Who doesn’t love detective fiction? A wonderfully primal
genre, a Manichaean struggle between good and evil, good guys fighting bad guys.
It’s a parallel genre to cowboys and Indians, except that these days we are a
bit more sophisticated. Instead of a single Lone Ranger type, a perfect human superman
who rides in on a white horse to save the day, we have shades of grey. The
detectives have flaws and appear more human. They struggle with drugs, alcohol,
relationship problems, and demanding work requirements give them too little
time to raise their kids properly.
If you impose on the detective story a tale of a woman police
inspector living in a man’s world, beset on all sides by corruption, cowardice and
incompetence, you’ve got yourself one hell of a feminist drama for the modern
age. Now locate the whole thing in Delhi, in India, and make one of the leading
characters the city of Delhi itself, and you’ve got a winner that almost can’t
fail. Of course, somebody has to make it happen, and for that we have these
wonderful new producers, chiefly Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu, turning out dramas faster almost than we can watch them.
That’s the background to the detective story that is Delhi
Crime. The crime in question is a brutal rape and murder, the details of
which make this story almost too brutal to watch. We are so inured these days to
shock and horror, scandal, outrage and injustice on a daily basis that each new
story has to push the boundaries in order to capture our attention, dulled by overstimulation.
Fortunately, Richie Mehta, the creator of this Netflix Original,
backs off from showing the gritty details of the crime, and leaves it to our
imaginations, so we can focus on efforts to track down the perpetrators instead,
and on the critique of life in the city of Delhi.
A young couple board a bus at night. There are a gang of six
people already on the bus, including the driver. They’ve got a scam going where
they subcontract the bus as a school bus during the day and then use it to rob
unsuspecting passengers at night. That such a scam is possible sets the scene
for the story within the story – the struggle of the police inspector to
convince her daughter not to go to Canada when all she wants is to escape what
she sees as the wretchedness of her home town in India. And the raw material
for raking the police over the coals – how can they permit such a gang to
operate on the city streets, where any citizen may fall prey?
Vartika Chaturvedi has the rank of DCP (Deputy Commissioner
of Police), a “gazetted”, or executive-level rank, officer in the police
hierarchy. As the story unfolds, she reveals herself to be unusually capable,
highly respected by her underlings, and a force of nature. Which force is no
match, however, for the cowardice of government bureaucrats ever on the lookout
for scapegoats when things go wrong and they need somebody to blame.
The series is an enactment of a true story. I can’t be sure
how close the filmmakers stuck to the original facts, and I don’t want to spoil
the ending, in any case. Just as you get annoyed that the filmmakers miss every
opportunity to create tension by taking all of the drama out of the tracking
down of the criminal suspects, and turn the chase into a fairly boring
chronicling of police work, you realize tension is being created over the
question of whether Vartika is going to solve the crime before the power
structure scapegoats her. The press, intensely hostile to the police, has
whipped up a frenzy of outrage in the general public, who call for heads to
roll.
To audiences unfamiliar with India, and that includes me, part
of the fascination of this drama is watching how things work in this city of
seventeen million souls on the other side of the world. The shots of the
jam-packed freeways from the air, buildings of crumbling concrete and unpainted
walls, dust rising from unpaved roads make this a story of the developing
world, which is juxtaposed against scenes of wealth and modernity, as a means
of screaming at you that life isn’t fair. The lights go out regularly and the
police have to borrow money from their fuel budget to make them go back on
again – until they have no more money left in their fuel budget. Inspectors
have to call on relatives and friends with cars to get them to work or the
scene of a crime, because no squad cars are at hand. Add to that all the scenes of police beating confessions out of their suspects, an irresponsible press, and ignorant mobs at the gate, and you've got a pretty grim reality.
It’s seven episodes of fifty minutes in length. Very much
worth watching for insight into how things work in an Indian police department.
My assumption that the depiction is credible stems from a strong endorsement of the series by the Hindustani
Times. And even more worth watching for the great acting of this powerfully strong
woman, Vartika, played by actress Shefali Shah. Highly recommended.
Looking forward to it ...
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