Khakee encounters: text only

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

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). 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 window] 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. 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.

The cops in Shetty’s cinematic franchise represent this fantasy of authoritarian populism: strong-man leaders, governed by a neoliberal, entrepreneurial commitments, can perform the unthinkable. They can create an absolute political-ideological consensus between the nation-state and its people. Cop-films like Sooryavanshi and Simmba present an incisive articulation of authoritarian populism in India “that combines strongman leadership, strident ethno-nationalism, populist strategies, and elements of neoliberalism.”[15] They glorify the culture of impunity in law enforcement machinery and valorize the muscular Hindu vigilante cop as the patriotic savior of the nation and its women. In the films, panics around rape and terrorism respectively, thus, serve to “win for the authoritarian closure the gloss of popular consent.”[16]

Furthermore, such a political consent is echoed in the bodies of the male superstars and at the level of the star texts of actors who play the cops in the two films: Akshay Kumar, as Sooryavanshi, and Ranveer Singh as Simmba. Bhavya Dore has written about Akshay Kumar’s ingenious dabbling in right-wing political visions by modeling himself as a nationalist hero, championing the BJP government’s Brahmanical, patriarchal, protectionist policies, and in the process setting himself up as a Hindu alternative to the three big “Khans” in the industry.

Radhika Raghav unpacks the star text of Hindu superstar, Ranveer Singh, to suggest that despite modeling himself as a fashion rebel through his iconoclastic, bohemian, and contrarian sartorial choices, he participates in “normalizing Hindu gender ideologies” that confirm the status quo. His corporate-managed persona only strengthens normative cultural politics and millennials’ values around gender, caste, class, and religion. Put another way, a key element of the process by which Bollywood has been Hindutva-ized is the way in which A-list male actors have enlisted their varied masculinities in the service of establishing Hindu hegemony within the film industry and have simultaneously emerged as exemplars of Hindu-Indian entrepreneurialism. Despite their divergent, self-curated, star identities and masculinities, both these actors can play cops in Modi’s India. Such is the cohering function of authoritarian logics—the actors gladly subsume and neutralize ostensible tensions in their individual presentations of celebrityhood to serve as a masterclass in ideological conformity.

“No arrest. No long cases. Justice on the spot.”
Simmba encounters the rapist.

The third film in Shetty’s cop-universe and a remake of the 2015 Telegu hit film, Temper, Simmba depicts the eponymous orphan and corrupt cop (Sangram “Simmba” Bhalerao) who is only interested in filling his coffers with bribes. Then his conscience is aroused: a young woman he develops brotherly affection for (Aakruti Dave) is fatally gangraped by the brothers (Sada and Giri) of a local criminal-drug lord (Durva Ranade). The conscience of the sleeping lion (Simmba translates as lion) awakens. He dons his khakee police uniform and roars with vengeance to kill the two rapists in a staged “encounter” in his police station. Simmba, thus, belongs to the subgenre of the post-millennial “encounter films” in which cops “encounter” or commit extra-legal killings to deliver “justice” by ridding the social landscape of those deemed criminals.[17]

What is especially remarkable about Simmba is how it manipulates and instrumentalizes Aakruti’s rape and the politics and discourses around it. As a narrative trope, this plot development builds consensus across multiple, disparate constituencies—judges, politicians, cops, middle-class men and women, young and old—to condone aggressive, muscular, individuated solutions to women’s gendered-sexual precarity. The final solution—to kill the rapists—is presented as the will of the people who appoint (and anoint) the cop as a strongman-leader and their political representative. The cop executes their wish in a context where both the people and the police are frustrated by the constraints and failures of democratic institutions. Vigilante justice becomes their only alternative.

The film’s opening makes its political stance explicit through the God-like voice over, soaring above the wail of sirens, as a procession of jeeps screech to a halt outside a police station. The voice-over tells us,

“Two encounters have happened. While these encounters are unofficial, this is the first honest deed that the officer-in-charge of this station has done.”

This loaded, opening exposition, does important political work to determine how the audience should make sense of what has happened. On the one hand, the choice of the words “first honest deed” critique Simmba’s erstwhile corrupt actions (he was until recently a shameless bribe-taking cop). But the voice-over’s ultimate force lies in its declaration that the encounter, “while unofficial” was an “honest deed.” The narration ostensibly sets up “honest” in tension with “unofficial.” But the tension is precisely what brings legitimacy to “encounters” as police practice. Indeed, the encounters are “unofficial” in that they’re undertaken by a cop who’s working outside sanctioned judicial processes and bureaucratic channels. However, the word “honest”—with all its attendant associations of fair, good, just, right—establishes for the viewers the legitimacy of the extra-judicial act. Importantly, audiences and fans would easily recognize the voice-over as belonging to Singham (Bajirao Singh), the super-cop from the inaugural film of Shetty’s cop-universe franchise. Singham, played by Ajay Devgn, is already established as a cop whose self-righteous zeal lends even more moral weight to the endorsement of vigilante justice.

If the opening with Singham’s voice frames and overdetermines how we read Simmba’s actions, the film itself is an illustration of how Simmba operates as he marshals vigorous support for authorizing an “unofficial-honest deed” of murdering rapists. His vigilantism might be outside the bounds of legality, but it is not without process. It may not follow legal routes, but it does adhere to systematic, ritualized protocols. The film lays out the contours of these extra-judicial systems of justice in the age of authoritarian populism. This logic does not signal mayhem but an alternative rationality and set of intentional practices that accompany this worldview.

It’s fun and games in the first forty-five minutes of the two-hour and thirty-nine-minute film, which establish Simmba as a rogue-ish cop without a conscience. He is flamboyantly dishonest in his dealings. The main lead, Ranveer Singh, hams it up as he plays, with cartoonish gusto, a feisty orphan-turned-cop who enjoys his chosen profession: he became a cop “to make money, and not to be Robinhood and help others.” We see him out-crook the crooks and out-swindle unscrupulous businessmen with his own crass corruption. Simmba becomes a cop because he wants “power;” it is precisely the authoritarian nature of law enforcement that draws him to this calling.

So enmeshed is his subjectivity with his occupation, his personhood and corporeality with that of the state, that he has “police” tattooed on his bulging forearm, which on numerous occasions he proudly flexes and flaunts. Simmba is literally the “strong arm” of the state. Even though his tattoo is a nod to Vijay’s iconic forearm tattoo—“Mera Baap Chor Hai” (my father is a thief)—in Deewar, Simmba’s persona is far removed from that of the angry young man. As a policeman, he is nothing like the haunted, desperate cop in Zanjeer. Simmba’s tattoo does not signify a traumatized and scarred body, or bespeak a history of shame and helplessness, as it does in Deewar.

It is not a forcible branding that is a “signifier for marginality and social displacement,” or of existing “outside the pale of the family.”[18] Simmba’s tattoo is a marker of pleasure and pride, of just how unmitigatedly he revels in being a cop, and how glad he is to exist as an extension of the state. Melodramatic excess rather than physical restraint defines his relationship to his profession. Unlike the angry young man version of the cop, he has no skepticism toward “the rituals of the family/nation,”[19] hegemonic institutions that exact more than their pound of flesh. Instead, Simmba invests in an indiscriminate familial-ization of the body politic that he polices. The orphan-turned-vigilante-cop turns the nation into his family and forges a familial relation with every person he meets.

With the rape of a young woman, the film’s tenor shifts from comedy to action/social drama. This turning point is anticipated in an exchange between Simmba and Nityanand Mohile, an ethical head constable whom Simmba supervises. After Simmba strong-arms an ordinary and helpless middle-class man into signing off his home (property and land) at a reduced price to a corrupt corporator, Mohile berates Simmba for “betraying his duty.” While Simmba has previously ignored Mohile’s withering looks, this time he loses his patience with Mohile’s accusations and snaps back: “You’re accusing me like I raped someone.” In the film’s ideological schema, rape is the worst crime. Duping old men out of their property and cozying up to landsharks doesn’t compare, and that behavior doesn’t even deserve any verbal chastisement. As the film progresses, we come to learn what the adequate punishment for rape is: the termination of life. This exchange, which precedes Aakruti’s assault and murder, provides an insight into how the film is interested in “muscular masculine celebrations of Maratha chauvinism and patriarchy,” which are more “insulted by rape” than anything else.[20]

Through Aakruti’s gangrape and death, Simmba invokes implicitly but also names explicitly the gruesome 2012 Delhi rape case and the discourses surrounding it.[21] Simmba co-opts the fears and anxieties associated with rape to drum up support for his own violent-masculinist-authoritarian populist agenda. Women’s gendered and sexual precarity is not an occasion to address structural issues, but it offers an opportunity to forward a conservative ideological stance that legitimizes coercive and exclusionary state practices. Historically, as feminist scholars (such as Lata Mani in the context of sati in colonial India)[22] have noted, women’s bodies have been used as the ground or site on which other debates are staged. Ultimately, women’s voices are silenced to support other ideological stances and political agendas. This film is no exception in that the violence committed against a woman’s body offers provocation to build consensus for unconstitutional and undemocratic delivery of justice.

The film steadily builds momentum toward normalizing its argument about how rapists should be dealt with. It harnesses and manipulates how the discourse around rape permeates different sites and spaces: in public protests and vigils, in the economic realm, within households, and in the courtroom. The film performs multiple forms of appropriation, of disparate ideologies articulated as distinct modalities of resistance—civic unrest, women’s anger, parental insecurity, patriarchal protectionism—and melds them all into one to produce a singular meaning and outcome. The film thus does the important ideological work of mobilizing a “fractured public … through profoundly modern calls for civic participation, into violence and into condoning violence.”[23]

The film’s politics continue to reveal themselves in how it presents the protests and candlelight vigils that follow in the wake of Aakruti’s rape and death. First, protest is presented as something that the middle class does as it stands in for “the people;” and thus the poor and working class is entirely absent from participation and investment in the cause. In fact, one of the kids (Chhotu) who is speech-impaired and who was a key eyewitness in the Aakruti case, turns “hostile” and disappears. The poor are thus either rendered mute witnesses or can’t afford principles and can be easily bought. The class-precariat, and class precarity, are “cinematically cleared”[24] while middle-class voices are amplified. Second, the focus is on middle-class outrage and what the film amplifies is their bloodthirsty, regressive demand for capital punishment for the rapists. The film spotlights protest signs that are held by middle-class young men and women—“Hang the rapist or we riot;” “Hang all the rapists. We want justice;” “There is no place for a rapist in society.” None of the protest signs demand legal reform or legislative changes to address gender-based violence.[25] The film has nothing to say about socio-economic precarity, and its relation to gendered violence, produced by neoliberal capitalism in India.

Third, since the film is invested in enshrining the cop as the ultimate agent of justice, the police join and support these protests, rather than trying to disperse the crowds. This is a far cry from how the police operate in India in the context of public protests. In fact, those protesting Pandey’s 2012 rape were met by the state’s draconian reaction. Curfew was imposed in some parts of the city; and protestors were hosed down, lathi-charged (struck by wooden batons), and tear-gassed by the Rapid Action Force units of the police.[26]

What the film does dial up is the rhetoric of the need to protect Bharat ki betiyaan (daughters of the nation).[27] It is critical to note that the nation is specifically invoked as “Bharat,” which is the word “nation” to connote “India” that the Hindu Right prefers to use. In analyzing this discursive shift, Christophe Jaffrelot sees the increasing use of “Bharat” instead of “India” as expressing the saffronization of the public sphere. In a statement made during an interview on a major news network after the 2012 rape, Mohan Bhagwat, the leader of the Hindu right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) organization, suggested that, “Such crimes [of rape] hardly take place in Bharat, but they frequently occur in India.”[28] In Bhagwat’s worldview, Bharat is associated with the “virtues” of a traditional idyllic Hindu nation, while India signals the “vices” of modernity or secularism. And the crimes of “India” must be prevented from occurring in Bharat through the protection of its chaste and virginal women (read: Hindu women).[29] The strategic invocation of Bharat ki betiyaan provides an insight into how the film’s patriarchal-protectionist and nationalist-populist message work together to disempower women.

In the courtroom, Simmba appeals to a female judge, reminding her that she too, like the victim, is a Bharat ki beti. His address positions her not as a public official or a professional working-woman, but as mother and daughter. Conveniently, the judge is swayed and grants another hearing date to the prosecution. Even more emphatically, when the rapists’ mother takes the witness stand, this judge castigates her, blaming her for her sons’ deviancy: they wouldn’t be rapists if it weren’t for her faulty upbringing. Here, the film transfers the responsibility for women’s precarity onto women in the legal field to bring the violent men to justice, and to women as mothers to raise men who are not rapists. Importantly, then, the male vigilante steps in to deal with the rapists, when all the women in public-professional and domestic spheres fail to fulfill their responsibilities.

The Bharat ki Beti discourse also resonates with the Modi government’s Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao (save the girl child, educate the girl child) campaign. In one scene, Nandini Mohile propels Simmba into action: “the daughters of the country are getting educated but who will save them from the monsters.” Her exhortation is a tacit endorsement of Modi’s campaign launched to address female feticide.[30] It encourages families to stop treating their daughters as a liability and give them a good education. That is what will enable them to maximize their “capacity to become virtuous market citizens” and be empowered to serve their family and nation. Simultaneously, though, Nandini’s words mark the limits of what the government can do: it can’t protect women from monstrous men who interrupt their emergence as prospective neoliberal subjects. Hence the need for an “eda” cop (slightly crazy cop) to rectify the challenge of monstrous men who pose a physical threat to women’s emancipation. However, the narrative of “monstrous men” does not acknowledge systemic operations of patriarchal power and masculine privilege and also sidetracks the other, everyday obstacles that stand in the way of women’s education. After all, we must not forget that Aakruti’s father, with his lower-middle-class salary, is barely able to pay for her education to become a doctor. Women’s aspirations encounter many more roadblocks tied to the neoliberal economy besides rapist men. The film makes no room for this conversation.

A closer look at the 2012 Delhi rape case, from which the film borrows heavily, enables us to observe the extent to which Simmba evacuates the wider neoliberal context that fuels such violence against women. Jyoti Singh Pandey was the daughter of an airport worker who came from a family of agricultural workers; she was the first in her family to have a professional career. She was enrolled in a physiotherapy course, and to pay for her education, she was working nights at an outsourcing firm, helping Canadians with their mortgage issues.[31] On the night of her fatal sexual assault on December 16, 2012, in South Delhi, she was returning home with a male friend, after watching a late-night show of The Life of Pi. On the private bus they boarded, he was beaten up and she was brutally raped by five men, all friends of the bus driver. Jyoti succumbed to her injuries a few days after the attack.

The event sparked mass anger and nation-wide protests and international attention and censure, resulting in the establishment of five fast-track courts to deal with issues of sexual violence against women. The Justice Verma Committee, a special commission comprised of legal experts, was formed to recommend changes to the laws pertaining to gender-based violence. While one of the perpetrators allegedly committed suicide in jail, the High Court sentenced the remaining four others to capital publishment, and the seventeen-year-old minor was sentenced to three years in a reform facility.

The film makes a few critical and telling changes in its fictionalized dramatization of this incident. In the film, like Jyoti, Aakruti is a young female Hindu (medical) student, who is gangraped and murdered. The film, however, attempts a “sanitization” of the victim’s profile; and she is presented as the ideal Bharat Ki Beti, the kind of gendered subject who can be valorized within the politics of neoliberal Hindutva. The film takes pains to establish Aakruti, always dressed in modest “Indian” clothes, as a chaste Hindu woman. Her goodness, purity, virtue, innocence, and diligence are repeatedly emphasized. This is what makes her an uncomplicated recipient of the audience’s sympathy.

This is why her nocturnal activities are assiduously reframed by the film. Unlike Jyoti, Aakruti is out at night not for recreational activities, but to teach street kids. She is raped and murdered not while she’s out with a male friend, but as punishment for discovering that the Durva and his brothers are using street children as drug mules. Ironically, women as neoliberal subjects—aspirational, educated, hardworking, successful—must still be desexualized in order to qualify as sympathy-worthy cinematic subjects. Jyoti, as a modern, mobile woman could easily be read as deserving of her lot. In an interview, Mukesh Singh, one of her rapists, maintained that a “decent girl wouldn’t [have been] out at night.” In the misogynist worldview he represents, “A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy … Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night, doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes.”[32] The film cleverly sidesteps these contradictions in neoliberal India’s public sphere by disassociating the rape-victim from any threatening markers of modernity.

In another divergence from the 2012 case, the film establishes both Aakruti and her perpetrators as middle-class. This is in contrast to Pandey and her perpetrators, who, as internal migrants from the rural to urban center, represent aspirational India. This alteration, of class location, has the effect of erasing the complex intersections of gender and class inequalities or precarities present in the 2012 incident. As Tithi Bhattacharya has noted, gender violence and misogyny need to be contextualized against the promises of neoliberal capitalism in India, and its failures which are managed by the deflection of frustrations and resentments of one oppressed and aspirational group (working-class men) upon another precarious segment of the population (working-class and lower-middle-class women).

Simmba has nothing to say about these messy politics in which neoliberal economics intermesh with traditional forms of patriarchy and Hindutva ideologies. Instead, it mobilizes the moral economy of patriarchal nationalism. Overall, then, the distortions in the film have the effect not only of valorizing a certain type of female subject who appeals to the conservative gender values of the Hindu nationalist-authoritarian populist project but also of marginalizing or erasing the larger socio-economic context and contradictions resulting from the adoption and failure of neoliberal reforms. The wide and complex arena of the neoliberal nation is in fact distilled and visually shrunk to a tiny locality: a dhaba (eatery) and the police station that is located across from it.

The film’s interpellation of women in the endorsement of violent vigilante justice, with the cop as political agent, reaches an escalation in the dhaba, where multiple women, young and old, traditional, and modern, gather and speak up. Thus, while Aakruti’s death silences her voice, the film does not silence women’s voices in general. Rather, its insidiousness lies in how it makes the middle-class Hindu women speak: loudly, angrily, and in unison, to support a politics of individuated, retributive/vigilante violence as the solution to women’s sexual precarity. Whether it is the rape victim herself, the female court judge, Simmba’s love interest (Shagun Sathe), the head constable’s daughter (Nandini Mohile), or the home minister’s daughter, women characters are incessantly recruited and willingly offer themselves up, as Bharat ki betiyaan. Their response is homogeneous, and they accept a patriarchal, protectionist lens, thus negating the history of feminist activism around sexual violence in India, including the unprecedented mass protests after the 2012 rape. These women conveniently delegitimize themselves as political agents and gladly accept the mantle of political provocateurs who urge men to act on their behalf.

Simmba goes to each one of them to solicit their opinion, and in every instance, they give him the permission and the encouragement to become an agent of change by acting “unofficially.” As Simmba asks these women what they feel each time they encounter news of rape, and what they think should happen about Aakruti’s case, they are resoundingly unanimous in their demand that the rapists be killed. Their demand perfectly echoes the language and ideology of the candlelit vigils and public protests that also espoused a lethal solution to the rapists: “They don’t deserve to live. Just kill them;” “They should be castrated in public.” The film, then, becomes an archive of women’s perspectives. Importantly, their perspectives are not mismatched at all. When official avenues fail, the unofficial recourse to justice becomes linear and coherent. No complications or contradictions muddy the waters. And, ironically, the unofficial pathway becomes the gateway for dominant Hindutva ideology to surface and take precedence. These women may emerge from different walks of life, but their voices and opinions arrive at a shared crescendo that reiterates and legitimizes a vigilante, authoritarian politics. With every confirmation Simmba receives from the women, he pats his gun, resting in a holster around his waist. The gun, as a phallically loaded object, becomes an apt vehicle of choice for vengeance, and to reinstate a protectionist-patriarchal masculinity.

Despite the heavy overlaps, the film insists that Simmba’s masculine self-positioning stands in sharp distinction to the patriarchal violence of the rapists. In fact, on two different occasions, Simmba mocks the rapists’ masculinity in the police station. He enlists female cops to beat the perpetrators. He taunts the men to dare to rape these women, while the latter snicker and snort, in response to Simmba’s goading of the men. The scene of the female cops slapping and beating up the men with their bare hands is oddly reminiscent of violent public action, or mob lynching episodes, which in contemporary India have been largely directed against the poor, Dalits, and religious minorities. The scene, then, participates in the normalization of “vigilante publics” and their “spectacular violence.”[33] As Shakuntala Banaji argues, a violent, fascist public consciousness is the “necessary base for state fascism.” This scene recruits women as participatory agents of vigilante violence.[34]

Later, when he’s preparing to stage the encounter, Simmba taunts the rapists for their “impotence,” their inability to do anything when the women cops beat them up and other civilian women witnessed their emasculation. Nothing, Simmba tells them, can be more humiliating. All these insults to their “mardaangi” (manhood) have the desired effect: the rapist-brothers lash out, and Simmba shoots them in “self-defense.” As they are shot, the image of Aakruti appears in soft focus, in white, smiling, and signaling her approval of vigilante vengeance.

As Stuart Hall notes, authoritarian populism is distinguished by its ability “to construct around itself an active popular consent.”[35] The film manufactures consent for cop-vigilante justice, presented as a necessary, moral, and rightful circumvention of the law. In contrast to the angry young man films of the 1970s in which the angry cop was celebrated as a figure of anti-establishment populism, here, the cop functions to serve a rightwing, establishmentarian populism.

Of course, Simmba goes scot-free for these extra-judicial killings because, by the end of the film, there is a strikingly single note sounded as the assembled bloc—of ordinary middle-class people, the state (judges, politicians), the cop—condones Simmba’s actions. Singham (the original cop-hero from Shetty’s film franchise, and whose voiceover the film opens with) returns at the end of the film. He is appointed by the Home Minister as a “neutral officer” in an SIT (special investigation team) inquiry to investigate the veracity of Simmba’s claim that he killed the rapists in self-defense. Predictably, Singham is not all that “neutral,” and he too gives his stamp of approval to Simmba’s extra-legal methods: “No arrest. No long cases. Justice on the spot.” This is the new way under neoliberal Hindutva.

The overburdened justice system cannot deliver, and hence police brutality—not recognized or acknowledged as such—is necessary for a swift dispatch of justice. The film’s populist consent depends on the failures of the system to stoke public distrust and contempt for institutions.[36] Importantly, unlike “classical fascism,” authoritarian populism “entails a striking weakening of democratic forms and initiatives, but not their suspension.”[37] The film ratifies this qualification: the state (through the home minister) does play a role, albeit a feeble one. He shows little regard for constitutional reforms or the legal system and processes. And, therefore, the state assists in its own peripheralization. It self-sabotages its predominance, thus enabling the vigilante cop to usurp its authority as the people’s representative. There is no tension between the police, the politicians, the people (the middle classes). Everyone’s on board with the new sidebar judicial order in which a paternalist vigilante cop operates as a brutal state executioner. Such a man is hailed as a fearless leader, and a protector of women’s virtue.

Homeland (in)securities: Sooryavanshi

Sooryavanshi follows predictable plot points—the threat of another terrorist attack looms large in present-day Mumbai. The anti-terrorism squad (ATS), led by the protagonist Soorya (played by Akshay Kumar), spends its time tracking down the forty “sleeper-terrorists” that infiltrated India from Pakistan a decade and a half ago, and the six hundred kilos of RDX that has been hidden in India since 1993 (the year of the first major bomb blasts in Bombay). The film is action-packed from the get-go: all detective-work is absurdly quick and always yields successful results. The film has its fair share of SUV entourages speeding down highways, helicopter chases, bazaar-brawls between terrorists and the police, and averted bomb blasts. All of this transpires to the beat of an aural landscape that’s come to be associated quintessentially with Shetty’s cop-franchise: the name of the cop-protagonist is turned into a hypnotic incantation that plays in the background to the action sequences. And the chanting of the hero’s name is overlain with the sound of sirens and drums, creating a background score that’s akin to a euphoric public celebration during a Hindu festival.

Indeed, ATS officer Soorya is godlike. The high-angle frontal shots through which he’s introduced compel us to savor his impeccable physique, his easy corporate-golfer aesthetic of aviator sunglasses and cargo pants. He enjoys a reverential status from his subordinates, who are in awe of his leadership but also share an intimate bonhomie with him; they feel comfortable enough to tease him about his minor flaws (he forgets and confuses everyone’s names, including the names of criminals, his colleagues, and his own wife). The film’s rather generic narratology is matched, then, by its template use of the body of the male superstar: larger than life and basking in adulation that he receives both on and off-screen.

In many ways, there is nothing new here. The way in which Akshay Kumar as Soorya swallows up the film’s visual landscape is reminiscent of Hindi cinema’s enshrinement of fantasies of a fearless, dynamic and erotic masculinity ever since the emergence of the angry young man in the 1970s. And yet, there is a critical difference: Amitabh Bachchan as the angry young man was a one-of-a-kind actor, corporealizing a new on-screen articulation of discontent. As Samir Dayal suggests, “Bachchan’s muscular elegance” could only be “aspirational, belonging to a fabulous and fabulist manhood, in reality inaccessible to most spectators.” Bachchan’s embodiment of wrath that pointed to the frustrations of an entire post-Nehruvian generation was thus expressed through a “nonrepresentative representation of Indian masculinity;” it exceeded any “correspondent referent of Indian masculinity.”[38] Akshay Kumar as the cop-hero, however, signifies a whole brood of men—a franchise-nation of martial patriots; “ede policewale”[39] played by Hindu actors, who, in the Hindi film industry, exemplify an alt-universe to the monopoly of the Khans, and, on screen, announce a death-knell to terrorists and rapists. If the angry young man marked a cinematic adjacency to the gentle, urbane, encultured masculinity of the Nehruvian postcoloniality, the Sooryavanshis, Simmbas, and Singhams indicate the new national, aspirational mainstream. They are slightly funnier and a tad more accessible and personable than their main-man, the ultimate strongman[40] Prime Minister Modi, in whose shadow they follow and whose version of ethnonationalist masculinity they work overtime to normalize and popularize.

Sooryavanshi assumes and addresses an audience with whom it shares insider knowledge and consensus about how much India has suffered because of terroristic violence. The film begins with a disembodied voice-over giving us a synoptic history lesson of bomb blasts in the country since the early 1990s. Everyone conversant with Bollywood star texts and Shetty’s cop-universe, recognizes the absent-body of Ajay Devgn as the somber, officious teller of this history. Devgn is, after all, the actor who plays Singham in the first superhit installment of the cop-franchise. Devgn’s auditory slippage from his own film to another film in the shared cinematic universe smooths the way for an easy-automatic transfer of ideologies between the filmic universe and its real-world counterpart as well. When actors and characters across films share a particular narrative, the audience is also encouraged to imagine itself as co-inhabiting the same, all-encompassing worldview and interpretive framework. Ultimately, the giving of information—about terroristic-events over the past three decades and how the Indian state has curtailed terroristic activities—is not about giving the audience new information at all. It is about jogging certain memories of national trauma that should never be forgotten; and it is about interpellating audiences into normative scripts about the state and its enemies. In the guise of telling them what they already know, the film in fact perpetuates a vociferously linear account of what is to be remembered and believed.

There’s a telling moment in the film: A Mr. Nayar from the Intelligence Bureau arrives from Delhi to warn the ATS team in Bombay about the likelihood of another terrorist attack. Addressing an audience of politicians, bureaucrats and policemen, all gathered around in a boardroom, he says:

“As you all know, after Section 370 was scrapped in Kashmir, it has become impossible for terrorist organizations like Lashkar to create animosity between the people of our country, or to infiltrate and send arms and ammunition into India.”

Through this utterly casual and passing reference, the film turns what was an extremely controversial and contested decision by the Modi government—to revoke a constitutional provision of autonomy granted to Kashmir—into an occasion for establishing a community of shared wisdom. The “jaisa ki aap sab jaante hain…” (as you all know) in the same breath confirms for the audience the obviousness of the motivation for scrapping Article 370, as well as the success of the enterprise: that it was all about the management of terrorist infiltration, and that it has in fact yielded exactly what was anticipated. The off-hand manner of conveying this information gives the audience a remarkably innocent and incontestable rationalization for the Indian state’s rather drastic measure of changing its constitution. It also nudges the viewer to accept that this is the version of explanations that they should all already know. The film works hard to establish that everyone within the film, and those watching the film, are all on the same page. Ajay Devgn’s auditory-documentary-esque summaries of the dates and sites of terrorist attacks, which are then repeated later in the film by Soorya as well, is one means of achieving such a continuum and ubiquity of knowledge about key political events that have shaped the trajectory of the nation today.

This unrelenting pervasiveness of the state’s master narrative produces a serious consequence: the figure of the cop, unlike his angry young man predecessor, is no longer in competition with the state to fulfill the responsibilities that the state has reneged on. Rather there is a perfect synchronicity and collaboration between the two; there is no room for frustration with or criticism of the state. In fact, even when the cop acts illicitly, it is never without state sanction but in anticipation of state permission that is always already guaranteed.

Early on in the film, Kabir Shroff, the joint commissioner of police, asks the chief minister to come to the ATS headquarters late at night. Upon his arrival, the minister is given an update about the whereabouts of a Pakistani insurgent—Riyaaz Hafeez—who has been hiding out in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, pretending to be a hotelier for the last fifteen years. We see Shroff and the politician with their backs to us as they stare at multiple screens flashing with images of places and people under surveillance by an array of uniformed (female) officers sitting in the room. The central screen has an image of two dead bodies, lying on the ground covered over with white sheets. The “investigation of these two suspects,” we learn, has led the police to Hafeez’s whereabouts. The paucity of details surrounding the death of these “suspects” is astounding. After the barrage of information that the audience has been given, via Devgn’s voiceover, at the start of the film (excruciating details about terrorists in India and Pakistan, and their nefarious plans), the film barely pauses to let us register the death of these two men, who have most likely been “encountered” as terrorist suspects. Even the Chief Minister does not ask any questions about them; the cop’s word is the final word. He determines our response to death, frames certain bodies as victims of the nation and certain others as disposable, relevant only as information, or for the evidence they generate about other things and people that really matter.

The chief minister instructs Shroff to send his team to Jaisalmer immediately and “arrest the bastard.” Without a moment’s hesitation, Shroff responds: “I’m sorry, Sir, but we couldn’t wait to get permission.” The minister had been unreachable while in a three-hour flight, and Shroff went ahead and took the unilateral decision to send his team to hunt down Hafeez. Once again, Shroff receives no objections, no questions. Clearly, then, the cop’s actions, even without official approval, are in line with what the state already wants. The cop is the mechanism for preemptive promptness—not a vehicle for over-compensatory amendments against the state. He only hastens state operation. And, because of his ability to anticipate the state’s actions, even before the state knows that it needs to act, the state always emerges as efficient and successful at combating its enemies. The implicit subtext is that this is a new phenomenon: in 1993 they might not have been able to preempt the twelve bomb blasts in Bombay. But today, with Article 370 in place, and the free rein given to the police, the state will not only rectify its past mistakes (like letting terrorists like Bilal Ahmad escape to Pakistan), but it will also halt new terroristic possibilities.

And this is because the state is willing to go that extra mile. They’ll do whatever it takes—physical torture, psychological warfare, intimidation, humiliation of suspects. In each instance, state machinery encourages the police to both act before consent (by assuming its eventual arrival) and, where necessary, act without consent. So, when Soorya tells his boss, Shroff, that the only way to get Kadar Osmani (another terrorist in India) to start talking is to “humiliate” him using an “unofficial” strategy, because beating and torturing him are not doing the trick to “break” him, Soorya gets exactly what he needs from his boss: a confirmation to go ahead. This authorization, however, is given without ever saying the word “yes.” Instead, it comes in the form of a refusal to say “no.” In response to Soorya’s request for the license to violate the law, his boss Shroff, mock-chides him: “Oh yes, like you’ve never done anything till now without my permission.” Without a categorical “yes,” Shroff lets Soorya know that the field of possibilities for dealing with terrorists is wide open, and that the state’s endorsement to break rules can be tacitly assumed.

Even more, such disregard for protocols protecting human rights becomes an open-secret and a matter of mirth—all the subordinates witnessing Shroff and Soorya’s interaction snicker at this exchange between the two senior police officers. The shared joke operates at multiple levels: it testifies to collective humor at Soorya’s pretense of seeking permission; at Shroff’s fake-irritation about Soorya’s not following rules; at the delicate balance performed in the routine of seeking and granting (un)official clearance; and, at how in-step the two cops are even in the moment when they’re discussing stepping out of line. They each know the role they need to play to side-step the law together. There is no rift; only the smoothest continuum between the state, top-ranking police officers, their underlings, and the audience who are in on the joke.

But such a successful moment of humor rests upon excluding someone’s body and subjecthood; the joke is predicated on someone’s rejection from insider-status and their consequent response of non-laughter. Muslims do not laugh in Sooryavanshi. They are, instead, angry, taciturn, vengeful, and petulantly committed to watching “India burn.” The film enacts a very different approach to the Muslim question than a film like Gully Boy. In the latter, the current “condition of Muslims” in India is tackled as a single throw-away sentence. Otherwise, the film steers clear of commenting on national politics and the ascendency of Hindutva ideologies. Sooryavanshi, however, takes on the challenge of explicitly spelling out “Musalmaano ka haal” (the situation Muslims are in).

It does so, first and foremost, by having Muslims tell their own story of trauma. Anti-Muslim riots do not make it into the national narrative. In this case, the historical background relevant to the film begins with the violence endured by the country in 1993, with the Bombay bomb blasts; not with the post-Ayodhya riots in 1992, in which more than two thousand Muslims died in Bombay alone. The film enforces a jarring severing of two intimately connected moments of violence and insists on starting history where the political culpability of Islamic terrorists (and their sympathizers) begins. The film’s historiography is fully aligned with a Hindutva timeline. What happened to Muslims during the riots is something that the Muslim-terrorists are left to recount. The film, and the nation it depicts, have no interest in anything else.

In some ways, the film is rare for how unequivocally it lays bare the politics of associating terrorists and Muslims—a key political tactic used by the Hindu Right to justify its Islamophobia, and to intimidate and delegitimate Indian Muslims as political agents. When Soorya reaches the Muslim mohalla to arrest Kadar Osmani, a Lashkar and ISIS-supporting politico-religious leader, a Muslim crowd gathers to protest his arrest. Addressing a maulvi (Muslim priest), Soorya offers a litany of Osmani’s crimes—misleading young boys in the name of religion and sending them off to Syria to fight for ISIS etc.—as evidence for why he must be arrested. But the “dialogue” with the Muslim community, the willingness to address and engage them, and offer a detailed explanation for the police’s actions is not an exercise in assuaging people’s unrest or their suspicion of the police. It is, rather, the segue to a threat:

“If, after knowing all this [about Osmani], you still continue to support him, then the whole community can be blamed.”

Soorya categorically warns Muslims that they are themselves responsible for being labeled unpatriotic, anti-national, and untrustworthy, because of who they ally with. But that’s not where the threat ends: if they don’t comply, then “another 1993-type of situation/atmosphere can occur,” and “neither you nor we want that,” Soorya reminds them.

At the start of the film, Devgn’s disembodied voice-over had left out any mention of the anti-Muslim riots of 1992 to cleave the country’s suffering (because of the blasts) from the suffering Muslims underwent in the 1992 riots. In this instance, Soorya’s evasion (of leaving out any mention of the riots) achieves a different end. The warning about history repeating itself (“1993-jaisa mahaul”) cloaks an unspoken threat to the public of anti-Muslim riots. No Muslim can remember the Bombay blasts without remembering the riots that preceded them. When Soorya mentions the blasts, the riots linger just under the surface of his words and return as phantasmagoric reminders of what Muslims should fear. Orchestrated riots: always denied, always deployed. Soorya’s warning, however, goes yet a step further. He pleads with the maulvi, “as one Indian to another” to “let him do his job”, otherwise the cop will have to bring in the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF)—India’s paramilitary force to manage internal national security. Tipping his hat to Muslims as compatriots just masks the final thread of the warning—that the federal state’s coercive apparatus is at the cop’s beck and call. Needless to say, the maulvi instructs the crowd to back down. Whether it’s from fear of being branded a terrorist, attacked in a riot, or taken out by special armed forces is hard to say. But the subtle intensification of the pressure to relent is decidedly hard to miss or ignore in this cinematic threat.

The script leaves the depiction of Muslim precarity to the meager and unreliable narrative capabilities of the “bad” Muslim, and, predictably, they come up short at convincing the audience (or the characters in the film) of the authenticity of Muslim vulnerability. Instead, the script works hard to present political grievances by Muslim as malicious distortions and exaggerations of the truth. In this way, Osmani’s words, “You know what the condition of Muslims in this country is?” are negated when a retired Muslim policeman, Naeem Khan (who just happens to be visiting the police station) reminds Osmani of Osmani’s grubby origins: he was a petty thief before he donned the garb of a pious man. Osmani is, of course, shamed into silence by the “tewar” (temper) of real “Hindustani Musalmaan.”

Another tactic for disqualifying the validity of protest from Muslims is to suggest that their civil rights were never really violated. This “unofficial” technique of humiliation Soorya uses to get Osmani to talk about his terroristic affiliations. Soorya brings the latter’s wife and daughter into the police station and pretends to torture them. They are taken into a room adjoining the one where Osmani is strung from the ceiling, their mouths covered so that they can’t make a sound. Then two female police-officers fake-scream in response to the sound of pseudo-belt-lashes, so as to make Osmani believe that the women in his family are being tormented. With no physical damage, any objections to police brutality against religious minorities would be unwarranted.

In this scene, too, the film takes recourse to humor to dislodge attention from the horrific nature of what is transpiring on screen. Instead, we are led to laugh at the absurdity of the erotic-sexualized screams that the female cops produce. To make that connotation explicit, Soorya reprimands his women colleagues for confusing torture for “Kamasutra,” and for not faking Muslimness convincingly enough: one of the female cops uses the Sanskritized word “pitaji,” instead of the Urdu word “abbu” for father as she calls out to the “father,” Osmani, to save her.

There is much to unpack here: The film’s gender politics are obvious in its use of women to create sexual humor. And its gendered ethnonationalism is on display because it reinforces the normalcy of patriarchal protectionism: even a terrorist will succumb to the horror of his women relatives being violated. Or, perhaps, it suggests that Muslim men are especially susceptible to the pressures of wanting to protect their women’s honor. The scene also articulates a subtle castigation of Urdu as a language associated with terrorists, and with the griminess of fake torture and bad porn. Most critically, the scene of simulated torture is used to make us un-see real torture on screen: Osmani hanging by his arms from the ceiling of a prison cell; and his wife and daughter being gagged into silence. And it does the trick to falsify our memory of real-world ideologies and incidents, where the Hindu Right cruelly advocates and deploys the use of sexual and physical violence against Muslims.[41]

There is one exception, where the film grants an iota of sympathy for the distress that Muslims have endured. When the police catch up with Bilal Ahmad, who has returned from Pakistan to set in motion the next terrorist attack in India, he threatens to take his own life rather than be hanged like a “spectacle.” With his gun to the temple, he describes his motivation for turning to terrorism. He tells Soorya that his house was scorched and his wife, children, and father burned alive during the 1992 riots:

“I still hear their screams twenty-seven years later.”

The film allows the viewer to feel a momentary possibility of empathy for Ahmad: we see flashback sequences, which ostensibly stand in for glimpses of Ahmad’s memory, of a mansion engulfed in flames. This visual assemblage, however, is distinctly minimalist compared to the long newsreel, archival footage we’re shown every time the film refers to bomb blasts by Islamic terrorists. Then, we see a sequential collage of photographs: collapsed buildings, chaos and catastrophe in public spaces, dead and injured bodies strewn everywhere. In contrast, the images of a burning house do not produce the same affective tenor. So, even when there is a basic visual repertoire offered to produce sympathy for the victims of communal violence, it is no match for the hyperbolic cinematic arsenal through which the film depicts the impact of terroristic violence.

During the conversation, Soorya does acknowledge that “what happened” to Ahmad “was wrong.” He even urges Ahmad to remember that India “tumhara bhi hai” (India is yours too). But these words of commiseration are sandwiched between strategies of dismissal, which once again invalidate Ahmad’s grief and anger. “What about the blasts you organized out of revenge?” is the first comeback that Ahmad receives from Soorya. “What happened with you was wrong, but you also took thousands of innocent lives.” This rejoinder is particularly poignant because, as a young man, Soorya had lost both his parents in the blasts. “If I wanted,” he continues, “I could take out all my anger [bhadaas] on you right now.” And then comes the clincher: “But that time has passed” and, Ahmad needs to forget, to move on: “aage badhna hoga.”

Herein lies the film’s ultimate treatise on the management of political discontent and psychological trauma that result from sectarian state politics. The answer to terrorism lies in one’s capacity to “move on,” to repurpose trauma, as Soorya has done, toward the higher end of protecting the nation. Ahmad’s, and by extension the Muslim community’s failure lies in their inability to be entrepreneurial with their pain, in their incapacity to convert pain into productivity. This is the neoliberal spin on ethnonationalism. Such a motif occurs at the end of the film, when Simmba arrives on the scene (to give Soorya support in taking down the terrorists. With his classic earthy humor Simmba reminds the terrorists that their activities hurt the economy, affect tourism, impact the entertainment, sports, and art industries.

If terrorism jeopardizes the smooth flow of capital, then the terrorist is the equivalent of a bad venture capitalist who misrecognizes the sagacity of the avenues of his investment. Instead of devoting his energies in and to the nation, he detracts from the nation. He is unable to get over structural traumas and deal with them as individual familial loss. Rather than nationalizing his trauma, he insists on traumatizing the nation. The Muslim-terrorist is thus the psychologically stunted, mentally unwell melancholic, brooding over the communal past, when the security state has opened up an exciting neoliberal future. The Ahmads, Osmanis, and Hafeezes refuse to enter the techno-financial global order that would free them from the oppressiveness of their Muslimness and allow them to be, as Basu puts it, “subsumed and extinguished into an overall civic religiosity of neoliberal market structures.”[42]

What this narrative does is to invent the Indian Muslim as “an entity that is at once pathological and infantile,”[43] and therefore, after all is said and done, pathetically ineffectual. In the same breath that the film collapses Muslim with terrorist, it also disallows terrorists the possibility of success. The Indian state and police, we learn, will always forestall political antagonism that may arise from religious minorities. The film reinforces the idea that any politics misaligned with ethnonationalism is doomed to self-combustion. This is seen in the following script development: Ahmad unwittingly self-sabotages the terrorist plan by insisting on going to visit his mother’s grave in Bombay, even though he is repeatedly warned against this kind of sentimental foolishness. Predictably, he is recognized at the graveyard, caught, and must take his own life. Thus, despite decades of Indian history with its “progressive underdevelopment, and disenfranchisement of entire Muslim communities,”[44] Muslims are deemed incapable of even proper, or properly terrifying militant political expression. As terrorists, they are not only devoid of good politics, they are devoid of politics altogether, or of a political future that is not entirely subsumed within a majoritarian-nationalist paradigm. Without threatening nudges, reminders, and rejoinders from the Hindu cop, outdated traumas, foiled plans, and familial-fixations are all they’re capable of.

Ajay Gudavarthy argues that this narrative structure, in which the malfunction of Muslim unrest is always a given, always scripted into the story from its very inception, offers audiences “many comforts,” especially when neoliberal reforms have expanded the realm of uncertainty and insecurity in everyday life.[45] The predictability of these narratives is premised on the knowledge that Muslims are the “safest enemies to have in India.” In this view, they are a numerical minority (only 15% of the nation’s population, while Hindus constitute 80% of India), socially backward, and economically marginalized. And yet this recurring narrative has a usefulness for the state. That is, positing Muslims as the stable, unified enemy allows an authoritarian populist state, and its cultural texts, to generate a unified Hindu identity that can forever exist in a quasi-panicked, quasi-celebratory state—fearful of Muslims but rejoicing in their guaranteed vanquishment. In the end, what this kind of screenplay produces is a cinematic universe in which all erstwhile idealism of communal harmony, even if it only once existed in the discursive-cultural-cinematic realm, is permanently laid to rest. What is normalized in lieu of it is a popular politics of pragmatism:

“From an imagination of overcoming conflict, we are reconciled to the fact that conflict is an everyday reality and that we will live with these conflicts for a long time to come…. The state that was forced to speak a social democratic language, now, under populist regimes has given voice to the views that we used to hold all through only in the private realm. The state has also accepted that conflicts are going to stay unsolved to become our lived reality.”[46]

In this scenario, the cop as a state functionary, becomes the vehicle of pragmatism. He brings a middle-class, Hindutva, drawing-room version of politics out into the open as he embodies and encourages a rampant disregard for a politics of justice or equity. Such a characterization moves to evacuate a politics born out of disenfranchisement and suffering to kneel at the altar of an impervious state, or worse, a state that is proactively vindictive.

Notes

1. The success of cop-films has in turn also spawned other related sub-genres tackling law enforcement and national security (such as spy and detective films). One of India’s biggest production houses, Yash Raj Films (YRF) has churned out blockbusters in its “spy universe” franchise, focusing on RAW agents (referring to the foreign intelligence agency of India, its Research and Analysis Wing): Ek Tha Tiger, 2012; Tiger Zinda Hai, 2017; War, 2019; Pathaan, 2023. [return to text]

2. Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1. For more on the angry young man, read: Fareeduddin Kazmi, “How Angry is the Angry Young Man? ‘Rebellion’ in Conventional Hindi Films,” in The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema, ed. Ashis Nandy (London: Zed Books, 1998), 134-156.

3. Samir Dayal, Dream Machine: Realism and Fantasy in Hindi Cinema (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014), 70.

4. M. Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 158.

5. M.K. Raghavendra, “A Renewal of Faith: Dabangg and its Public,” Economic and Political Weekly 46, no.6 (Feb 5-11, 2011): 33-35.

6. M.K. Raghavendra, Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Popular Indian Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2012), 130-32.

7. Prasad, Ideology, 95-96.

8. Anustup Basu, “Encounters in the City: Cops, Criminals, and Human Rights in Hindi Film,” Journal of Human Rights, 9, no. 2 (2010): 175-190.

9. Arunima Paul, Unraveling Countrysides: Provincial Modernities in Contemporary Popular Indian Cinema. PhD Dissertation, University of Southern California, 2014.

10. Sanjay Srivastava, Passionate Modernity: Sexuality, Class, and Consumption in India (Routledge India, 2018), 99.

11. Paul, Unraveling Countrysides.

12. Paul, Unraveling Countrysides

13. Sanjay Srivastava, “Modi Masculinity,” Television & New Media 16, no. 4 (April 2015), 331.

14. Srivastava, “Modi Masculinity,” 331-338; and Jyotirmaya Tripathy, “The Character of Modi’s Masculinity,” https://indiachapter.in/index.php?/user/article/2/2/69

15. Priya Chacko, “Gender and Authoritarian Populism: Empowerment, Protection, and the Politics of Resentful Aspiration in India,” Critical Asian Studies 52, no. 2 (2020), 219.

16. Stuart Hall, “Authoritarian Populism: A Reply,” New Radical Review I/151, June 1, 1985,https://newleftreview.org/issues/i151/articles/stuart-hall-authoritarian-populism-a-reply

17. Basu, “Encounters.”

18. Ranjani Mazumdar, “From Subjectification to Schizophrenia: The ‘Angry Man’ and the ‘Psychotic Hero of Bombay Cinema,” in Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, ed., Ravi S. Vasudevan (Oxford University Press), 245.

19. Mazumdar, “From Subjectification to Schizophrenia,” 246.

20. Akshaya Kumar, “Cinema and its Spatial Predicates: Landscapes of Debt in Search of Justice,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 60 (Spring 2021).

21. On 16 December, 2012, a 23-year old woman, Jyoti Singh Pandey, was gangraped and left to die by the side of the road in Delhi; the brutal nature of the event sparked nation-wide protests. The name of the raped young woman in Simmba, Aakruti, resonates with Jagruti (means awakening) which was one of the symbolic names (in addition to Nirbhaya) that Jyoti was given by the media to “honor” her, before her father made the decision to reveal her name.

22. Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (University of California Press, 1998).

23. Shakuntala Banaji, “Vigilante Publics: Orientalism, Modernity and Hindutva Fascism in India,” Javnost - The Public (Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture) 25, no.4 (2018): 335.

24. Megha Anwer, “Cinematic Clearances: Spaces of Poverty in Hindi Cinema’s Big Budget Productions,” The Global South 8, no.1 (Spring 2014): 91-111.

25. A survey in India found that “over half the population preferred extrajudicial actions by the police to legal action.” Roshni Chakraborty, “Sanctioning Abuse,” Harvard International Review (Fall 2020), 65.

26. Krupa Shandilya, “Nirbhaya’s Body: The Politics of Protest in the Aftermath of the 2012 Delhi Gang Rape,” Gender and History 27, no. 2(August 2015), 467.

27. “India’s Daughter” was the title of a controversial 2015 documentary made by Leslee Udwin, “India’s Daughter” on the 2012 rape case, which featured interviews with one of the convicted rapists and his lawyer, and was banned in India.

28. Cited in Shandilya, “Nirbhaya’s Body,” 472.

29. Of course, this sort of construction both leaves non-Hindu women out of the category of Indian women even as it silences how poor women, Dalit women, non-Hindu women are disproportionately subject to sexual assault and other forms of violence.

30. “Beti Bachao: Government’s Efforts to Eradicate Female Infanticide and Sex-Selective Abortion are inadequate,” Economic and Political Weekly (Engage), November 22, 2019, https://www.epw.in/engage/article/beti-bachao-eradicate-female-infanticide-violence-against-women-girls-abortion

31. Tithi Bhattacharya, “India’s Daughter: Neoliberalism’s Dreams and the Nightmares of Violence,” International Socialist Review 97, https://isreview.org/issue/97/indias-daughter/

32. Damien Gayle, “‘A Decent Girl wouldn’t be out at Night,” Daily Mail, March 2, 2015, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2975989/A-decent-girl-wouldn-t-night-says-one-men-convicted-gang-rape-left-Indian-girl-dead.html

33. Banaji describes how the fascist consciousness that pervades these “vigilante publics” is “in turn, a necessary base for state fascism.” The vigilante publics and their “spectacular violence” “can at once be endorsed and disavowed by the state, whose purposes are furthered through participatory violence (335).

34. Here, one needs to mention a grotesque case of life imitating Simmba’s fictional narrative in the widely publicized 2019 Hyderabad police’s extra-judicial killing of the men who gang raped a young veterinarian, allegedly when they visited the crime scene to recreate it. While this episode in the nation’s recent history of macabre rape-murder crimes and the extra-judicial killings as shocking, what was even more disturbing was the celebratory wave of public support for the cops, much like the description in Simmba that publicly legitimizes state vigilantism as justice. See, “Hyderabad case: Police kill suspects in rape and murder of Indian vet” (BBC, December 6, 2019). https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-50682262

35. Stuart Hall, cited in Coates, “The Language of Authoritarian Populism.”

36. In her review of the film, Nandita Singh notes, that the “premise, plot and even the dialogue of Simmba sounds a lot like a 2 hour 45-minute-long justification of Yogi Adityanath’s ‘Encounter Pradesh.’ If the system doesn’t work, “Thok do (shoot them).” Nandita Singh, “Ranveer Singh’s Simmba is everything that is wrong with this country,” The Print, 28 December 2018, https://theprint.in/opinion/ranveer-singhs-simmba-is-everything-that-is-wrong-with-this-country/170391/

37. Stuart Hall, cited in Wynn Coates, “The Language of Authoritarian Populism,” Los Angeles Review of Books, (November 1, 2021).

38. Samir Dayal, Dream Machine, 71.

39. Singham calls cops like himself and Simmba “ede policewale” who aren’t afraid to engage in encounters to rid the nation of sexual predators, criminals, and terrorists.

40. Ajay Gudavarthy, India After Modi: Populism and the Right (Bloomsbury, 2021).

41. In 2019, Sunita Singh Gaur, leader of the BJP’s Mahila Morcha is reported to that “There is only one solution for them (Muslims). Hindu brothers should make a group of 10 and gang rape their (Muslims) mothers and sisters openly on the streets and then hang them in the middle of the bazaar for others to see.” Gaur was subsequently expelled from her post. https://thewire.in/communalism/bjp-mahila-morcha-leader-says-hindus-should-gangrape-muslim-women-gets-expelled

42. Basu, “Encounters.”

43. Basu, “Encounters.”

44. Basu, “Encounters.”

45. Gudavarthy, India After Modi.

46. Gudavarthy, India After Modi.