In Vetrimaaran’s hard-hitting film Viduthalai Part 1, released on March 31, a senior police officer calmly asks for cutting pliers. He then proceeds to pull out the nails of the Adivasi man in his custody, asking him for information that the latter says he doesn’t have. When he doesn’t get what he wants, the officer asks for the man’s daughter-in-law to be brought into the room and stripped.
Even as the audience finds it difficult to process the extensive scenes of custodial torture in Viduthalai, the state of Tamil Nadu is witnessing a real life case that mirrors the brutality that was shown on screen. Just a few days before Viduthalai came out, three men alleged on video that they were subjected to custodial torture by officers at the Ambai police station, including Ambasamudram’s Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) Balveer Singh IPS. The complaints range from sexual assault to breaking and pulling out teeth with stones and cutting pliers, and crushing their testicles. It has further emerged that the victims include two minors, one of whom belongs to the Scheduled Caste.
After pressure mounted on the government to act, Balveer Singh was suspended and two other policemen, Boghan from the Vikramasingapuram division and Rajkumar from the Kallidaikurichi division, were transferred to the armed police forces. Though there is public outrage over the incident, there is also a narrative being spun to dilute the seriousness of the crime — that punishing the officers would dampen the morale of the force and make ‘honest’ police officers reluctant to do their job.
Do you love reading Sowmya Rajendran’s reviews? Sign up here to receive our latest movie reviews in your inbox, once a week.
The ‘job’ of the police in popular imagination is to dispense instant justice, acting as an omnipotent force that can immediately identify evil-doers and protect the innocent. Cinema, the most influential medium of popular culture in India, has contributed a great deal to the building of this construct. The idea of a righteous hero dressed in khaki and vested with full powers of the state to shoot rapists and murderers offers a fantastic escape to an audience that knows how many exhausting years it takes for a court case to reach its conclusion, and for the accused, if convicted, to be punished.
From MGR and Sivaji Ganesan to Rajinikanth, Kamal Haasan, Vijayakant and the generation after that — Vijay, Ajith, Suriya, Karthi, Vijay Sethupathi among others — most superstars have, at some point, played a police officer. In the ‘90s and more so in the 2000s, this ‘righteous’ hero increasingly acquired grey shades. He was willing to bend the rules and break the law himself if he was convinced about the ‘greater good’. For instance, while interrogating Badri, a terrorist (Nassar), Kamal Haasan’s Adhi Narayanan in Kuruthi Punal (1995) tortures him and illegally administers a ‘truth’ serum. When Badri points out that he’s breaking the law, Adhi tells him that he isn’t bothered by it and that he needs to change the law to suit the circumstances. The sequence has Badri repeatedly taunting Adhi, making the viewer feel that the officer’s actions are justified.
Later films such as Vikram’s Saamy series (2003, 2018) with its infamous “Naan police illa, porukki” line (I’m not a policeman but a rowdy), Suriya’s Kaakha Kaakha (2003) and Singam films (2010, 2013, 2017), Vijay’s Theri (2016), Ajith’s Yennai Arindhaal (2015), Kamal Haasan’s Vettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu (2006), and Rajinikanth’s Darbar (2020) all have the actors playing supercops who indulge in custodial violence and justify extrajudicial killings. Many of them also mock human rights activists. These films don’t merely represent a reality, they glorify it.
In these films, the people who are at the receiving end of police violence are characterised as so evil that the audience is serenaded into believing that the officer is right in breaking the law. Such a perception leads to public celebrations when encounter killings of those accused in heinous crimes are reported, such as the Hyderabad vet gangrape case of 2019. The fact that the police are not empowered to decide the guilt of the accused or award a punishment is lost on the public, who wants instant justice to be delivered.
Of course, there have also been films where the police have been portrayed as the villain, but the narrative then is about how an evil person with authority is targeting the hero who is essentially a good person. These films present a bestial cop as the face of evil, and we respond to the violence because it’s being inflicted upon the hero — not because the police are breaking the law as such. The idea that this violence is systemic, condoned, and celebrated, isn’t the focus of the narrative.
Vetrimaaran’s critically acclaimed film Visaranai (2015) was probably the first Tamil film to look at custodial violence in unflinching detail, a change from narratives that routinely glorified it. Based on a real life story, the film is about four labourers who are picked up by the police and tortured into confessing to a theft they did not commit. What follows is nothing short of a nightmare, as the men are bullied into doing the police’s bidding at every turn.
The graphic scenes of violence in the film pointed to the dangers in celebrating unchecked authority. When the horrifying custodial deaths of P Jayaraj and Bennix were reported in Tamil Nadu in 2020, Visaranai was the film that many people recalled when discussing police excesses.
Mari Selvaraj’s Karnan (2021), based on the real life incident of the police unleashing unspeakable brutality on a village of Dalit people in Tamil Nadu’s Kodiyankulam in 1995, was another powerful rebuttal to traditional cop films. The film closely mirrors the real life case where the dominant caste Thevars of a neighbouring village deeply resented the growing prosperity of the Pallars who resided in Kodiyankulam. A quarrel between the two villages resulted in the police going on a rampage against the Dalits for several hours. The film reimagines the violence, with a Dalit hero defending his home and avenging the brutality.
Later that year came TJ Gnanavel’s Jai Bhim (2021), which was released directly on Amazon Prime Video. This film, too, was based on a real life case and was fought by former Madras High Court judge Chandru when he was a lawyer. The courtroom drama starring Suriya and Lijomol Jose, revolves around the arrest of a group of Irula tribal men in a theft case. When one of the men dies due to custodial torture, the police claim that he escaped their custody and try to hush up the crime. The film received an overwhelming reception on the OTT platform, and became the highest user rated film on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).
Like Viduthalai, where the story of police brutality unfolds through the eyes of someone in the force, Franklin Jacob’s Writer (2021) too delves into the ugliness within the system from the shoes of an insider. In the film, a PhD student is illegally detained for daring to research the reasons behind suicides in the police force, and a sympathetic policeman ends up paying the price for trying to help him. This film, too, emphasises the casteism within the police force, raising the question of how it can be expected to treat citizens equally and without bias during investigations.
Director Tamizh, who used to be in the police force and played the murderous officer in Jai Bhim, made Taanakkaran (2022) inspired by his own experiences in police training. The film, which was released on Disney+Hotstar, stars Vikram Prabhu in the lead, and takes the viewer through the abusive nature of the training that is aimed at snuffing out the humanity within the force.
Some of these films have been criticised for depicting long drawn out violence on marginalised bodies, and questions have been raised if it doesn’t amount to trauma porn. But even as that very valid discourse continues, it must be said that these films have contributed to chipping away at the glorified image of the police in popular culture at least. Since most of these films are based on real life cases, it is hard to deny the truth that they speak. After Rajinikanth’s Darbar flopped, we haven’t yet seen a top star play a glorified police officer. And as more and more cases like the alleged Ambasamudram custodial torture spill out, it may well be a blessing if Kollywood refrains from validating such crimes and painting the perpetrators as heroes. We certainly don’t need low angle and slow-mo shots with pumping background scores to celebrate human rights violations.
Watch: Juvenile victim in Tirunelveli custodial torture speaks to TNM