Kohrra

Kohrra begins with the discovery of a murdered corpse that turns out to be Paul Dhillon, the son of an affluent NRI businessman who was visiting his ancestral home in Jagrana, Punjab, to get married. Also missing is his friend Liam Murphy, who had come to attend his wedding. Since both men are British nationals and Paul’s family has powerful political connections, the case quickly generates media scrutiny and public speculation, putting the police under considerable pressure to quickly bring the culprit/s to justice.[3][open endnotes in new window]The investigation is headed by the middle-aged Sub-inspector Balbir Singh Sekhon and the younger Assistant Sub-inspector Amarpal Garundi, who form a companionable team.

Unlike the naïve and idealistic Ravi in Kaalkoot, Balbir and Amarpal are hardened cops. Foul-mouthed and physically violent, they are unapologetic about the rough-edged manner in whic they perform their duties. Their world routinely involves casual violence against obvious suspects for extracting confessions. Drug addicts, truck drivers, liquor sellers, kabaddi players, pop singers: no one is spared their aggression, except the wealthy, who are outside their reach. Indeed, the frequent demonstration of custodial torture here reminds one of many other representations of police brutality by the ‘tough cop’ and ‘encounter specialist’ in Indian cinema. Such characters profess similar disregard for ‘human rights’ objections and the police station becomes the site of subordinating the already marginalised (Basu 184; Koickakudy 6). If Ravi struggled to adjust to the misuse of power he observed among his colleagues in Kaalkoot, then Amarpal and Balbir seem professionally well-adjusted to the world of police intimidation and abusive authority.

However, what unites all three characters in both shows, is the struggles they face in their personal lives, and how the investigations they embark upon challenge their understanding of masculinities and transform their self-perception. Even as they conduct their professional duties with thoroughness, both Amarpal and Balbir are stuck in dysfunctional family dynamics. The former is an unmarried man living with his brother and in a sexual relationship with his sister-in-law that he wishes to end, to get married. The latter is a widower with a hostile relationship with his daughter, Nimrat, who is estranged from her husband and has come to live at her father’s with her son. In effect, the assertion of authority that both men demonstrate at their workplace could be seen as compensating for their lack of control in their intimate lives. But equally, as Nimrat points out to Balbir, at home they also vent their workplace frustrations, born of submitting to hierarchy in the force without ascending within it. Thus, the two men remain trapped in a cycle of aggression and powerlessness, until in the course of investigating Paul’s death, they learn to recognise and break away from some of these stifling conditions.

The deceased victim, Paul Dhillon, fits in the social world of small-town Punjab only tangentially. He is an ‘outsider’ not only as a clearly westernised NRI, but also as a man who disrupts the hegemonic codes of masculinity in the world of violent and possessive masculinity he inhabits. We learn about his interstitial positioning through a series of flashbacks. Back in London, a teenage Paul clips his kesh (uncut hair worn by Sikhs), sending his father into a rage, who then thrashes him while shaming his masculinity. As an aspirational NRI casually flaunting his financial and cultural capital in his visits to his hometown, he becomes an object of envy for his cousin and wonder for his uncle. Then, when he conceals his sexuality from his family and agrees for an arranged marriage with a local girl and proceeds to have sexual relations with her, he invokes the jealousy of her lover and his own. In addition, on turning down a drug peddler, he invites the latter’s greed and fury. Just as the investigation in Kaalkoot reveals Parul’s secret life, so does the investigation in Kohrra reveal Paul’s, and like Parul, Paul’s several concealments also invite multiple betrayals—his father who never recognises his sexuality, his cousin who hires a hit-and-run contract against him, his lover who attacks him and leaves him wounded, and the peddler who finds him, steals his valuables, and clubs him to death. However, unlike Kaalkoot that invites the investigator and thus the viewer to identify with Parul, Kohrra does not provide us with meaningful opportunities to enter into Paul’s own subjectivity—he remains something of a cipher, even in death, haunting the narrative with his elusive masculinity.

Perhaps this is also because, for the most part, he is especially obscure to the cops investigating his death. If what separated Parul and Ravi was their gender, then what separates Paul and Amarpal/Balbir are class and sexuality. Paul comes from a world that is, quite literally, ‘foreign’ to Balbir and Amarpal, who feel a mixture of envy and contempt for it. This is apparent in the tactless disregard with which Amarpal speaks of Paul’s corpse, and even more so in Balbir, who struggles to communicate in English with Liam’s distraught mother and resents the wealthy influence of the Dhillons, through which they exert pressure on the police, in pursuit of justice for their son. Instead of feeling sympathy or deference for the upper class, it is clear that Balbir feels a sense of simmering impotence before them—a feeling that is exacerbated by his daughter’s wealthy lover.[4] Yet, as their investigations proceed, the two cops discover points of identification with the characters involved in the case and the situations in which they find themselves. For instance, like Steve Dhillon, Balbir too is faced by a rebellious daughter and tries to impose his will on her, with disastrous consequences. Amarpal’s situation (who willingly opts for an arranged marriage) may seem the inverse of Paul’s (who agrees to marry a bride of his father’s choosing, out of compulsion). But for both of them, the struggle is between the defiance of familial will and the repression of their own desire. Amarpal’s struggle to break free from the emotional/sexual manipulation of his brother and his sister-in-law who believe that his marriage would break up their family unit, is not too unlike Paul’s repression of his queer sexuality in submission to the norms of heteropatriarchy.

The personal challenges before the two cops are different. While Amarpal wants to break away from his family’s grasping influence, Balbir is besieged by both possessiveness and guilt towards the women in his life—his wife with whom he shared a turbulent relationship and who died by suicide, the widow of the man he killed in an ‘encounter’ and whose desire and trust he has earned by deception, and his disobedient daughter (much like Parul), whose life he desperately wants to control through the methods of his profession: surveillance and intimidation. Both cops will have to find their way out of these self-destructive patterns and endure bitter and painful confrontations with their loved ones. Thus, Balbir will have to listen to Nimrat’s accusation that he never supported her or let her make her own decisions, thus driving her to attempt suicide in despair (like her mother). And Amarpal will have to defy his family and announce his resolve to get married and set up his own home. In a moment of drunken introspection, Amarpal declares that people spend all their lives failing to understand their families—indeed, it is the inscrutability not of strangers, but of loved ones, that lies at the centre of the multiple tragedies unfolding in Kohrra.

A curious motif that keeps resurfacing in Kohrra is that of land. Property disputes form the cause of discord between the Dhillon brothers, to the extent of causing estrangement between them and violence in the younger generation. It is the fear of property division that makes Amarpal’s brother and sister-in-law try their best to prevent his marriage, even if it means both brothers have to share their bed with the same woman. The location of the discovery of the two corpses is just as significant. Paul’s body is found abandoned in a field, while Liam’s is discovered much later, wrapped up and dumped in a well. The allure of land (long associated with agrarian Punjab) is revealed to be both irresistible and dangerous, and quite literally, all- consuming. In a desperate bid to prevent him from bringing home a bride, Amarpal’s sister-in-law tries to kill herself, fearing that his wife would soon want her share of everything: home, land, and man. This chain of signification is revealing. In fact, land and progeny seem to mirror each other, invoking comparable emotions of control, possession, and submission. The problems that each family faces centres on tensions around the authority that father figures (or elder brother figures) exert, that need to be recognised and confronted. Such confrontations sometimes end in the younger person’s submission, such as Steve Dhillon’s brother ceding to him the right of their deceased sister’s share of property and Amarpal giving up his own share of the farmland in order to keep peace and break away from his brother’s influence. But in another instance, it also culminates in the father’s submission to the child’s will, such as when Balbir unites his daughter with her lover.

Paul’s tragedy is ultimately caused by the intersection of multiple masculine dysfunctions, all of which emerge from the impulses of violent and possessive masculinity that cause his death. His disruptive presence has provoked jealousy, insecurity, greed, and fury both within and outside the family. Paternal/fraternal bonds in Kohrra are especially depicted as being driven by emotional violence that is controlling and repressive, and from which the characters variously struggle to free themselves. For the two cops to work their way through the resolution of Paul’s mystery, they have to be able to do that which Paul and those in Paul’s life have desperately failed to do: let go of their loved ones. At one point in the show, Balbir diagnoses Punjab’s ‘tragedy’ as its inability to confront truth, accusing the police of only wanting to close a case, instead of solving it, so that all crime can be attributed to the ‘poor junkie’, leaving ‘respectable’ people unbothered. While it may be unjustifiable to claim that the solving of this case would transform the professional demeanour of the two cops in future, we do witness a moment of remorse when Amarpal apologises to a detainee he had beaten and ridiculed under suspicion for Paul’s murder. Their investigations lead the two cops to intimate discoveries about themselves and their social order, especially the tragic repercussions of men’s violence, inflicted upon themselves and one another. There is no ‘justice’ to be ensured in this case, only the revelation and acceptance of truth. By embracing truth and liberation, they not only solve the case in defiance of convenient solutions, but also save their own selves (metaphorically) from the last moment of violence that the show leaves us with—Liam walking to his own death, in a daze of guilt and grief.

Conclusion

Given the rise in contemporary public discourse around systemic violence and police brutality, the emergence of these cop protagonists and their implications for the larger society they represent, gives us much to mull over. Does the psychological depth with which these protagonists are explored in these shows nudge the viewer to question the presumed distinctions between criminal and cop, crime and punishment? Or does the portrayal of their capacity for self-introspection indicate the presence of a similar capacity for self-correction within the police as an institution? Does the Khaki uniform inspire fear, sympathy, or ultimately, renewed trust?

The victims/survivors in both stories, Paul and Parul, are attacked because of the challenge they offer to their social orders. They are ‘punished’ for their defiance of hegemonic codes of gender and sexuality and their surreptitious desires that force them into secret lives. In both cases, guilt is ascribed not to a single agent, but to a decrepit moral order and its collective culpability. Their deaths are symptoms of larger social injustices and discriminations that continue to plague the small towns where these stories are set, such as the surveillance and intimidation of women and the rejection of queer sexuality. The cops who try to discover the truth of these crimes must first learn to challenge the prejudiced logic of the penal system which they represent, which prioritises hasty punishment over true location of guilt. As they look closer into the cases they are investigating and contend with the violent impulses of fathers, brothers, and lovers towards women and one other, they are compelled to extend their investigations to their own selves, to examine their own motivations, actions, and patterns of behaviour. As they exceed the script of their uniforms and learn to identify with the ‘otherness’ they encounter, they also learn to identify their own embeddedness in a patriarchal social order with its many imbrications of masculinist authority and entitlement.

Ravi, Amarpal, and Balbir are all examples of the new flawed cops of Indian web shows. Although the cop protagonists in Kaalkoot and Kohrra seem to inhabit contrasting moral frameworks, with Ravi struggling to reconcile his idealistic image of the police with his experience of it, and Amarpal and Balbir settled into the cynical rhythm of their police duties, all three experience personal/professional growth in the course of the stories that leaves their lives transformed. They are not unimpeachable police officers functioning within rigid moral binaries, but officers who demonstrate the capacity for emotional and moral maturity in the course of the investigations they conduct. As they cross-examine their suspects, they end up recognising some of their own motivations in the latter, making any self-righteous distance untenable. In fact, it may even be argued that it is because they are able to recognise themselves in their suspects that they are able to solve these crimes. Conversely, discovering the truths of their cases also helps them confront their own unpalatable truths. As their reserves of empathy and compassion for the vulnerable are fortified, so is their self-awareness and their awareness of their surroundings.[5] The transformations they undergo are also apparent in the very names of these stories—Kaalkoot, meaning the poison that emerged in the churning of the ocean of milk by the devas and asuras [gods and antigods] in Hindu mythology, and Kohrra, signifying the fog that obscures visibility and shrouds reality. By churning the bog of a patriarchal social order, they have pierced the fog of invisibility that obscures masculinist violence, leaving them with a clearer gaze into the hypocrisies and complicities that lie at the root of the crimes they are investigating.