindu upper-caste assertion, one that often alienated certain castes, communities and women,” despite its language of rebellion and nationalism. She also described archives not merely as research sites, but as haunted spaces filled with erased women, forgotten detectives and voices buried under patriarchal narratives. The session ultimately argued that historical crime fiction can resurrect emotional truths left behind by textbooks, while also creating alternative narratives for women.

Jerry Pinto opened his session by saying, “We all like murder mysteries because they force us to confront the elephant in the room — death — that we all die.” He transformed the discussion from one about detective fiction into a meditation on loneliness, morality and human tenderness. Calling loneliness a “national epidemic” and arguing that “we live with incorporated justice,” Pinto questioned society’s fragile faith in justice. With sharp wit and effortless humour, Pinto kept the audience in laughter throughout the session, turning conversations on crime and violence into something both engaging and reflective. “Murder in Mahim” explores prejudice, sexuality, class inequality and the quiet desperation of urban life.

The later sessions featured international author Leodora Darlington and Amit Lodha, Additional Director General of the State Crime Records Bureau, Bihar.