Challenging the Romance of the Techno/Metropolis: The Social Critique of the ‘City’ in Zac O’Yeah’s Crime Trilogy

Abstract

Following the American discovery of the high concentration of skilled IT professionals in Bengaluru, the Karnataka Government announced its IT policies in the late 1990s which changed the city from a placid ‘pensioners’ paradise’ to the bustling ‘Silicon Valley of India’. With almost an explosion of disruptive changes, the topography and the demography of the city both saw a dramatic transformation. The ‘Mr Majestic Trilogy’ (2012–2017) by Zac O’Yeah is a crime-detection series set in post-millennial Bengaluru. The current paper argues that it is possible to read this crime novel series as a social critique of the changing (social) spaces and interactions in the city, albeit these are represented with humour and light-heartedness in his novels. The paper seeks to read the novels as representing the specificities of the urban experience in this global South Asian city, and as bringing to the fore the dialectics of space and spatiality, especially as it embraces a neoliberal wave of globalisation. It looks at the narratives’ engagement with various aspects of urban experience, including crime and migration, and also investigates the network of relationships that the novels explore in their depiction of the urban/hinterlands duality. For its purposes, the paper borrows insights from theorists of space and urbanity.