MURDERS SHE SOLVED
Web series about serial killers are rare in India, but Sonakshi Sinha-starrer Dahaad takes a stab at the genre
Crime has been a staple of Indian web series, but few creators have attempted one set around a serial killer (Voot Select’s Asur and ZEE5’s Duranga come closest). Enter Reema Kagti and Zoya Akhtar, whose second show, Dahaad (streaming on Prime Video), involves a bunch of police officers following the trail of one. A slow burn of a crime drama, it’s one where the audience is always two steps ahead of the police and the thrills and twists are few and far between.
It’s not for lack of trying. Sonakshi Sinha, who learned judo, bike riding and a Rajasthani dialect to play Anjali Bhaati a.k.a. ‘Bhaati Saheb’, the sole woman in the police station, battles casteism and patriarchy while leading an investigation to hunt down a smoothtalking predator who lures women into running away with him under the pretext of marriage. The said serial killer is essayed with understated flair by Vijay Varma, by far the show’s most impressive character despite the script not offering an entirely convincing setup for his motivations and ability to pull off his many crimes. Varma consulted a psychiatrist to break down the “twisted mind”. “They [serial killers] are good at lying and being invisible when they want,” says Varma.
Set in Mandawa, a small town in Rajasthan, Kagti and Akhtar use the backdrop to highlight the fault lines of caste and religion in the region, which leads to some half-hearted sociocultural commentary. Sinha and her superiors, played by Gulshan Devaiah and Sohum Shah, are pressured to intimidate a young Muslim man who has married the Hindu daughter of an influential politician. For Varma, who has earlier collaborated with Akhtar and Kagti on Gully Boy, it showcases the filmmakers’ need “to send a bigger message through the cinema they are making”.
Not every crime drama has to be a whodunit or adhere to the tropes of the genre, but Dahaad fails to lure audiences into its police procedural. As the body count rises (credit to Kagti and Ruchika Oberoi for avoiding the blood and gore) and the catchme-if-you-can drama drags on, the plot gets repetitive and tiring. It doesn’t help that the personal arcs of the three officers—the men feud with their wives while Sinha’s Anjali contends with an overbearing mother (Jayati Bhatia in a thankless role)—don’t add much meat to the proceedings. By episode six, Dahaad struggles to stay afloat as all the characters do is keep giving instructions to each other to follow leads. It comes down to Varma to do much of the heavy lifting as he demonstrates how not all serial killers need to be deranged and creepy. The menacing killer could very well be the regular family-man next door.
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An oil painting depicting Draupadi’s vastraharan with a distinctly European gaze, ‘reverse-glass’ paintings of the Hindu pantheon churned out by ateliers in Canton, a pin-up print of a voluptuous merry widow. And an unconscious rendering of the Indian subcontinent’s sacred geography as Saraswati. These are just some of the wildly diverse and yet kindred images on display at the DAG gallery’s new flagship showroom in Delhi—and in the sumptuous volume that commemorates it. As the show’s title suggests, these eclectic pictures are united by time (19th and early 20th century) and place (Bengali). This shared context is productively and provocatively explored in the text, which draws out a visual genealogy that goes back to the scroll paintings used by patua performing artists. The transformation of that kinetic folk-art form into more static individual frames for solipsistic consumption is a well-documented parable of Indian art’s encounter with colonial modernity and the age of mechanical reproduction. But by juxtaposing watercolour pats with a range of art in other mediums—oil paintings, woodcuts, metal engravings, lithographs and chromolithographs—that were jostling for attention in the art bazaar that was colonial Calcutta, this selection offers a reminder of the scandalous fecundity and visual delight of this encounter.
While the march of money and class is explicit in the ostentation of the oil paintings or the precious metals slathered on some prints, it becomes clear that social hierarchy was constantly subverted in this melting pot of aesthetics, technology and
technique. Somehow the sheer novelty of cheap mass-produced colours and mechanical printing mirrors the lively and scurrilous imagination of the subaltern pats, overwhelming the staid aspirational aesthetics of the elites.
The rather genteel text accompanying these exuberant images describes a “stylistic confluence” at work here. There are surely more robust words for this dazzling zoetrope of tradition and innovation, eroticism and piety, commercialism and craft. These are visions of the entangled imaginations of early Hindu modernity and colonial capitalism in plain sight. All the images in this show are ‘registered historical artefacts’ more than a century old, we are reminded, but they pulse with the energetic parochial cosmopolitanism that still enlivens popular art, religion and politics today. ■