Female cops proliferate on Indian OTT, but how much have they evolved

Raveena Tandon in Aranyak

Indian series have found a new backup plan for thrillers – the female cop. With room to cast top female actors who are willing to take up meaty parts that cast them in the lead, web series with a female police officer proliferate. Only that which began with impressive and memorable characters is now descending into generics, sometimes unconvincing characters that don’t empower or focus on the best side of a woman.

Suzhal- the Vortex, a Tamil original series (Prime Video) and SHE (Netflix) both feature a woman cop in the lead role. SHE has Aditi Pohankar playing the titular role as police constable Bhumi who goes undercover as a sex worker to nab a powerful drug lord. While the series has drawn (fair) criticism of being written from a male gaze, and being no more than skin deep, the one aspect that sticks out is what really empowers this character to go beyond her mundane, repressed existence. Bhumi as a police constable shunned by her ex husband on her wedding night as  ‘frigid’ lives out a standard unexciting life in Mumbai. But a single sexual position makes her find her ‘chi’ so to speak; which is text book over simplification. If a woman were to find her power with sexual intercourse, she would use that to sort out her life at a grander scale; something that SHE never explores. It doesn’t add dimensions to it’s female cope, who is neither here nor there.

She Season 2

Then there’s Suzhal,  where Sriya Reddy plays Regina Thomas, a small town police officer in charge and borderline corrupt and disillusioned. When challenged she will do her job as investigator, while dealing with her personal vulnerabilities. Like the film critic at Newsminute aptly stated, Why does a female police officer always have to seem like she swallowed a fireball for breakfast? An important character in this over complicated thriller, this cop is never really given room to evolve or grow to explain her behaviour and current persona.

Still from Suzhal

It’s not hard to locate this spurt in female police officers (or women in uniform) on OTT. Series like Mare of Easttown, Broachchurch, Happy Valley having created female cops that feel real, vulnerable, tough and determined, creating a new term- anti heroine- to describe them. They are popular and almost benchmarks in dramatic thrillers. In India, we saw a pretty convincing female police officer in in Shefali Shah’s portrayal in Delhi Crime of ACP Vartika Chaturvedi; of course, she is based on a real person (DCP Chaya Sharma) but adapted to fit cinematic story telling. The moment when she loses control and flings a shoe at a suspect who has confessed to de-humanizing and brutalizing the rape victim explains everything that a woman’s mind would face in such a situation. The series also balances her cynical, tired point of view towards policing with that of a fresh recruit, a young IPS officer Neeti Singh that Rasika Duggal played with finesse. This girl is intent on doing good, reluctant to do battle against her parents or family and their perceptions of a woman’s need to marry; but also dealing with sheer disgust with the realities of her job.  Outraged and angry, Vartika tells the suspect, now our youngest recruit, a woman, will teach you a lesson;  she responds, “With due respect maam, I don’t want to touch him.” This female cop is no Singham, instead she is still figuring out if this job is all that it is made out of. What we saw of Raveena Tandon as Kasturi Dogra in Aranyak was rooted and fleshed out. She is a salt of the earth, local police officer, unsure about the English speaking colleague in charge now; and committed to doing her duty. Dogra’s domestic problems felt real and her inability to balance life and work was convincing.

Raveena Tandon in Aranyak

In the Great Indian Murder Mystery, Richa Chaddha plays a morally dubious but smart cop, who is drawn into many strands of crime and injustice that emerge from a single murder in the capital. Adapted from Vikas Swarup’s celebrated novel Six Suspects, Chadda’s police officer is seen backing an expensive business  for her brother;  and then proceeds to keep investigating. Makers of this series have made little effort to build the HOW behind this cop; or her colleague (Prateik Gandhi). Chaddha excels at playing hard ass no nonsense characters, something she displays in Candy (Voot Select); again as a police officer dealing with superstition, crime and power play in a small town. Here too the lead character is determined to solve a shocking crime, and her life beyond this, is just a sidebar.

Perhaps because it remains focused on a strong emotional core, the female police officer in Grahan (Hotstar) is loaded with a personality and evolution with the story’s progression. She finds herself caught in an awkward situation where she has to investigate her doting father’s involvement in a mass crime; and in the process, discovers a lot of her own life. The show falls short as procedural, but it marks up a journey of it’s lead character, SP Amrita Singh (Zoya Hussain), leading to a convincing conclusion. Adapted from the book Chaurasi by Satya Vyas, Grahan makes a believable female cop come to life.

Some of the more believable female police officers in Indian OTT have actually gotten lost because of our obsession with movie stars. Shahana Goswami is credible and sufficiently weather beaten as Lipika Bora, the police officer in The Last Hour, although the show lacks depth. Then there’s Swara Bhaskar’s performance in Flesh, of a cop chasing human trafficking. She excels in a role that barely details the character’s life or evolution.

With The Indian Police Force, Shilpa Shetty will play a stylized super cop character. The tendency to glam up and scale up the hype around a female police officer is visible again as cinematic is more in demand on OTT than credible. However, for any character on OTT to make a lasting impact and to stay with audiences, it has to be believable and worth relating with. Our screen women in uniform need to get a soul too.

Archita Kashyap is an experienced journalist and writer on film, music, and pop culture. She has handled entertainment content for broadcast news and digital platforms over 15 years.