The Indian state works interestingly; it is powerful and powerless simultaneously. Take the police as a state institution, for instance.
Even to this day, after seventy-five years of Indian independence, police procedures are deeply implicated in an individual’s caste, class, religion, and gender positions in society. Police stations, similarly, work to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. In several households, it is considered a disgrace to go to a police station and/or enter a courtroom.
In the 2025 movie ‘Santosh’, a Hindi-language police procedural drama set in rural north India, Sandhya Suri, in her very own exquisite narration, captures the harsh realities of Indian society. After the death of her husband, Santosh (played by Shahana Goswami) joins the police force in the capacity of a police constable. Santosh is no crusader—she wants to fit in, keep a roof over her head, eat her meals, pay her bills, and escape the loneliness that widowhood brings with it.
Santosh gets thrown into a case early on. A Dalit girl has been killed and her body was floating in the well. No police personnel want to touch the body of the Dalit girl. Because: untouchability. So, Santosh, a new constable, has been made to carry the dead girl to the postmortem.
Soon, this scandal breaks out: The police inspector is transferred to another station and replaced by Inspector Geeta Sharma (played by Sunita Rajwar). Geeta is shrewd, but simultaneously, deeply practical. Geeta is charismatic, but deeply suspect. So, in a patriarchal social structure, Geeta would balance both worlds. Under Geeta, Santosh learns the good cop, bad cop—enjoying the pleasures of power and is deeply troubled by the violence it brought with it.
The movie provocatively engages with how caste operates in police stations, with the police inspector denying writing an FIR for a lower-caste individual whose daughter had gone missing, not touching the body of the dead girl belonging to a lower caste, conducting purification ritual once after the body of the Dalit girl has been moved to postmortem.
The upper caste groups block off the road to deny the procession of the dead girl into the village. They deny them access to water in the wells that the upper-castes used. And a deep distrust exists amongst the lower caste groups towards the police—either they want money or want to leech off us.
There is a lot of police brutality, all of which is uncomfortable to watch. Police brutality is rampant in village societies. People are not educated enough to understand their rights. They do not have access to good lawyers. And the use of violence is very much a norm in police stations across India.
And the movie masterfully shows the tense engagement with violence in terms of how Santosh is deterred by it and accepts it. Santosh is just a police constable. But what Suri does is to show how even Santosh’s coming to terms with the police uniform was about making sense of police power and its great temptations.
Suri’s directional ‘Santosh’ does not sermonise. It does not tell you anything new either. However, Suri presents the complex relations between police and society regarding how they negotiate who holds power and how they operate it within the confines of existing social relations. It presents the reality as it exists. Poor Dalits and Muslims do not have access to these institutions even today. They are also predominantly punished for the crimes they did not commit. Police institutions are presented in their raw, authentic form, in terms of how caste, corruption, and violence surround them.
In one sense, ‘Santosh’ is a social critique exploring the tussles between the powerful and the powerless. And in presenting the movie as a social critique, Suri wants her audience to reflect on systemic issues that pervade our everyday realities.
Very thoughtful..Keep it up🤞
Thank you so much, Preyasi!