The cop drama receives a pronounced makeover in Santosh, British-Indian director Sandhya Suri’s first fiction characteristic, a Hindi-language movie that includes Shahana Goswami and Sunita Rajwar in roles that neither has performed earlier than.
The movie forays into the agricultural boondocks of North India and examines spiritual prejudice, caste discrimination, abuse of energy, custodial torture and gender dynamics in a police station and within the communities that it serves.
Suri’s percipient script places two policewomen – one a hardened professional who has seen all of it, the opposite a rookie fighting half-truths and undisguised lies – on the centre of a story that delves right into a damaged system that’s manipulated at will by people who wield energy, be it social, political or administrative. It’s they who decided the substance and course of justice and the police pressure performs alongside.
A just lately widowed lady, Santosh Saini (Shahana Goswami), is inducted into the pressure on compassionate grounds. Earlier than she will discover her ft within the job, the constable finds herself in the midst of a delicate crime investigation.
A Dalit lady has been raped and murdered in a village. The probe is led by a troublesome feminine inspector, Geeta Sharma (Sunita Rajwar) – she is addressed as ‘Sharmaji’ – who shouldn’t be averse to getting her arms soiled within the cesspool that surrounds her.
Santosh is ready in a state known as Chirag Pradesh. The cities wherein the story performs out – Nehrat, Mapur, Madrabad, Ghazaliabad, Machogarh – bear fictitious names. Apart from the truth that these locations have parallels in the actual world, all the things in Santosh is rooted in actuality.
It’s a police procedural that is not restricted by style conventions. Actually, it’s outlined by its steadfast abjuration of the norms of the shape. Santosh is a slow-burning and trenchant commentary on the ills of a society the place biases of many varieties run rampant typically with horrific penalties. However life goes on.
Santosh follows each the private and the collective with equal rigour, revealing the fault traces that the brand new policewoman should perceive and cope with as her superior, a lady who has years of expertise below her belt, not solely does a little bit of hand-holding but additionally goes out of her approach to make the beginner’s work simpler.
The bonding that develops between the 2 ladies in a male-dominated pressure additionally brings out the marked divergence within the approaches of the 2 cops. Santosh is an outsider. She is barely accepted by the lads within the police station. However she troopers on. In distinction, Sharma is the boss. The unflappable woman calls the pictures. She appears eager to mould Santosh in her personal picture.
Apart from the grief of dropping her policeman-husband within the line of obligation, Santosh has to reckon with the apathy and cynicism of the lads, in uniform and in any other case, she works with. She learns the ropes fairly shortly however can not shrug off the sense of guilt and frustration that comes with the territory.
An illiterate Dalit man approaches the cops to complain that his solely daughter is lacking. He’s all however shooed away. Santosh steps in and gives to assist the hapless father. However how far can she go within the face of her male colleagues’ all-round and ingrained reluctance to serve the dispossessed?
Earlier, a woman arrives on the police station to lodge a grievance a few perfidious boyfriend. The lady’s father, who has the signifies that lacking Dalit lady’s father doesn’t, bribes one of many cops to be allowed to mete out immediate punishment to the ‘erring’ boy. Santosh can solely watch.
Amid the injustices that the lads below her perpetrate with impunity, Sharma comes throughout as a lady who espouses the best principals. Nevertheless, because the case proceeds and Santosh descends deeper and deeper into ethical gray areas, she begins to determine that no one within the police pressure, not even her apparently benign mentor, is freed from stains.
Caste oppression and misogyny are hidden in plain sight in Santosh. The movie additionally underscores the informal method wherein spiritual fissures are normalised in a divided society. “It occurs,” an unperturbed Sharma says to Santosh when the investigation takes an avoidable flip.
Defending an indefensible act, Sharma reminds Santosh that this nation has two varieties of “untouchables” – people who you don’t contact and people who you can’t contact. The battle between the 2 shouldn’t be solely unequal however endless.
A repeatedly defiled nicely in a Dalit village is the location of continuous higher caste tyranny. A mutilated corpse is present in it. A decomposed cat and a useless canine are thrown into it. The neighborhood that makes use of the nicely is indignant however powerless. They know they should dwell with being on the receiving finish as a result of the impervious higher caste males of the village can get away with homicide.
Santosh has no background rating. Two songs that play on the audio system of the Inspector Sharma’s official car are supposed to break the solemnity of two policewomen’s work. Within the silences, the ambient sounds, particularly the thwack of an off-camera police baton touchdown an accused’s again, change into all of the extra chilling.
Shahana Goswami delivers a efficiency of astounding emotional depth. She brings out the internal turmoil of the titular character, an ingenue who should discover her approach round in a world within the grip of corruption and exploitation, with restraint. The means she employs are measured and significant.
Sunita Rajwar, a sufferer of typecasting in Hindi movies and net exhibits as a loud-mouthed termagant, digs are enamel right into a meaty and layered function that permits her to depart a lot unsaid. She comes up with an act that enhances the sharpness of the inquisition that the movie conducts into the pulls and pressures of policing a various and divided nation.
