Interrogating masculinities in
khaki: the new male cop in
Indian web series
The cop protagonist has enjoyed a long career in Indian cinema, from righteous upholder of the law dispensing divine justice, to vigilante super-cop or encounter-specialist glamourising extrajudicial killings. There have also been tragic honest cop characters, with moral dilemmas about the scope and might of their uniform, who have dared to challenge the legal-juridical system they represent and in turn, been crushed by it. In recent times, the world of OTT streaming channels, with their proclivity for detective thrillers and police procedurals—often adapting templates from Western shows—has witnessed the emergence of yet another form of cop protagonist investigating a particular kind of crime.
Unlike their cinematic counterparts, these crime plots are generally not related to the mafia or terrorism. Instead, they are intimate in nature, with implications for the integrity of the family or community, rather than that of the nation-state. In the plot development, the police’s hasty assumption of culpability, reflective of majoritarian biases, is often revealed to be misleading, demanding a reorientation of the investigative self and a readjustment of the gaze of suspicion, which can then lead to the gradual, methodical revelation of true guilt. The cop protagonists at the centre of these narratives are flawed and often cynical, contending with the violence of their professional duties and personal lives. Struggling with unhealthy patterns of self-destruction or trying to resist social repression (or both), they come to realise that the investigation of the crimes assigned to them is intimately related with introspection and assertion of their own selves. As a result, the solution of these cases leads to some kind of personal revelation as well.
The gender and caste locations of these cop protagonists, instead of being irrelevant to their investigations, has a significant bearing on them. For instance, if the Dalit female cop is able to identify with the most marginalised and unrecognized victims to ensure them justice and claim their own space in the public sphere, then the dominant-caste male cop has a different challenge—to learn to see the vulnerability of the ‘other’ and wield his authority in their protection.[1] [open endnotes in new window] In particular, the male cop becomes a lens through which to interrogate the workings of patriarchy and masculine authoritarianism and entitlement, whether that of the legal system he represents, the social order he belongs to, or the family sphere.
Sub-inspector Ravi Shankar Tripathi in Kaalkoot, and Sub-inspector Balbir Singh Sekhon and Assistant Sub-inspector Amarpal Garundi in Kohrra are three such characters investigating crimes that lead to the scrutiny of intertwined hegemonies of gender and sexuality in the larger moral orders, such as that of the police force as an institution within which they function.[2] As these characters are drawn deep into the examination of collective guilt and social hypocrisies that generate the crimes they are investigating, they are also compelled to confront their own biases, dysfunctions, and complicities. In this essay, I will analyse these three characters, the crimes they investigate, the revelations they encounter, and the different arcs of their growth, to discern the ways in which the new male cop in Indian web shows challenges the violent and masculinist authority of self, society, and state and calls for newer understandings of innocence, guilt, and punishment.
Kaalkoot
In Kaalkoot, SI Ravi Shankar Tripathi is a rookie cop at the Sarsi police station in Uttar Pradesh who is disillusioned with the corruption he observes among his colleagues. Ravi, who lives with his recently-widowed mother, is struggling to reconcile his father’s high moral standards with the ethical compromises that his profession demand from him. He is on the verge of handing in his resignation when he is assigned the case of an acid attack survivor, Parul Chaturvedi. On the personal front, Ravi does not want to pursue any of the marriage alliances his mother suggests, stashing away the photos of prospective brides in a drawer and thus putting them out of mind. He also feels helplessly torn between his fondness for his married and now pregnant older sister, and repulsion for the man who had once molested her, made her the object of social humiliation, and then married her. His growth throughout the show will unfold along personal and professional fronts, as he overcomes his many hesitations and dilemmas, learns to wield his authority without compromising his integrity, and succeeds in establishing a relationship of trust and emotional intimacy with the women around him, which in turn helps him confront the ‘other’ in his own self.
Initially, the police, in trying to trace Parul’s attacker, invade her privacy and indulge in her character assassination—branding her as a young woman with multiple boyfriends, a drinking habit, and an enticing profile on an adult chatting website. With each such investigatory speculation, she is portrayed as harbouring a secret life behind the façade of an ‘innocent girl’ and ‘obedient daughter’, leading the viewer to assume that her own provocations to male lust led to her violent fate. Here, the police’s moral framework, replete with patriarchal prejudices and skewed priorities, work more towards hindering than aiding the investigation.
This moral orientation is foreshadowed at the very beginning of the narrative, when we see a police training session in progress. The gender sensitisation training workshop conducted by a woman, elicits indifference and even mirth from the male attendees, who do not seem to be particularly concerned by the rising incidents of crimes against women or the abysmally low rate of apprehensions in such cases. Even as Ravi tries to detach himself from the workings of the police, he remains somewhat suspended between the influence of his senior, SHO Jagdish Sahay, and his junior in rank, Constable Sattu Yadav. Both men are middle-aged and inhabit a patriarchal world on whose fringes Ravi finds himself poised. For instance, both are casual about domestic violence and freely exchange stories of hitting their own wives and feeling not remorse but self-pity at it; similarly, both feel contrary sympathies for Parul’s condition and her ‘questionable’ character. Both also take a keen interest in Ravi’s matrimonial prospects and freely give him unsolicited advice to assert his authority in the investigation of the ongoing case and the ‘investigation’ (i.e. scrutiny) that Ravi is himself undergoing at the hands of his prospective in-laws. Although Ravi flinches from their crudely expressed opinions and patriarchal stances (so different from his own father’s), he also partially cedes to their advice, as he tries to play the ‘tough cop’ to intimidate his suspects and impress his in-laws. The viewer feels the contrary pulls of his moral conscience and his cultural conditioning both as man and cop expected to perform his role in the social hierarchy.
Ravi’s first encounter with Parul is delayed and disturbing, as he waits for her to regain consciousness and then walks into her hospital room, only to recoil immediately and stagger out, visibly shaken at the sight of her. His initial inability to face her is significant, for this single moment brings together several kinds of discomfiting recognitions: his unpreparedness as a detached cop to face a survivor in intense pain, his revulsion as a man to the disfigurement of a beautiful young woman, and his unsettled realisation that it was Parul’s photograph that he had put away in his drawer earlier that morning. Woman and victim cease to be abstract concepts that he could evade, and instead his confrontation with the reality of their condition poses a challenge to his professional capability, human compassion, and masculine entitlement.
As Parul’s case unravels before Ravi’s keen and increasingly compassionate gaze, it is evident that Parul’s offenders are multiple—the resentful father who is more concerned about his dog than his daughters, the obsessive stalker who eventually dies by suicide, the jealous friend who takes Parul’s identity and thus leaks her ‘exposed’ photos and chats online with men, the possessive ex-boyfriend who plots to teach her a lesson, and the vigilante who carries out the acid attack on her. Thus, a chain of betrayals and collusions lead up to the central crime. To bring Parul’s culprit/s to justice, Ravi must look not only deeper into the ‘common sense’ of patriarchy, but also to identify and challenge patriarchy’s blinders within himself.
Upon doing so, he finds uncanny resonances between the motivations of the men he investigates and himself, and he sees telling contrasts between his own reality and Parul’s. These unsettling recognitions lead to his unravelling the mystery of the acid attack and learning the reasons for his own emotional vacillations and indecisions. For instance, he learns of the harassment that Parul faced when her intimate photos were shared online without her consent and is reminded of his own sister’s trauma. He listens to Parul’s father’s bitter diatribe against the heedless freedom of his daughters and contrasts it with his own grandmother’s indulgence of the waywardness of boys and men even at the expense of women’s privacy and safety. In one scene, as Parul’s ex-boyfriend appeals to Ravi’s masculinist ego and tries to justify his impulse for avenging himself against Parul for what he perceives as ‘fraud’ (her sending intimate photos to another man), Ravi recalls his own impulsive emotional blackmailing of his fiancée for sex to soothe his hurt ego (at the discovery of her concealed epilepsy). As Ravi learns to confront his male privilege and overcome his own distrust/dismissal of women in order to enter their emotional world, he begins to mature and comes closer to the solution of the mystery.
In the end, the attack on Parul is revealed to be no isolated incident but connected to a larger tradition of violation of women’s life and liberty in Sarsi. The self-appointed vigilante who attacked her with acid is shown to have a history of surveilling women and reporting their various ‘transgressions’ to their brothers and partners. This one crime is but one example of the workings of patriarchy via its many self-appointed guardians who have delegated to themselves the moral responsibility of punishing women’s desire and agency. In his determined and eventually successful pursuit of this culprit, Ravi also rescues a drowning baby abandoned by her father in the town’s lake. He has thus stumbled upon another insidious local practice endangering female life that the town has long been complicit in—mass female infanticide, a secret that has finally risen to the surface to haunt the people’s health and conscience through the lake’s poisoned waters. Thoroughly shaken with these discoveries and reflecting on his own truth, Ravi confesses to his fiancée that he identifies with the self-righteous entitlement of Parul’s aggressors and that he is not, after all, the ‘good man’ he thought he was. He agrees to marry her, but with humility and trust, instead of entitlement and resentment. In this way, the story keeps tracing larger systemic injustices through Ravi’s personal characterisation.
Ravi’s relationship with Parul, which began on a note of disconcerting alienation, matures into friendship by the end of the narrative. Ravi realises that his narrow escape had not been from marrying Parul (like his colleagues suggested), but from becoming the kind of man who could assault (someone like) her. Even as Ravi is established as a ‘saviour’ figure, he is also shown as someone who is saved. Parul, who had once been his father’s student, acts as a conduit between them, and the two bond over his poetry of resistance and revolt. Instead of feeling fear or pity towards Parul, Ravi takes inspiration from her refusal to be defined by the violence that was done to her and her defiance of the sense of shame that was sought to be instilled in her through the incident. Ravi puts aside his own shame, takes his mother aside and reads aloud to her the sexually explicit poem his father had written for her and sent him posthumously; he can now see women as independent sexual agents in their own rights, both through Parul’s own example and that of his father’s non-possessive gaze. In a patriarchal world where men are rewarded for keeping an eye on women to keep them from ‘straying’, Ravi has learnt to turn his scrutinising gaze not just away from the unjustly blamed female victim and towards her attackers and enablers, but also turned it inwards in honest self-confrontation and transformation. In becoming an ally, he has also learned to form meaningful relationships with women, which in turn has taught him to be honest with himself and others.
By the end, Ravi has learnt that delicate balance between asserting his authority without abusing it, and learning to express himself emotionally without falling into the trap of self-pity, resentment, and rage that he sees in men around him. He is no longer a naïve and self-righteous rookie cop but one who has grown aware of the complexities of human nature and the layered workings of power and violence. He has overcome the anxiety of living up to the high moral standards of his widely-respected dead father, whose poems and letters continue to speak to him from beyond the grave. Interestingly, this reference to the dead father indicates another significant ghost that haunts the script—the figure of Anant Welankar, another reluctant and idealistic cop hero from the cult Hindi film Ardh Satya. Anant is Ravi’s spiritual predecessor, torn between the contrary impulses of authoritarianism and emasculation that his uniform bestows upon him. But whereas Anant was shown as being unable to protect the common public and rendered servile to the interests of powerful criminals and capitalists who ultimately drive him to murderous rage, Ravi is able to resolve his dilemma. Here, the police protagonist strikes an almost miraculous balance between accepting the ambiguous demands of his profession and serving the cause of justice. This revised tale of a cop’s coming of age presents new possibilities for the cop’s uniform and the different kind of male cop who is shown as deserving to wear it.
