copyright 2025, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media,
Jump Cut, No. 63, summer 2025

Interrogating masculinities in khaki: the new male cop in Indian web series

by Rituparna Sengupta

The cop protagonist has enjoyed a long career in Indian cinema, from righteous upholder of the law dispensing divine justice, to vigilante super-cop or encounter-specialist glamourising extrajudicial killings. There have also been tragic honest cop characters, with moral dilemmas about the scope and might of their uniform, who have dared to challenge the legal-juridical system they represent and in turn, been crushed by it. In recent times, the world of OTT streaming channels, with their proclivity for detective thrillers and police procedurals—often adapting templates from Western shows—has witnessed the emergence of yet another form of cop protagonist investigating a particular kind of crime.

Unlike their cinematic counterparts, these crime plots are generally not related to the mafia or terrorism. Instead, they are intimate in nature, with implications for the integrity of the family or community, rather than that of the nation-state. In the plot development, the police’s hasty assumption of culpability, reflective of majoritarian biases, is often revealed to be misleading, demanding a reorientation of the investigative self and a readjustment of the gaze of suspicion, which can then lead to the gradual, methodical revelation of true guilt. The cop protagonists at the centre of these narratives are flawed and often cynical, contending with the violence of their professional duties and personal lives. Struggling with unhealthy patterns of self-destruction or trying to resist social repression (or both), they come to realise that the investigation of the crimes assigned to them is intimately related with introspection and assertion of their own selves. As a result, the solution of these cases leads to some kind of personal revelation as well.

The gender and caste locations of these cop protagonists, instead of being irrelevant to their investigations, has a significant bearing on them. For instance, if the Dalit female cop is able to identify with the most marginalised and unrecognized victims to ensure them justice and claim their own space in the public sphere, then the dominant-caste male cop has a different challenge—to learn to see the vulnerability of the ‘other’ and wield his authority in their protection.[1] [open endnotes in new page] In particular, the male cop becomes a lens through which to interrogate the workings of patriarchy and masculine authoritarianism and entitlement, whether that of the legal system he represents, the social order he belongs to, or the family sphere.

Sub-inspector Ravi Shankar Tripathi in Kaalkoot, and Sub-inspector Balbir Singh Sekhon and Assistant Sub-inspector Amarpal Garundi in Kohrra are three such characters investigating crimes that lead to the scrutiny of intertwined hegemonies of gender and sexuality in the larger moral orders, such as that of the police force as an institution within which they function.[2] As these characters are drawn deep into the examination of collective guilt and social hypocrisies that generate the crimes they are investigating, they are also compelled to confront their own biases, dysfunctions, and complicities. In this essay, I will analyse these three characters, the crimes they investigate, the revelations they encounter, and the different arcs of their growth, to discern the ways in which the new male cop in Indian web shows challenges the violent and masculinist authority of self, society, and state and calls for newer understandings of innocence, guilt, and punishment.

Kaalkoot

In Kaalkoot, SI Ravi Shankar Tripathi is a rookie cop at the Sarsi police station in Uttar Pradesh who is disillusioned with the corruption he observes among his colleagues. Ravi, who lives with his recently-widowed mother, is struggling to reconcile his father’s high moral standards with the ethical compromises that his profession demand from him. He is on the verge of handing in his resignation when he is assigned the case of an acid attack survivor, Parul Chaturvedi. On the personal front, Ravi does not want to pursue any of the marriage alliances his mother suggests, stashing away the photos of prospective brides in a drawer and thus putting them out of mind. He also feels helplessly torn between his fondness for his married and now pregnant older sister, and repulsion for the man who had once molested her, made her the object of social humiliation, and then married her. His growth throughout the show will unfold along personal and professional fronts, as he overcomes his many hesitations and dilemmas, learns to wield his authority without compromising his integrity, and succeeds in establishing a relationship of trust and emotional intimacy with the women around him, which in turn helps him confront the ‘other’ in his own self.

Initially, the police, in trying to trace Parul’s attacker, invade her privacy and indulge in her character assassination—branding her as a young woman with multiple boyfriends, a drinking habit, and an enticing profile on an adult chatting website. With each such investigatory speculation, she is portrayed as harbouring a secret life behind the façade of an ‘innocent girl’ and ‘obedient daughter’, leading the viewer to assume that her own provocations to male lust led to her violent fate. Here, the police’s moral framework, replete with patriarchal prejudices and skewed priorities, work more towards hindering than aiding the investigation.

This moral orientation is foreshadowed at the very beginning of the narrative, when we see a police training session in progress. The gender sensitisation training workshop conducted by a woman, elicits indifference and even mirth from the male attendees, who do not seem to be particularly concerned by the rising incidents of crimes against women or the abysmally low rate of apprehensions in such cases. Even as Ravi tries to detach himself from the workings of the police, he remains somewhat suspended between the influence of his senior, SHO Jagdish Sahay, and his junior in rank, Constable Sattu Yadav. Both men are middle-aged and inhabit a patriarchal world on whose fringes Ravi finds himself poised. For instance, both are casual about domestic violence and freely exchange stories of hitting their own wives and feeling not remorse but self-pity at it; similarly, both feel contrary sympathies for Parul’s condition and her ‘questionable’ character. Both also take a keen interest in Ravi’s matrimonial prospects and freely give him unsolicited advice to assert his authority in the investigation of the ongoing case and the ‘investigation’ (i.e. scrutiny) that Ravi is himself undergoing at the hands of his prospective in-laws. Although Ravi flinches from their crudely expressed opinions and patriarchal stances (so different from his own father’s), he also partially cedes to their advice, as he tries to play the ‘tough cop’ to intimidate his suspects and impress his in-laws. The viewer feels the contrary pulls of his moral conscience and his cultural conditioning both as man and cop expected to perform his role in the social hierarchy.

Ravi’s first encounter with Parul is delayed and disturbing, as he waits for her to regain consciousness and then walks into her hospital room, only to recoil immediately and stagger out, visibly shaken at the sight of her. His initial inability to face her is significant, for this single moment brings together several kinds of discomfiting recognitions: his unpreparedness as a detached cop to face a survivor in intense pain, his revulsion as a man to the disfigurement of a beautiful young woman, and his unsettled realisation that it was Parul’s photograph that he had put away in his drawer earlier that morning. Woman and victim cease to be abstract concepts that he could evade, and instead his confrontation with the reality of their condition poses a challenge to his professional capability, human compassion, and masculine entitlement.

As Parul’s case unravels before Ravi’s keen and increasingly compassionate gaze, it is evident that Parul’s offenders are multiple—the resentful father who is more concerned about his dog than his daughters, the obsessive stalker who eventually dies by suicide, the jealous friend who takes Parul’s identity and thus leaks her ‘exposed’ photos and chats online with men, the possessive ex-boyfriend who plots to teach her a lesson, and the vigilante who carries out the acid attack on her. Thus, a chain of betrayals and collusions lead up to the central crime. To bring Parul’s culprit/s to justice, Ravi must look not only deeper into the ‘common sense’ of patriarchy, but also to identify and challenge patriarchy’s blinders within himself.

Upon doing so, he finds uncanny resonances between the motivations of the men he investigates and himself, and he sees telling contrasts between his own reality and Parul’s. These unsettling recognitions lead to his unravelling the mystery of the acid attack and learning the reasons for his own emotional vacillations and indecisions. For instance, he learns of the harassment that Parul faced when her intimate photos were shared online without her consent and is reminded of his own sister’s trauma. He listens to Parul’s father’s bitter diatribe against the heedless freedom of his daughters and contrasts it with his own grandmother’s indulgence of the waywardness of boys and men even at the expense of women’s privacy and safety. In one scene, as Parul’s ex-boyfriend appeals to Ravi’s masculinist ego and tries to justify his impulse for avenging himself against Parul for what he perceives as ‘fraud’ (her sending intimate photos to another man), Ravi recalls his own impulsive emotional blackmailing of his fiancée for sex to soothe his hurt ego (at the discovery of her concealed epilepsy). As Ravi learns to confront his male privilege and overcome his own distrust/dismissal of women in order to enter their emotional world, he begins to mature and comes closer to the solution of the mystery.

In the end, the attack on Parul is revealed to be no isolated incident but connected to a larger tradition of violation of women’s life and liberty in Sarsi. The self-appointed vigilante who attacked her with acid is shown to have a history of surveilling women and reporting their various ‘transgressions’ to their brothers and partners. This one crime is but one example of the workings of patriarchy via its many self-appointed guardians who have delegated to themselves the moral responsibility of punishing women’s desire and agency. In his determined and eventually successful pursuit of this culprit, Ravi also rescues a drowning baby abandoned by her father in the town’s lake. He has thus stumbled upon another insidious local practice endangering female life that the town has long been complicit in—mass female infanticide, a secret that has finally risen to the surface to haunt the people’s health and conscience through the lake’s poisoned waters. Thoroughly shaken with these discoveries and reflecting on his own truth, Ravi confesses to his fiancée that he identifies with the self-righteous entitlement of Parul’s aggressors and that he is not, after all, the ‘good man’ he thought he was. He agrees to marry her, but with humility and trust, instead of entitlement and resentment. In this way, the story keeps tracing larger systemic injustices through Ravi’s personal characterisation.

Ravi’s relationship with Parul, which began on a note of disconcerting alienation, matures into friendship by the end of the narrative. Ravi realises that his narrow escape had not been from marrying Parul (like his colleagues suggested), but from becoming the kind of man who could assault (someone like) her. Even as Ravi is established as a ‘saviour’ figure, he is also shown as someone who is saved. Parul, who had once been his father’s student, acts as a conduit between them, and the two bond over his poetry of resistance and revolt. Instead of feeling fear or pity towards Parul, Ravi takes inspiration from her refusal to be defined by the violence that was done to her and her defiance of the sense of shame that was sought to be instilled in her through the incident. Ravi puts aside his own shame, takes his mother aside and reads aloud to her the sexually explicit poem his father had written for her and sent him posthumously; he can now see women as independent sexual agents in their own rights, both through Parul’s own example and that of his father’s non-possessive gaze. In a patriarchal world where men are rewarded for keeping an eye on women to keep them from ‘straying’, Ravi has learnt to turn his scrutinising gaze not just away from the unjustly blamed female victim and towards her attackers and enablers, but also turned it inwards in honest self-confrontation and transformation. In becoming an ally, he has also learned to form meaningful relationships with women, which in turn has taught him to be honest with himself and others.

By the end, Ravi has learnt that delicate balance between asserting his authority without abusing it, and learning to express himself emotionally without falling into the trap of self-pity, resentment, and rage that he sees in men around him. He is no longer a naïve and self-righteous rookie cop but one who has grown aware of the complexities of human nature and the layered workings of power and violence. He has overcome the anxiety of living up to the high moral standards of his widely-respected dead father, whose poems and letters continue to speak to him from beyond the grave. Interestingly, this reference to the dead father indicates another significant ghost that haunts the script—the figure of Anant Welankar, another reluctant and idealistic cop hero from the cult Hindi film Ardh Satya. Anant is Ravi’s spiritual predecessor, torn between the contrary impulses of authoritarianism and emasculation that his uniform bestows upon him. But whereas Anant was shown as being unable to protect the common public and rendered servile to the interests of powerful criminals and capitalists who ultimately drive him to murderous rage, Ravi is able to resolve his dilemma. Here, the police protagonist strikes an almost miraculous balance between accepting the ambiguous demands of his profession and serving the cause of justice. This revised tale of a cop’s coming of age presents new possibilities for the cop’s uniform and the different kind of male cop who is shown as deserving to wear it.

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] 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 which 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.

Notes

References

Basu, A. (2010). Encounters in the City: Cops, Criminals, and Human Rights in Hindi Film, Journal of Human Rights, 9:2, 175-190. https://doi.org/10.1080/14754831003761688.

Benjamin, M., Bhushan, A., Tyagi, K.S., and Rana, S. (Executive Producers). (2023). Kaalkoot. [Web series]. Tipping Point Films; Leo Media Collective; Viacom18 Studios; Jio Studios.

Jha, R. (Director). (2023). Kohrra. [Web series]. Clean Slate Filmz, Netflix.

Koickakudy, M.K. (2023) Khaki on Screen: Understanding the Representation of Cops in Malayalam Cinema, Quarterly Review of Film and Video https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2023.2242065.

Nihalani, G. (Director). (1983). Ardh Satya [Film]. Neo Films Associates.

Sengupta, R. (2023). Dahaad and Kathal: The Disappearance and Reclamation of Invisible Women. Critical Collective, August Cinema Newsletter.

Sinha, S. (2013). Vernacular Masculinity and Politics of Space in Contemporary Bollywood Cinema, Studies in South Asian Film & Media, 5:2, 131-145. https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/safm.5.2.131_1

Ssharma,K. (Executive Producer). (2023). Kohrra. [Web series]. Clean Slate Filmz, Netflix.

Viswanathan, A., Bhatia, R. and Shah, A. (2019). Crime and Punishment in Indian Entertainment. Civic Studios. https://sway.cloud.microsoft/CUIjI1M69CLiVxCN?ref=Link.