The force is with her


In early March, Netflix India announced its slate of over 41 titles for 2021. As with television shows, a marker of success for a web series is its renewal for subsequent seasons. On that note, two particular titles stood out. Not so much for their high profiles, Delhi Crime is India’s first International Emmy winner and She is created by Imtiaz Ali, as for their shared cultural theme. Both are long-form dramas spearheaded by women police officers. Another policewoman-led thriller, Kamathipura, was slated to drop on March 8, until Disney+Hotstar indefinitely postponed its release in a genuflection to the controversial new OTT guidelines issued by the ministry of information and broadcasting. The Netflix list also featured a supernatural series named Aranyak, starring Raveena Tandon as “a harried Himachali cop on a big-ticket case”.

Raveena Tandon in Aranyak

A decade ago, when Hindi cinema was blowing up with masala male-cop franchises like Dabangg and Singham, a female cop-led story was virtually unimaginable, let alone a sequel to one. The evolutionary process was perhaps fated to begin with a film called Mardaani (loose translation: “machismo”), a slick, entertaining Yashraj

Aaditi Pohankar in She

Films production starring Rani Mukerji as a brash crime branch inspector. But the beginning was far from perfect.

Geetika Vidya Ohlyan in Soni

Despite their popularity, the problem with mainstream movies like Mardaani is their stubborn simplification of female authority. The complications of being a woman, in a male-dominated field, a marriage, a household, are eschewed to service the visual sensationalism of smashing the patriarchy. The protagonists derive a sense of agency by pretending to be their male counterparts. For instance, Mukerji’s Shivani Shivaji Roy speaks a language, literally, figuratively, designed to compensate for the alleged limitations of the ‘weaker sex’. In essence, Shivani’s feminism is a spiritual remake of the very masculinity she is paid to defeat. Ditto for Tabu’s IGI Meera Deshmukh in Drishyam and Priyanka Chopra’s SP Abha Mathur in Jai Gangaajal. The lens loftily frames them as superheroes, whose gender becomes more of a resolution than an ongoing conflict.

In comparison, the women of Delhi Crime and Soni are authentic for how they struggle to accept the contradictions of their identity. Their arcs reveal the futility of imitating male power in an environment notoriously hostile to females. Delhi Crime’s Vartika Chaturvedi (Shefali Shah), the DCP investigating the 2012 Delhi gangrape, is consciously playing the ‘role’ of a no-nonsense boss leading a squad of men. She only lets her guard down on brief phone calls with a husband who isn’t emasculated to highlight her dominance. But the triumph of Delhi Crime lies in Vartika cracking beneath her veneer of performative stoicism. She often apologises for exhibiting emotions, wrestling with her inability to stay rational as she confronts the worst of male entitlement. Her young trainee (Rasika Dugal) refuses to acclimatise to this duality, opting out before it suppresses her natural being. Their equation is reflected in the award-winning Soni, where senior superintendent Kalpana (Saloni Batra) is torn between punishing and nurturing the primal impulsiveness, termed “recklessness” by male colleagues, of her hot-headed officer, Soni (Geetika Vidya Ohlyan).

But a subversive critique of old-school Bollywood’s red-blooded perspective emerges in She. The show is centred on the sexual awakening of a young constable named Bhumika (Aaditi Pohankar), hired by the Anti-Narcotics Squad to go undercover as a prostitute to honey-trap a mysterious drug lord. She ends with Bhumika crossing over to the dark side, the implication being that the hypocrisy of an exploitative police force is far more toxic than the naked masochism of a gangster. Hers isn’t a morality tale so much as a coming-of-rage arc. This premise doubles up as a scathing indictment of the male gaze of an artistic medium that, like Bhumika’s employers, tends to objectify the body of the policewoman instead of wielding her mind.

It’s another matter that the poorly executed She eventually succumbs to its own metaphor. Yet, despite the bumps in recent years, the fetishisation of uniform has slowly made way for the humanisation of form. Perhaps the marriage of the female cop with the female filmmaker is only the logical next step, one maintains the order, the other calls the shots. One protects life, the other recreates it. All that separates them is a camera.

Women on duty

The mainstream heroine as female cop

Madhuri Dixit (Khal Nayak)

Bollywood without the undercover female cop is like Khal Nayak without Madhuri Dixit. There remains something iconic about her Inspector Ganga crooning “Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai”, while pretending to be a street girl.

Juhi Chawla (One 2 Ka 4)

Juhi Chawla effortlessly sways between the comedic cacophony of being a Hum Hain Rahi Pyaar Ke-style babysitter/lover and the sullen secrecy of being an undercover cop posing as the mega-villain’s sultry squeeze.

Sushmita Sen (Samay: When Time Strikes)

A rare pre-2010s female cop-led thriller, Samay stars Sushmita Sen in a gender-reversed version of David Fincher’s Se7en, as a widowed ACP on the hunt for an unorthodox serial killer.

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