A supercop’s mythical jurisdiction

Here we want to address the space that supercops in Hindi masala films professionally inhabit and how that helps to shape the narrative in their favor. Interestingly, in both Dabangg and Singham the protagonist police officers are posted in their hometown and village respectively. In fact, Indian government protocols generally refrain from posting an officer in their home district, much less in their own village. This convenient fictionalization reminds us of the colonial history of policing as the film scripts produce a mythical jurisdiction. As Nikita Sonavane has noted, 

“The British had previously experimented with a police system … This further culminated in the adoption of a system that involved policing through village headmen or ‘respectable members of the community’, according to the Indian Police Commission Report of 1902 prepared by the Fraser Commission constituted by the colonial government to recommend police reforms (the ‘Fraser Commission Report’). These ‘respectable members’ were invariably landed individuals of dominant castes.” ( Sonavane 56)

Public as the Weapon of Mobilisation: Singham (2011). The Public gathers around the police station to defend the masala cop figure- providing Public support against the villain.

Consider Singham in this context. He is a native of the fictional town of Shivgarh. He is  a practicing Hindu as is regally depicted in the the title song itself. His father commissions Puja rituals at home wherethe young man meets his fiancé-to-be Kavya. His position in the village is that of a son of a respectable village headman, and villagers loyal to the family militantly support him in his first confrontation with the villain. In fact he claims it to be his village in a fiery monologue. In the course of the film, he uses the villagers’ support to threaten the arrogant criminal and to break the man’s ego. Not only does he solve crimes but also people call him for help in all kinds of matters. 

He represents his village more than he represents the law. In an example of this kind of support, an old man confronts the teasing criminals prior to the fight and warns them of retaliation from the village people. But here the old man reaches out to Singham’s father as a village headman, rather than reaching out to Singham as a police officer. Singham’s response to the situation is then as a custodian or muscle of the village rather than as a law-keeper. As Sonavane has argued, the colonial model of policing was aimed at keeping ‘law and order’ where order is prioritized over law. Since the colonial administration used and strengthened the existing caste order to extract labor and resources and because the village headman police happened to be dominant-caste landlords, the order with colonial support is essentially caste order. To this purpose, the police are granted discretionary power to determine what and who are a threat to the order. Through this discretion, which is at the very center of colonial police work, the oppressor-caste cops worked in the interest of their caste brethren (ibid). In this film, Singham’s police work provides a glorious display of using ‘discretion’ to keep order rather than law. 

In the mise-en-scene, the Shivgarh police station is too well lit and too opaque for a police station. All windows are open, so that the village is always in the background, visually establishing the space of the police station and the village as one. Strangely, there are no crimes in the jurisdiction, only happy and prosperous villagers. As a mythical jurisdiction in perfect order and harmony, it is comparable to Ramayan’s Ayodhya before the Vanvas (exile), which gets disrupted through Singham's subsequent transfer. 

Other kinds of spaces, especially in urban areas, are not so idyllic. In Policegiri, there is no such perfect jurisdiction because the protagonist is based on Hanuman and the space is a city full of crime (read evil) i.e. Lanka. Even the police station is involved in organized crime and the protagonist has to ‘purify' it. Going to a new police station after transfer or exile tends to mean entering a moral buffer zone for the Dharma-abiding, righteous policemen, a fortress of sorts that may not recognize departmental hierarchy. In Dabangg (2010), the protagonist supercop Chulbul Pandey is shown to be immoral and fits the angry young man trope. Interestingly, this film does not feature any sequence in a police station except for one that plays as a comic relief. In this scene, Chulbul detains the heroine Rajjo’s drunk father and falsely accuses him of petty offences, forcing her to show up at the station. This scene again reminds us of everyday harassment and brutality exerted in vulnerable communities by cops through their discretionary power as explained by Sonavane. ‘Discretion’ is not arbitrary in the masala cop films; it works on mythical premises precisely to maintain (caste) order(ibid).

Angry young dabangg as a
precursor to the mythical supercop

Dabangg is different from the rest of the masala cop genre films in some crucial aspects, so much so that somewhere it might not fit very well into the genre template. In particular, the Brahmanical myths here are incorporated in the narrative in a much more subtle way than in the other films of this genre. The reason can be attributed to the very fact that this was one of the earliest films of the sub-genre and thereby it marks a sort of milestone in the development of the sub-genre still formulating into its characteristic structure. The film inclines towards the angry young man tropes more than its later counterparts.

For instance, Chulbul Pandey, unlike Singham and Rudra, has a childhood trauma associated with the loss of his father, a role that his step-father could not or did not play very well. This childhood trauma gives him an angry young man edge within the arena of his family melodrama. In that regard, he is mostly shown to be irritated and bitter in his home, he is not a temple-going person, and he has little to no respect for rituals and traditions as seen in the wedding sequence. Still, because of a lack of any revenge narrative unlike in usual angry young man films, Pandey’s anger is contained in the household until he finds out that the cause of his mother’s death was the villain, and that revelation comes only at the climax.

The angry young man's anger is thus cathartically purged in the climactic spectacle of a fistfight so that Pandey could finally be able to assimilate into the symbolic order of the patriarchal structure. Pandey’s extrajudicial violence is fueled by childhood trauma and a revenge narrative, rather than a direct authentication from the divine, as was the case in Policegiri and Singham. Although he has the typical super cop trajectory of turning righteous from mischievous, there is no obvious evocation of a Brahmanical myth in his favor. Owing to such differences, it is clear that the masala cop film genre was still developing in Dabangg and it had not completely taken on the task of reimagining the Brahmanical myths to build the myth of an oppressor caste super cop.

However, the caste dynamics and privilege are starkly visible in the film through multiple facets. First, the name of the film is Dabangg, a term used by vernacular newspapers to address, and to conceal caste identity of, oppressor caste criminals who committed caste-based crimes, atrocities and rapes against scheduled caste and tribe people. 

Hindi News Reports referring to dominant  caste rapists as ‘Dabangg’. Different incidents of molestation on women around parts of Northern India as reported in  local newspapers. This is in stark contrast with the usage of Dabangg in the 2010 film where it denotes ‘Fearless’.

Second, all of Pandey’s fellow policemen are Brahmans except Kasturilal Vishwakarma who happens to be an alibi and a potential relative of the villain. A Vishwakarma surname is generally associated with Other Backward Castes (O.B.C.s) such as carpenters and blacksmiths. Then there are two more O.B.C. male characters in the film, a socially nonfunctional alcoholic father of the potter (belonging to the Kumhar caste) heroine Rajjo and her disabled brother. Both are killed suddenly, conveniently, and inconsequentially so that the heroine could become Mrs. Pandey with no strings attached to her working-caste background. Apart from Rajjo, there are no muslim and scheduled caste characters in the film. Third, Pandey flaunts his caste along with his police job while putting his marriage proposal to Rajjo’s father Haria. He also flaunts his surname Pandey while introducing himself to Kasturilal as Robinhood Pandey. He could not be just any Robinhood, he is Robinhood Pandey. He could not be just any Chulbul, he is Chulbul Pandey.

	Erasure of the backward caste families in Dabangg (2010): The death of the father and the brother of Rajjo, the working caste representative through infliction of everyday harassment in the first 4 shots and brutality in the subsequent shots on vulnerable communities.

These caste connotations prove that the film is not only caste conscious, it is in fact a proud narrative of a Brahman policeman, from a perspective that makes a hero out of an unlawful cop. As the genre later progresses and evolves to more provincial settings and more importantly, South Indian film (specifically Tamil and Telugu mainstream film) aesthetics, the protagonists’ caste become less visible. Further, their provincial feudal mindset and entitlement to violence comes to the fore, which is morally legitimized by the evocation of Brahmanical myths and icons as discussed above with the example of Policegiri and Singham. 

The question of encounter and public mobilisation

Generally in cop films the question of encounter and extra judicial violence remains a crucial aspect. As noted by Anustup Basu, encounter is an intensely local practice that operates silently below the grand narratives of the nation, a neoliberal order and questions of human rights. The encounter is ‘an effectively executed theme of normalcy’ rather than a precise working of the law (Basu 178). As Basu further notes, the figure of the encounter specialist cannot be attributed a mythic dimension precisely because of the difficulty of distinguishing the larger-than-life image of the hero from a routine abuse of state power. The encounter specialist, as seen in films like Ab tak Chapaan ( 2004) and Kuruskhetra ( 2000) among others, becomes a raw manifestation of state power. He incorporates a form of sovereignty required in the name of terror, but it's a kind of sovereignity never overtly expressed as operational within the constitutional paradigm, which itself is in danger because of such extra-legal activities.

The public reception of encounter killing and other forms of vigilante justice is entangled with a sense of moral virtue attached to it. The police figure is projected as the much needed saviour from an all-powerful evil; he's one who is morally supported by the public to be allowed to commit to extralegal proceedings. As noted by Beatrice Jauregui in a 2016 study of the Indian nation-state and its vigilante practices, Indian public have a certain ambivalence regarding police vigilantism as their undersatanding is also constituted by a sense of religious interpretations which get transformed by mythological and historical experiences. Although also present in earlier films like Kuruskhetra (2000) or Ab Tak Chhappan (2004), where the issue of vigilantism or encounter killings are looked at from a self- reflexive lens, the supercop masala films almost unfold as a sort of wish- fulfilment. Even films like Shool (1999) or Khakee (2004) become a manifestation of such ambivalence because of the interspersing between public opinion and the symbolic order. The masala cop hero, in stark opposition to Basu's hypothesis, is a larger-than-life figure who seldom faces consequences while committing random acts of violence, primarily due to the power granted not by law but by his social identity. Further, the public is shown to be in awe of the police figure as an individua, and that awe throughout the course of the film gets transferred to the institution as a whole.

In this regard, the climax of Singham is crucial. The villain, Jaykant Shikre, who previously had the entire police force under his control except for Singham and his colleagues, is shown to be tormented by the same police force. They get persuaded by their family to go against Jaykant and ‘do the right thing’. In this elaborate sequence, the entire police force of Goa is shown to be present in Jayakant’s  house, who is going to take his vows as a minister in the next morning. They reach a consensus to kill him before the oath-taking ceremony. The police commissioner, along with lesser rank officers, presided over by the righteous Singham, are shown to be bouncing around ideas regarding how to finish Jaykant. The sequence continues with a chase sequence in the dusk, where the police vehicles are chasing Jaykant in slow motion and he is asking for help from the public. However, the public themselves are also in accordance with the police force and Jaykant ends up in the police station where he is shot to death by Singham.

Singham's execution of Jaykant indicates the completed formation of a police state, with the towns' public and in turn the film's spectators bearing witness to such extra-legal practices. This involvemnt of public witness is in concurrence with a 2018 report, as published in CNN, where half of Indians who polled found nothing wrong with extrajudicial violence towards criminals. There are numerous incidents where the public in social media and various news channels' reports express support for encounter killings or ‘fake’ encounter killings for crimes they deem vicious and unpardonable. Popular discontent towards the legal and judicial order of the country gets validated by the police actions.

How these public attitudes have been shaped is well-express in the Dalit intellectual B.R. Ambedkar’s writings. In his Philosophy of Hinduism, Ambedkar points out, through various examples, that religion regulates the life of a Hindu at every strata of one's life. That is, every significant act of life is governed by the tenets of the religion, regardless of an individual's belief (Ambedkar 22-23). This tie between religion and social order is largely attributed to the fact, as per Ambedkar, that religion in India is a social force which operates on the scheme of ‘divine governance’ as an ideal to be followed (ibid). This ideal might be non-existent and a construct but its effect is very real as regious tenets are followed in nearly every operating field (ibid). Even a logical individual succumbs to the tenets of a religious ideal as opposed to a secular one whenever the two are in conflict. Thereby the religious ideal always has a significant grip over people, regardless of whether or not there's an earthly gain (ibid). It might be a stretch to say that the masala cop films influence the public’s tendency to justify extra-legal behavior. But these fictions certainly create that climate through their evocation of Brahminical iconography. And this iconography normalizes extrajudicial killings through its communal/masculine assertion of power. In that way, the consensual "law" of the land is followed, governed by a religious ideal and not the law of the constitution.

Further, public response to as well as police action about crime also observably respond to the caste of the victim. If the victim comes from a higher caste than the accused, they may receive instant justice by court if not by encounter. But that is not usually the case when the accused is of oppressor caste and the victim belongs to Scheduled Castes and Tribes. For instance, one can take a look at the 2012 Delhi Nirbhaya (pseudonym) rape case, which changed juvenile criminal law to punish the criminal, and the 2019 Hyderabad Disha (pseudonym) rape case, which resulted in encounter killing of all four accused (Patil) ( Nichenametla). They stand in sharp contrast. In contrast, if we take a look at  the 2020 Manisha Valmiki rape case, the victim's body was forcefully burned by the police, and the court acquitted all of the accused except one (Dixit). In this case of a Scheduled Caste Victim (ibid), the media did not even assign a pseudonym but published the real identity of the victim. In another incident in 2017 in Salempur, Gamri Haryana, a Dalit woman who was gang raped, accused the local police of inaction after she tried to register her case multiple times. She said that the police refused to take her complaint and also asked the victim and her family to settle the matter outside of legal jurisdiction. In another instance, on October 2020, a 15 year-old girl belonging to the Dalit community committed suicide in Bundelkhand, Uttar Pradesh, days after she was raped; the police refuse to take any action about her mother’s complaint (Sahay). There are numerous such instances constantly occurring along with reports from human rights activists and scholars that attest to such caste-based discrimination and urge prompt action from the police. But these get little to no media coverage (Sharma, Hamilton, Kalita).  Thereby, we argue that the Hindu social organization based on caste affects police action and elicits selective public outrage. Systematically, the religious heierarchy works to advantage the oppressor-caste parties in contests of justice.  

Encounter killings, also, have come before the legislatures. For example, when a Brahmin criminal Vikas Dubey was shot dead by the U.P. Police in Kanpur in 2020, the Yogi government was accused of targeting Brahmins, to which the government replied with official encounter data. According to the government's own data, out of the 124 individuals killed, 47 were Muslims, while 58 belonged to backward castes, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Vaishya, and Thakur communities. 11 Brahmins and eight Yadavs were killed. Police records indicate that a total of 13,837 individuals were arrested during these encounters, resulting in injuries to 2,419 accused persons (Jafri). The opposition Samajwadi party then released a list of 17 thakur criminals that the U.P. police, allegedly, cannot encounter under this government because the chief minister Ajay Bisht, A.K.A Yogi Adityanath, is also a Thakur. By 2024, the official encounter tally has crossed 200. The government still denies any castewise targeting of criminals (Singh 2024). Such is the  naked reality of police vigilantism in India, which further proves how the ruling governement subjugates the police. By characterizing policemen as mythical heroes and by justifying and normalizing police violence, filmmakers then inadvertently sharpen a tool already at the disposal of an oppressive sovereign.