One of the funniest and scariest scenes in Anurag Kashyap's 2004 film Black Friday - about the investigation that followed the 1993 terror attacks in Bombay - had a bunch of policemen pursuing a suspect named Imtiaz through a massive slum. Towards the end, both the chasers and their quarry are exhausted, lurching rather than running. "Imtiaz, ruk ja yaar," a clearly unfit cop calls out - the effect is that of two quarrelling lovers trying half-heartedly to make up, and we gather that these men know each other reasonably well. They are from similar lower-class backgrounds and have a lot in common, but their lives must have diverged at some unknowable point, for whatever combination of reasons. They are now natural antagonists, but they are also part of a morally hazy world where mutual cooperation is part of the game.
Similar things are on view in Pradeep Sarkar's new film Mardaani about a woman cop battling the human-trafficking mafia. The opening sequence is a prelude that has nothing to do with the main narrative - it simply shows Inspector Shivani (Rani Mukherjee) and her team on a stakeout. They catch a hood named Rahman, and immediately one notes the tangled relationship between cops and small-time criminals, a relationship that involves give and take and often attains unexpected levels of camaraderie. The banter can sound almost affectionate - "Nahin aaya tere encounter ka order," Shivani sweetly tells the scared Rahman before arresting him - and there are pithy one-liners: "Aajkal instant ka zamaana hai," she tells a potential informer, indicating that he might as well come clean quickly so they can get on with their work.
Later, as the narrative becomes increasingly intense, some of the smart-alecky chatter between Shivani and her main nemesis, Karan, belies the seriousness of what is going on. ("Kya adaa kya jalwe tere paaro," she says to him wryly when he makes a swaggering proclamation; meanwhile, time is running out for a group of young girls who have been kidnapped and are being sold into sex slavery.) But the bigger, darker picture is always in sight. We can smile at those early scenes between wisecracking cops and crooks - but we also realise that this chumminess and connectedness is a minor-scale manifestation of something much bigger and more unsettling, something all of us are familiar with, something Karan smiles and spells out even as he is being beaten up by Shivani in the climax: that in this country, if you have connections at the right level and in the right places, you can get away no matter what you did and no matter who knows you did it.
Such is the complex world that these people live and work in, and this film - tightly constructed, with a fine script by Gopi Puthran and very good performances by Mukherji and the young Tahir Bhasin - makes it believable. But it operates on another level too, refusing to provide sops to the complacent upper-class viewer. Shivani has achieved success in her profession in the big city and earned the right to be called "Ma'am", but we also learn that she grew up in a village, presumably understood how to fend for herself at an early age, and that she occupies a hazy space between two Indias and two states of mind. There was a forest nearby, she says, and she has brought her knowledge of wild animals to the urban jungle she now lives and works in: you need to be a rat to ferret out a rat, a tiger to stalk a tiger... and a snake to catch a snake.
These are useful things to know, for the bad things happening in this story are not localised in the "other" India, the place of backwardness, illiteracy and poverty. Here, the snake in the water may be a Hindu College dropout emerging from the depths of a swimming pool during a glamorous party where rich white men are being serviced by scared girls who have been dressed up in slutty outfits and given names like Angelina. The sinister Karan switches casually between Hindi and English, many of the girls who are sold into sex slavery are from English-medium schools, and an elderly woman involved in the trade appears to be a high-society type. The evil spans every imaginable hierarchy - the urban, cosmopolitan viewer is allowed no comforting illusion that the criminals here are the mythical "them", the rustic beasts in the backwaters, well out of sight.
Similar things are on view in Pradeep Sarkar's new film Mardaani about a woman cop battling the human-trafficking mafia. The opening sequence is a prelude that has nothing to do with the main narrative - it simply shows Inspector Shivani (Rani Mukherjee) and her team on a stakeout. They catch a hood named Rahman, and immediately one notes the tangled relationship between cops and small-time criminals, a relationship that involves give and take and often attains unexpected levels of camaraderie. The banter can sound almost affectionate - "Nahin aaya tere encounter ka order," Shivani sweetly tells the scared Rahman before arresting him - and there are pithy one-liners: "Aajkal instant ka zamaana hai," she tells a potential informer, indicating that he might as well come clean quickly so they can get on with their work.
Later, as the narrative becomes increasingly intense, some of the smart-alecky chatter between Shivani and her main nemesis, Karan, belies the seriousness of what is going on. ("Kya adaa kya jalwe tere paaro," she says to him wryly when he makes a swaggering proclamation; meanwhile, time is running out for a group of young girls who have been kidnapped and are being sold into sex slavery.) But the bigger, darker picture is always in sight. We can smile at those early scenes between wisecracking cops and crooks - but we also realise that this chumminess and connectedness is a minor-scale manifestation of something much bigger and more unsettling, something all of us are familiar with, something Karan smiles and spells out even as he is being beaten up by Shivani in the climax: that in this country, if you have connections at the right level and in the right places, you can get away no matter what you did and no matter who knows you did it.
Such is the complex world that these people live and work in, and this film - tightly constructed, with a fine script by Gopi Puthran and very good performances by Mukherji and the young Tahir Bhasin - makes it believable. But it operates on another level too, refusing to provide sops to the complacent upper-class viewer. Shivani has achieved success in her profession in the big city and earned the right to be called "Ma'am", but we also learn that she grew up in a village, presumably understood how to fend for herself at an early age, and that she occupies a hazy space between two Indias and two states of mind. There was a forest nearby, she says, and she has brought her knowledge of wild animals to the urban jungle she now lives and works in: you need to be a rat to ferret out a rat, a tiger to stalk a tiger... and a snake to catch a snake.
These are useful things to know, for the bad things happening in this story are not localised in the "other" India, the place of backwardness, illiteracy and poverty. Here, the snake in the water may be a Hindu College dropout emerging from the depths of a swimming pool during a glamorous party where rich white men are being serviced by scared girls who have been dressed up in slutty outfits and given names like Angelina. The sinister Karan switches casually between Hindi and English, many of the girls who are sold into sex slavery are from English-medium schools, and an elderly woman involved in the trade appears to be a high-society type. The evil spans every imaginable hierarchy - the urban, cosmopolitan viewer is allowed no comforting illusion that the criminals here are the mythical "them", the rustic beasts in the backwaters, well out of sight.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer