Khakee encounters: New Bollywood’s cop-films and political agency in the age of precarity

by Megha Anwer and Anupama Arora

Historically, an interlink between the police and politics—politics both as ideology and as official channels for a state’s operation—has been explicit in every cinematic rendition involving cops in popular Hindi films (Zanjeer, “Chains,” 1973); Meri Aawaz Suno, “Hear My Voice,” 1981; Shool, “Lance,”1999; Khakee, 2004—among others).

Poster of the quintessential cop film: Zanjeer (1973); Dir. Prakash Mehra.	Manoj Bajpayee in Shool (1999); Dir. Eeshwar Nivas. Shool is a prime example of a “provincial cop” film.

Since the 1950s, the cinematic figure of the cop has embodied and articulated shifts in relations between the state and its citizens. Almost always embodied as male, the cop’s personhood and function has enabled film to comment on politicians, state policies, national development, national security, and law enforcement. One of the biggest trends in post-millennial New Bollywood cinema has been the emergence (or re-emergence) of genres related to law and order, including homeland/national security.

To give some contemporary examples, 2010’s biggest box-office hit was Dabangg (Abhinav Singh Kashyap), a supercop-film about a Robinhood-esque policeman with a complicated moral code (he is corrupt in that he takes bribes, but only from the bad guys—he looks out for the little guy). The film’s huge success led to two sequels (Dabangg 2, dir. Arbaaz Khan, 2012; Dabangg 3, dir. Prabhu Deva, 2019). Also, a slew of police procedural films and shows have appeared on OTT platforms such as Netflix and Prime, including Delhi Crime (2019), Aranyak (‘Wild,’ 2021), Dahaad (‘Roar,’ 2023), Kathal (2023), and Indian Police Force (2024). Another prominent conglomeration of cop films is directed by Rohit Shetty, who has created a shared “cop universe,” a cinematic franchise that focuses on larger-than-life Hindu cop-heroes. Films in this franchise include Singham (2011), Singham Returns (2014), Simmba (2018), and Sooryavanshi (2021).[1] [open endnotes in new page] Here we examine two of these films, Simmba and Sooryavanshi, to demonstrate that the cop-protagonists in this conglomeration introduce a new cinematic imaginary and political conjuncture in contemporary India.

Historically in popular Hindi cinema, the cop protagonist’s crisis entailed a hard choice—to represent the state and win over the people through his technocratic zeal, or to serve the people by going against an apathetic state. We lay out this complex cinematic history of cops-on-screen in the essay’s first section. In the following sections, we undertake close readings of Simmba and Sooryavanshi to demonstrate that these film texts encapsulate New Bollywood’s distinctly new political mood of neoliberal Hindutva and its commensurate politics of unabashed nationalism, Islamophobia, and upper-caste-Hindu, patriarchal majoritarianism. Significantly, in comparison with their genre predecessors, these films articulate a world of authoritarian populism characterized by an absolute political-ideological consensus between the nation state and its people. Through these films, therefore, we explore the new political configuration yielded by post-millennial neoliberal Hindutva. In this political economy, cops act on behalf of the state and the people. Now, the state and its populace think alike and want to act in unison. The cop, then, is the conduit for materializing viewers’ conjoined desires—for getting it all done and for manifesting dark, ethnocentric and misogynistic fantasies as banal realities.

In particular, the films tackle issues of rape and terrorism, respectively—two thematic-political concerns that have long occupied the most rhetorically charged valences in India’s public sphere as well as within Hindi cinema. In studying these films, we come to learn something about how cops operate as agents of neoliberal Hindutva, exacerbating the precarity experienced by women and religious minorities (primarily Muslims) in contemporary India. These films also reveal new structures of consent formation mobilized via the figure of the police-officers. Simmba and Soorya, cop protagonists of the two films under consideration, are perpetually recruiting on- and off- screen publics into the authoritarian logics they embody. Through the way the films use strategies of a “voice-over,” for instance, communities within the film, as well as the audiences watching the films are absorbed into statist, authoritarian master-narratives.

At the same time, however, the scripts make a clear separation of subaltern bodies into those who are inducted on the side of the cop as worthy of protection (Hindu women) and those who are exempted from inclusion and left to their own narratological and political devices (Muslims). This demographic-identitarian segregation is depicted through the cop’s obfuscation and subsumption of anti-authoritarian politics. Legitimate unrest gets perpetually neutralized through the neoliberal politics of co-option and coercion. In that sense, these cop films mark an instructive moment in the evolution of the genre.

The cop genre in Hindi films

In many ways, the figure of the cop operates as a representative of the state, embodying its ideological kernel as coercion. He exemplifies both the everyday, mundane practices of the state—maintaining law and order to ensure the smooth functioning of societal grids—as well as its crisis-management avatar when he protects the nation-state under duress. And yet, in the history of Hindi cinema, time and time again, the police-officer has converted his intimacy with official power into subaltern agency, forwarding the rights and welfare of the dispossessed, the silenced, and those without political will or agency. The cop, by virtue of his proximity to and embedment within state apparatuses is the vehicle par-excellence of juridical-legal processes. At the same time, his capacity to sidestep legal authority, prompted by frustrations at the state’s ineptness, marks him as a curiously liminal character—one who remains bound by (and to) a moral-ethical jurisprudence, even when he commits acts that are extra-judicial and outside the bounds of a constitutional framework. In fact, when the state is morally corrupt, inefficient, or dysfunctional, the cop’s recourse to illicit legality then represents the purest embodiment of what his professional responsibility ought to entail.

Hindi films have long familiarized us with the cinematic trope of a cop who resorts to extra-legal means to render “justice.” For example, the quintessential cop-film of the 1970s, Zanjeer (“Chains,” 1973), depicts an honest police officer who has to work outside institutional frameworks (since they’re either corrupt, weak, or loophole-ridden) both to avenge his family’s murder and to bring criminals (smugglers, corrupt politicians, underworld/mafia dons) to justice. Zanjeer also introduced the powerful cinematic figure of the “angry young man” who represented “subaltern anger” or the disaffection of the dispossessed, urban, working-class precariat. Against a background of massive socio-political upheaval and a crisis of faith in governmental and legal institutions, this angry young man as cop came to be synonymous with the superstar Amitabh Bachchan, who “lash[ed] out at a system of social injustice,”[2] offering “antiauthoritarian fantasies of resistance”[3] and heralded “the arrival of populism on the national arena.”[4] The cop as the “angry young man” thus combines state authority with the moral authority of the common person. As a state official, he is armed both with the skills to navigate state machinery, but also with the power to reject and disrupt its monopoly over demarcations of right and wrong. He can weaponize his own state-sanctioned power against the state, but also discover and recover non-statist methods of resistance. He is both the ideal state functionary and the ideal citizen.

Such an interlink between the police and politics is explicit in cinematic representations of cops in Hindi cinema. The cop in every role—whether as the comic-relief constable, the corrupt officer, the honest/earnest boss, or the revenge-seeking vigilante cop-turned-rogue—offers us the occasion to trace a popular, bottom-up perception of relations between the state and its citizens. This is why, over the decades, scholars have often read the various iterations of the cop figure and cop films as responses to shifts in the Indian political landscape and concomitant shifts in attitudes towards the state. M.K. Raghavendra, for instance, suggests that every time the Indian state was seen to have weakened or worsened—in 1960s after the 1962 Sino-India War, or in the 1980s as a result of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency years, or as in the aftermath of economic liberalization in the 1990s, seen as withdrawing from its own institutions—disenchantment with the state was reflected in the portrayal of the police as having lost moral ground/authority or as weak or impervious to legality respectively.[5]

At the same time, however, as Raghavendra argues elsewhere, “The police have consistently represented the authority of the State in the Hindi film.”[6] And, thus, even when the cop acts against the state, he is in fact endorsing an utopic idea of how the state should act. This is why, for M. Madhava Prasad, the joke that in classical Hindi cinema (of the 1960s) “the police always arrive late” on the scene after the hero has already beaten up the villain and neutralized his threat, is not reducible to “a satire on the incompetence of the police.” Instead, the police’s delayed arrival enables the state’s “feudal system of justice” to play its part. The police must wait their turn to bring criminals to justice because pre-modern modalities also play a part in the reinstatement of law and order and in the enactment of justice in the modern state. The police’s tardiness, then, functions as an encoded endorsement of the “final alliance” between the feudal and the modern “sites of power,” both of which “retain their separate identities” but also operate with an interwoven interdependence in the postcolonial state.[7] The official channels of legality allow vigilante forces and impulses to have the first go. In the end, however, vigilantism, including the cop’s extra-judicial rage, must relent to the reassertion of the “legal state” in the form of the police arriving to put any remaining criminals behind bars or the hero offering himself up to the state.       

Anustup Basu[8] draws attention to another dimension of the cop genre. He deploys Achille Mbembe to study the proliferation of the “encounter trope” in cop films since the 1990s, as a more contemporary manifestation of the conflation between the modern and the feudal. These films instate a logic where weakly mediated “government bureaucracies, a nominal civil society, and ineffectual or naïve media,” demand the perverse mixing of “capital or technology with new medievalisms.” The “encounter”—the colloquialism used to describe the extra-legal killing of enemies of the state (usually terrorists, sometimes rapists)—is thus the secret practiced in open daylight. It is the “degree zero of metropolitan order,” an “act of clearing,” the state of exception that allows the everyday to exist and thrive. Without the police’s capacity and willingness to cross the borders of legality and “encounter” monsters who deserve extermination, the realm of human activity and human rights would not exist. The “constitutional pieties of the state” can come into being, therefore, only because the cop is illicitly authorized to suspend them.

The figure of the cop, however, has not always represented this quasi-conflictual, semi-competitive relation with the state, where he embodies both its legal authority and a resistance to its failures. Arunima Paul discusses two post-1990s cop-genres: the “national cop-film” and the “provincial cop-film." In these post-liberalization renditions of the cinematic-cop, the cop is the perfect instantiation of the state’s will to modernization and postcolonial development.[9] These films, she argues, have an older lineage and share something in common with the “Five Year Plan hero” of the 1950s. According to Sanjay Srivastava, this post-independence figure found expression on screen as having a middle-class masculinity that adhered to the ideals of patriotism, mobility, modernity, technocratic governmentality, and a self-sacrificing investment in national good.[10] His capacity for delayed gratification and distance from mindless consumerism established him as a model for emulation and revival. This happened about five decades later in films like Sarfarosh (“Patriot,” 1999, John Matthew Matthan), Khakee (Rajkumar Santoshi, 2004), and Black Friday (Anurag Kashyap, 2004) released after liberalization. Paul suggests that the “national cop” of the post-1990s retains the “developmental mandate for an educated and qualified middle-class hero as a figure of reason and transformation who transcends the suffering (family trauma) as well as pleasures of the self (consumerism).”[11] This national cop travels across variously recalcitrant geographies—those scarred by communal disharmony, militancy, insurgency, or terrorism. His ultimate responsibility, as Paul argues, is to bring to submission these contested territories, to subsume and re-develop them within the bounds of nationalism and neoliberalism.

If bourgeois urbanity and elite educational backgrounds are the hallmark of the national cop, then the “provincial cop film,” set in the hinterland, disrupts the hegemonic, elite, metropolitan understanding of the nation-in-crisis. Such a film employs a different lens from the one utilized by the national cop film to articulate issues of correction, justice, governance, and political action. By delving into provincial dystopia, disaffection, and dissent, these films, as Paul notes, show rampant corruption in law enforcement and highlight an inequitable polity and brazen power hierarchies. In their climactic depiction of “a mobilized provincial public adopting vigilantist modes of political action,” films like Shool (‘Lance,’ Eeshwar Nivas, 1999), Gangaajal (‘Holy Water,’Prakash Jha, 2004), and Aakrosh (‘Outrage,’ Priyadarshan, 2010) evoke an impasse constituted by neoliberal anxieties about a ‘failing’ developmental state and electoral democracy, as well as suspicion of mass political action.”[12] As we will show, this impasse finds renewed expression in the new cop-franchise films.

Rohit Shetty’s cop universe

In the next section, we study two films from Shetty’s cop universe, Sooryavanshi and Simmba, that share features with previous cinematic renditions of the cop/cop-film even as these are reconfigured in the contemporary political moment. In this case, the angry young man figure is reworked in the figures of Simmba and Sooryavanshi. Simmba is not a traumatized orphan (although he is an orphan) or a disaffected anti-establishment figure. He is more a buffoonish self-gratifying cop who eventually transforms into a roaring lion against the lackadaisical institutions of the state to avenge sexual violence against women. His campy-buffoonery doesn’t quite disappear.

The buffoonish faces of Simmba.

It is amalgamated and re-purposed within the patriarchal, protectionist-masculinist logic of the state (and its people). Simmba doesn’t have to step out of the state to annihilate the rapists, but he must properly step into his state-sponsored role as its functionary. Similarly, the brooding masculinity of the angry young man is remodeled in Sooryavanshi as Soorya’s unapologetic ethnonationalist masculinity. But he too, outside of his professional identity as a cop, is a bumbling man, incapable of getting anyone’s name right or of fulfilling the responsibilities of a husband.

In both instances, far from practicing self-denial or shunning consumerist desires as did the cops of yore committed to a developmentalist state, both films feature flamboyant cops who revel in consumer cultures, whether with Ray Ban sunglasses, shiny SUVs, high tech, or superior weapons, as they tackle threats to national security or economic prosperity. What is perhaps most striking about these new cop films is how custodial violence, extra-judicial vigilante justice, and/or the “encounter” occupy less a space of secrecy or a state of exception. Rather they operate as normalized, foregone, and matter-of-fact occurrences sanctioned by the state. Finally, not only is the vigilante cop complicit with the state, the vigilante publics that goad the cop’s extra-judicial violence-justice grant his actions an ethical responsibility and legitimation. This narrative then creates a harmony between cop, people, and the state to reveal a consensus around the authoritarian populism that provides the edifice of the neoliberal Hindutva state.

There is, of course, a larger political backdrop within which Shetty’s films and characters cohere. Sanjay Srivastava suggests that during the 2014 general election, Narendra Modi’s campaign and the pre-prime ministerial discourse that surrounded him, “significantly focused upon his ‘manly’ leadership style: efficient, dynamic, potent, and capable of removing all policy-roadblocks through sheer force of personality.”[13] This kind of description presents a sharp contrast to his “majboor” (pathetic/helpless) predecessor’s government run by the “impotent” Manmohan Singh, and controlled by the ma-bete (mother-son) duo of the Gandhi family (Sonia and Rahul Gandhi).[14] Modi’s rise in the era of digital media has much to do with building an image of omnipotent masculinity, promoted through both his physicality and aggressive policy shifts that cast aside a predecessor deemed hamstrung (by “policy paralysis” in media discourse). Modi’s willingness to attract attention to his physicality with references to his taut 56-inch broad chest has become a synecdoche for a mazboot (strong) government that can take on terrorists with as much aplomb as it can deal with issues of housing, sanitation, health insurance, and LPG cylinders. Modi’s unabashedly self-indulgent consumerism—the ultra-expensive suits, accessories, and elite air travel—contribute to a Hindu masculinist typology: aggressively self-reliant, and in this case, able to solve national problems while fulfilling personal ambitions of upward mobility. Modi’s lineage, from tea-seller at a train station to the nation’s most powerful man, unafraid to exercise his power to inure both the nation and himself against attacks, then provides the perfect fodder for Bollywood’s dream machine. The figuration of the state in the cop genre amplifies this Modi-like potency. In this filmic cop universe, a euphoric-celebratory public casts aside cumbersome institutions and judicial processes as niceties that delay and deny the gratification of instant justice.