Back in the '80s and '90s, the rise of vigilante justice in Bollywood movies (Shahenshah, Ajooba) stemmed from a specific feeling of dissatisfaction of the country’s working class toward the government.
The systems that the country has put in place to ensure that its citizens were protected, and their voices heard, were designed to alienate them, making any form of justice out of their reach. And India’s citizens were slowly realising that the bureaucratic mechanisms were instead tilted toward perpetrators — wealthy, connected, or just pure evil. At the time, Hindi films started reflecting this growing sense of anti-establishment.
The idea of a middle-class hero shorn of generational wealth or connections, going out on the streets to exact justice that due process was not capable of affording them became a language of rebellion. The grammar of violence in Hindi cinema then resembled the weapon of India’s middle-class — a way for them to reclaim their constitutional power. But by no means was vigilante justice supposed to be the solution to systemic excesses. It was merely a temporary demonstration meant to wake the conscience of government due process, a reminder of sorts to the government that it served the public, and not the other way around.
In the last decade however, Bollywood has weaponised the genre of vigilante justice to an extent that it has ended up glorifying violence instead of resembling a call for justice. Think either the Dabangg (2010, 2012, 2019) or the Singham (2011, 2014) franchises, in which physical violence — in particular, meting out a brand of vigilante justice — became encoded in the definition of male bravado. If the Singham series floated the idea of an “erratic police officer” taking a decision on the spot by killing perpetrators without an “arrest or a long case,” then Simmba (2018) and Satyameve Jayate (2018) cemented that line of punishment.
Both these outings represented a genre of vigilante justice films that endorsed extra-judicial killings as the only form of civilian justice. In Simmba, Ranveer Singh plays a cop who believes that the only way to stop rape is by killing rapists, going beyond the boundaries of law to exact a semblance of justice, even though the act falls more in line with satisfying the bloodlust of a vengeful mob. And in Satyameve Jayate, John Abraham essays a deranged civilian who is convinced that the solution to a just country lies in burning alive corrupt cops.
Even though these two films were not the only narrative occurrences that brandished death as the ultimate punishment in the last two years, they still remained as one-off occurrences of movies that operated on equating justice with the severity of punishment. And what can be more severe than taking someone’s life?
The films of 2021 pose a worrying answer to that. The onscreen depiction of violence in Hindi movies of the year go beyond being just an extension of mob justice or punishment. They reveal instead the country’s unending fixation with the death penalty. Cop dramas like Sooryavanshi, Antim, and Satyameva Jayate 2, and thrillers like Dhamaka and Tadap have turned death into due process.
Although all five films have different storylines and seemingly disparate roads to death, their protagonists share the same mental outlook toward punishment. It does not matter if they are a cop, a journalist under hostage, or a heartbroken hero; what matters is that they do not think much about taking someone’s life.
In fact, these five protagonists look at the death penalty as a calling — as a way for them to sanitise the world of suffering.
Guilt becomes an afterthought when the very act of death is intertwined with public service. As a result, physical violence is stripped off any accountability.
That is to say, the Hindi movies of 2021 hinge on relaying majoritarian values about crime and punishment, an especially dangerous trend in a country that has blurred the lines between revenge and justice when it comes to taking someone’s life through unconstitutional means.
If Sooryavanshi becoming the highest-grossing film of the year proves one thing, it is the fact that Bollywood has successfully turned the death penalty into a civilian performance — and is rewarded for it. It has gone far beyond mob-justice or extra-judicial killings. The death penalty is now a public right that comes with no consequences or moral culpability. It is this violent undercurrent that has defined Hindi cinema of 2021, simply because it points toward a future of filmmaking where the question we will be tackling is not merely “What does it mean to take a life?” Instead, it will be “How does it feel to kill?”
Poulomi Das is a film and culture writer, critic, and programmer. Follow more of her writing on Twitter.
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