Wyndham and Banerjee Series

Abir Mukherjee’s Wyndham and Banerjee series follows Captain Sam Wyndham, a British veteran and former Scotland Yard detective, and Surendranath “Surrender-not” Banerjee, one of the few Indian officers in the Imperial Police, through the final decades of British rule in India. Beginning in Calcutta in 1919 and moving through princely states, Assam, Bombay and the changing metropolis of the 1920s, the investigations combine murder mysteries with the political pressures of the Raj and the growing independence movement.

The partnership gives the series two increasingly different perspectives on colonial power. Wyndham arrives carrying the trauma of the First World War and an opium addiction, while Banerjee must reconcile his police career with a family and society increasingly committed to ending British rule. Real events such as the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement and the Prince of Wales’s visit to India intersect with fictional crimes, allowing the series to trace how nationalism, race, class, religion and imperial authority reshape both the detectives and the institutions they serve.