One of the many grim-faced characters in Anurag Kashyap’s Ugly, which opens on December 26, is Ronit Roy’s senior police officer Shoumik. Cynical to a fault, cold towards his wife and brutal towards suspects, Shoumik is an extreme version of the nasty cop that has become a staple of crime dramas and action flicks since the eighties.
The Hindi movie cop has kept up with the headlines, acquiring more stains on his khaki as underhand dealings of the real-life custodians of law come to light. A good cop is either a joke or, more likely, a vigilante who flouts the law while claiming to uphold it. He has an extra-constitutional attitude and extraordinary powers to single-handedly solve crimes, punish the wicked and protect family, society and the nation. The movie cop is also a wisecracker, a superb singer, a consummate dancer, a heart melter, a potentially good husband, a role model and the epitome of cool.
When the good cop pretends to be a bad cop, audiences have the pleasure of watching the same actor in hero and villain garb. The catharsis-aiding rowdy cop sub-genre, imported from Telugu and Tamil cinema, is simple and easy to replicate. Upright cop goes undercover to annihilate a gangster, since the possibility of jailing the thug for his actions has been exhausted. The cop behaves just like a criminal until the climax and slips back into a crisply ironed uniform for a low-motion walk towards the camera before the end credits.
Bollywood as the villain
In November 2013, Satyapal Singh, the Commissioner of the Mumbai Police at the time, summoned the top brass of the Mumbai film industry to complain about how his colleagues were depicted in the movies. Singh was irked by scenes showing police officer having their palms greased, stringing up suspects in custody, and generally bumbling about.
However, Singh and the other senior police officers at the event did not object to the vigilante tactics routinely employed by their screen counterparts. None of them asked for a moratorium on depicting unusually well-groomed and fit men in police uniforms demolishing criminal empires with their bare hands and bravado. They raised no protests against such macho vigilante fantasies as Dabangg and Rowdy Rathore.
What the cops should have actually done that day was give Bollywood a collective medal for boosting their image as fearless and incorruptible pillars of society.
The good old innocent days
Until the sixties, however, cops were generally upright if benign creatures, sitting behind a desk and issuing orders to their crack man on the ground to arrest (not kill) undesirable elements. Many of them looked like Jagdish Raj, who played the part in over 140 films. Others resembled Iftekhar, the distinguished-looking actor who was a khaki staple between the sixties and the eighties.
Some movie cops were obviously inefficient, landing up on the crime scene only after the hero had sanitised it. Some of them were famously anxious and angry, sorely in need of therapy and a long vacation.
Cops sometimes made bad fathers and siblings, unable to prevent their kinsmen from sliding into criminality. Amitabh Bachchan’s anti-hero in Yash Chopra’s Deewar is rightly celebrated for his ability to crystallise the disillusionment with family, state and society that gripped the nation in the seventies. But spare a thought for his principled cop brother, played by Shashi Kapoor, who prefers to split his family down the middle rather than let his brother get away.
Nastier and nastier
Any innocence that lingered in the dying light of Nehruvian India evaporated by the eighties. The movie cop had become closer to the characters whose bribe-takings and custodial tortures were being reported in the press. Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya (1983) is a seminal cop drama that makes bold links between masculinity, custodial torture and corruption. Om Puri's Anant Velankar beats a suspect senseless because that is what cops do. He goes after Sadashiv Amrapurkar’s hoodlum because that is what cops do. He tries to ace the system when he is shunted for his actions because that is what cops do. He is no hero, nor is he an anti-hero – the half-truth suggested in the film’s title.
Movies such as John Matthew Matthan's Sarfarosh and Kabeer Kaushik's Sehar are about cop heroes in the traditional sense: they are decent and honest men looking to do their jobs well despite political interference and institutional corruption. But one filmmaker refused to buy the neatness of the good versus evil binary. In the late eighties, Ram Gopal Varma noticed that public cynicism about the state’s institutions had bubbled over, and that there were protagonists and antagonists rather than heroes and villains. The mirror wasn’t cracked, it was actually distorted.
The movies in the 1990s and 2000s that Varma directed and produced, especially Ab Tak Chhappan, perfectly illustrate the bizarre reality of the Mumbai police force in those decades. Unable (or unwilling) to defeat gangsters in real life, they set up so-called encounter squads to gun down fugitives, often under suspicious circumstances. In the movies, this resulted in a run of films about “The System”, a favourite phrase with Varma. This System produced dubiously honourable police officers who were removed from the sureties of previous decades. The gangsters were now in government. The cop was on a mafioso’s payroll. What was the man in the middle supposed to do?
Perhaps it is this system-gaming cop that has attracted the ire of no less than Prime Minister Narendra Modi. At a national conference of Director Generals of Police and Inspector Generals of Police in Guwahati last month, Modi echoed Satyapal Singh in saying that “films show police in such poor light that the people of the country have developed a very negative image of the police". Modi suggested that the government hire a publicity relations company to “hold a meeting with producers to request projecting the positive rather than the negative image of the police".
Like Singh, Modi’s understanding of popular cinema’s attitudinal shift towards law enforcers is outdated. Media reports of police misdemeanours, from the trivial to the outrageous, are only increasing as citizens get more vigilant and less patient. The movies, on the other hand, have found in the police officer the budget answer to Hollywood’s comic book-inspired men in capes and tights. We have few local superhero films because we have the Man in Khaki.
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The Hindi movie cop has kept up with the headlines, acquiring more stains on his khaki as underhand dealings of the real-life custodians of law come to light. A good cop is either a joke or, more likely, a vigilante who flouts the law while claiming to uphold it. He has an extra-constitutional attitude and extraordinary powers to single-handedly solve crimes, punish the wicked and protect family, society and the nation. The movie cop is also a wisecracker, a superb singer, a consummate dancer, a heart melter, a potentially good husband, a role model and the epitome of cool.
When the good cop pretends to be a bad cop, audiences have the pleasure of watching the same actor in hero and villain garb. The catharsis-aiding rowdy cop sub-genre, imported from Telugu and Tamil cinema, is simple and easy to replicate. Upright cop goes undercover to annihilate a gangster, since the possibility of jailing the thug for his actions has been exhausted. The cop behaves just like a criminal until the climax and slips back into a crisply ironed uniform for a low-motion walk towards the camera before the end credits.
Bollywood as the villain
In November 2013, Satyapal Singh, the Commissioner of the Mumbai Police at the time, summoned the top brass of the Mumbai film industry to complain about how his colleagues were depicted in the movies. Singh was irked by scenes showing police officer having their palms greased, stringing up suspects in custody, and generally bumbling about.
However, Singh and the other senior police officers at the event did not object to the vigilante tactics routinely employed by their screen counterparts. None of them asked for a moratorium on depicting unusually well-groomed and fit men in police uniforms demolishing criminal empires with their bare hands and bravado. They raised no protests against such macho vigilante fantasies as Dabangg and Rowdy Rathore.
What the cops should have actually done that day was give Bollywood a collective medal for boosting their image as fearless and incorruptible pillars of society.
The good old innocent days
Until the sixties, however, cops were generally upright if benign creatures, sitting behind a desk and issuing orders to their crack man on the ground to arrest (not kill) undesirable elements. Many of them looked like Jagdish Raj, who played the part in over 140 films. Others resembled Iftekhar, the distinguished-looking actor who was a khaki staple between the sixties and the eighties.
Some movie cops were obviously inefficient, landing up on the crime scene only after the hero had sanitised it. Some of them were famously anxious and angry, sorely in need of therapy and a long vacation.
Cops sometimes made bad fathers and siblings, unable to prevent their kinsmen from sliding into criminality. Amitabh Bachchan’s anti-hero in Yash Chopra’s Deewar is rightly celebrated for his ability to crystallise the disillusionment with family, state and society that gripped the nation in the seventies. But spare a thought for his principled cop brother, played by Shashi Kapoor, who prefers to split his family down the middle rather than let his brother get away.
Nastier and nastier
Any innocence that lingered in the dying light of Nehruvian India evaporated by the eighties. The movie cop had become closer to the characters whose bribe-takings and custodial tortures were being reported in the press. Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya (1983) is a seminal cop drama that makes bold links between masculinity, custodial torture and corruption. Om Puri's Anant Velankar beats a suspect senseless because that is what cops do. He goes after Sadashiv Amrapurkar’s hoodlum because that is what cops do. He tries to ace the system when he is shunted for his actions because that is what cops do. He is no hero, nor is he an anti-hero – the half-truth suggested in the film’s title.
Movies such as John Matthew Matthan's Sarfarosh and Kabeer Kaushik's Sehar are about cop heroes in the traditional sense: they are decent and honest men looking to do their jobs well despite political interference and institutional corruption. But one filmmaker refused to buy the neatness of the good versus evil binary. In the late eighties, Ram Gopal Varma noticed that public cynicism about the state’s institutions had bubbled over, and that there were protagonists and antagonists rather than heroes and villains. The mirror wasn’t cracked, it was actually distorted.
The movies in the 1990s and 2000s that Varma directed and produced, especially Ab Tak Chhappan, perfectly illustrate the bizarre reality of the Mumbai police force in those decades. Unable (or unwilling) to defeat gangsters in real life, they set up so-called encounter squads to gun down fugitives, often under suspicious circumstances. In the movies, this resulted in a run of films about “The System”, a favourite phrase with Varma. This System produced dubiously honourable police officers who were removed from the sureties of previous decades. The gangsters were now in government. The cop was on a mafioso’s payroll. What was the man in the middle supposed to do?
Perhaps it is this system-gaming cop that has attracted the ire of no less than Prime Minister Narendra Modi. At a national conference of Director Generals of Police and Inspector Generals of Police in Guwahati last month, Modi echoed Satyapal Singh in saying that “films show police in such poor light that the people of the country have developed a very negative image of the police". Modi suggested that the government hire a publicity relations company to “hold a meeting with producers to request projecting the positive rather than the negative image of the police".
Like Singh, Modi’s understanding of popular cinema’s attitudinal shift towards law enforcers is outdated. Media reports of police misdemeanours, from the trivial to the outrageous, are only increasing as citizens get more vigilant and less patient. The movies, on the other hand, have found in the police officer the budget answer to Hollywood’s comic book-inspired men in capes and tights. We have few local superhero films because we have the Man in Khaki.
