I was just thinking last week about how many police procedural films I’d seen recently. They range from the very over-the-top masala films where a policeman is seen to be above the law, larger than life and meting out a kind of extra-judicial justice, something writer Jinoy Jose P. called “muscular justice”, a kind of justice that “bypasses those supposedly tiresome democratic niceties like due process and constitutional rights.” Sometimes they are about well-meaning, honest policemen trying to carry out the best investigation they can in order to bring a culprit before the justice system. But what they all have in common is that the person doing the investigating is a man. A policeman. Sometimes female officers exist, but they’re often in the background, or, at best perhaps, assisting.
So what makes Sandhya Suri’s 2024 film Santosh stand out is that it places the attention squarely on a female police officer, the young widow Santosh Saini (Shahana Goswami). Santosh becomes a police officer after the death of her husband, a constable killed during a riot. Santosh is offered her husband’s job under an Indian social security scheme called Compassionate Appointment, under which a dependent family member may be appointed to the position held by a family member who dies while in service. Santosh jumps at the opportunity, not surprising since her in-laws want to wash their hands of her, and her family isn’t keen to take her back, either.
Early on, Santosh is thrown into the investigation of the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Dalit girl. We get our first hints at a system that is stacked against certain populations, in this case the lower caste Dalit community. Santosh first hears about the case when the father of the missing girl (later found dead) goes to a neighbourhood cobbler to get help. Santosh brings the father to the police station, not realizing that this system of letting the cobbler be the first line for these kinds of complaints is actively encouraged by her superiors at the station. Extra-judicial justice of a different kind, and much less effective when there’s no vigilante policeman involved.
So, Santosh is ostensibly a police procedural, and when Santosh’s male superior at the station is transferred after some bad publicity, senior officer Geeta Sharma (Sunita Rajwar) is brought in to take charge of the investigation, and Santosh becomes her assistant and mentee.
Like many police procedural films in India, there’s this element of the police being all powerful and above the laws they’re supposed to uphold, taking bribes, meting out cruelty (especially to marginalized characters like the Dalit and Muslim characters in the film). I’d call them incompetent, but it’s beyond that. These men (and they are, mostly, men) are more interested in their place in the power structure, and exerting that power over others, rather than taking any real interest in solving crimes.
At first, Santosh stands in for us, the audience, as an observer of all of this: of the incompetence, of the willing subversion of laws, of either ignoring the pleas of the Dalit and Muslim communities, or targeting them, even without any basis for doing so. But the system gradually pulls her in – first at the side of “Senior Madam”, taking on new responsibilities for investigating the rape and murder of the Dalit teenager, but also gradually becoming part of the system that ignores evidence or lines of investigation to pursue one convenient narrative, and eventually joining in on the torture inflicted on the man who becomes the main suspect in the case.
The death of this suspect places Santosh at a crossroads – she has become a police officer by the accident of her husband’s death and the system of Compassionate Appointments. Through the investigation, she becomes both complicit in the prejudices, the violence, the incompetence, and the inhumanity of a system meant to protect the very people it is harming. When she comes to the realization that their suspect had nothing to do with the girl’s death, she confronts her senior, only to be told that there are two types of untouchables: the ones that no one wants to touch, and the ones that cannot be touched, that is, people in positions of power who will never answer for their crimes. For Senior Madam, there is nothing that can be done to change this: the police are just servants in this system. Santosh might know the truth about what happened, but there is no good outcome for sharing that truth, and it’s better to let people feel that justice, however ham-fisted, has been done. And also that justice often has little to do with truth or fairness. Santosh might feel she knows the truth about what happened, but there are other hard truths that she must face.
Suri’s film, with Shahana Goswami at its core as an excellent observer, is tense and heart-breaking. It’s also occasionally very hard to watch, particularly the scenes involving the torture of the suspect, in which Santosh becomes an active participant, stepping out of her role as silent observer for the first time. For me, though, it’s Sunita Rajwar as Santosh’s senior, Geeta Sharma, who is one of the most compelling characters in the film. Sharma is charismatic and intelligent. She takes pride in having been the person to establish the first women-only police help desks. But it’s very evident that to get to the position she holds, she’s had to play the man’s game – when she first arrives, and the officers are eating dinner, the female police officers are at a table by themselves, but Senior Madam holds fort with the male officers. She takes Santosh on as a mentee, but some of the ways she interacts with Santosh are just as inappropriate as if a male officer did the same things: a pat on the shoulder becomes a caress on the ear. A gift of a gold nose stud which Senior Madam gently puts in Santosh’s nose. It’s a very unsettling and yet deliberate way to show that women only get ahead in a man’s world when they are just as corrupt as the men. Senior Madam might talk a good line about women having to swallow humiliation, but as she tells Santosh, “We’re all performing, us and the suspects too.” Who knows more about performance than the police?”
Santosh is a complex film. It invites us to question the actions and words of everyone, of the police, of the accused, and even of the victims. In such a complicated web of deceit and corruption, how is anyone expected to get justice? Santosh shows us that even our most faithful observer of a corrupt system risks becoming complicit in the worst way.
Returning to Jinoy Jose P.’s reflections on The Uniform Code – if most contemporary police procedurals trade “the messiness of democratic discourse for the clean certainties of vigilante justice”, Santosh is one of those rare and scarce cinematic voices willing to stand in the face of this and ask us, the audience, to bear witness to it all, just as Santosh Saini must bear witness to the corruption, violence, misogyny and systemic injustice of a system that is supposed to deliver justice, and which instead ends up subverting it.