Khakee: The Bengal Chapter

Police vs the underworld is a trope that Indian cinema has adapted too many times. An honest officer trying to clean the system even as he and his force are outdone by smart crooks who are hand in glove with the powerful leaders is a story well too familiar. Netflix’s new series Khakee: The Bengal Chapter falls in a similar category- where an honest and brave IPS officer is out to clean up the city- in this case Kolkata- even as his work is hindered by powerful leaders and local crooks. Showrunner Neeraj Pandey and directors Debatma Mandal and Tushar Kanti Roy shift the cop drama from rural Bihar (The first part was Khakee: The Bihar Chapter) to the underbelly of Kolkata where goons and politicians work hand in hand and run a nexus of organ trading, kidnapping, real estates and more. Everyone knows that the system is corrupt and people in government are involved but the honest are scared to raise an alarm while the local goons want a piece of the pie.

LAST WEEK, a tightly wound, one-shot wonder called Adolescence dropped on Netflix. It took a couple of days and the verdict was out: this is the streamer’s breakout show of the year. Like Baby Reindeer was in the previous year and the first season of Squid Games, the Korean survival thriller, was in 2021. The list keeps expanding as one looks back but the dearth of Indian titles is conspicuous. Vikramaditya Motwane’s Sacred Games (2018) was a formidable start but the mentions have only been leaner with time. There is a distinct kind of non-commital work that is more content in occupying space than inhabiting time. They speak a lot but say too little. Except for Motwane’s Black Warrant (co-directed by Satyanshu Singh), most Netflix originals from India this year have been an assembly line of similar-looking production. Neeraj Pandey’s sprawling Khakee: The Bengal Chapter, the second part of his Khakee franchise, is the newest addition.

Like Khakee: The Bihar Chapter (2022), creator Neeraj Pandey’s standalone sequel Khakee: The Bengal Chapter represents the awkward second rung of crime thriller television — too trashy to be taken seriously, too serious to be pulpy, too long to be bingeable, and too predictable to be culturally specific. It’s more or less an old-school Prakash Jha potboiler stretched into long-form entertainment. A loaded ensemble and the illusion of a grassroots narrative are supposed to offset the generic tone, a cyclical plot and a repetitive landscape. This time, the focus is Kolkata in the early 2000s, where a no-nonsense IPS officer arrives to clean up a city ripe with bloody gang wars, sinister politicians and confused cops. A reporter exclaims: “Is the City of Joy now the City of Bhoy (fear)?”. Thankfully, the show explicitly mentions the timeframe at some point, because this is the one city that makes it hard to distinguish a period setting from a modern one. Timelessness is an aesthetic here; I assumed it was 2025 until I spotted a character holding a Nokia 6600 (which still made it look like 2022). Unfortunately, rumours of a Sourav Ganguly cameo in this seven-episode drama remain rumours, despite there being plenty of scope for a princely outsider with shirt-twirling charisma leading a team of gritty underdogs.

Calcutta is a living, breathing entity in Khakee: The Bengal Chapter, but not in the way we have come to know of it on screen. The city — familiar to the world as the hub of culture and creativity, as the land of Tagore and Ray — is imbued with a sinister edge in this new Netflix series, functioning as a hotbed of gang wars, organ trafficking, kidnapping, murder and of the consistently tenuous equation between cops and criminals. So, a machher bajar, where the act of buying fish has almost been romanticised into a form of art by the Bengali gastronome (honestly, is there any other kind?) sees a policeman being hacked in broad daylight by a bnoti; At the parar cha-er dokan, adda is definitely a mainstay but so is the brokering of hit jobs. A significant character’s body is stacked against the gate of the Victoria Memorial, forming a dichotomous (I refrain from saying ‘striking’) bloody red foreground against the pristine white facade of the city’s iconic landmark. Guns are traded at New Market. The streets are seedy, the changing positions of the players often finds the underbelly indistinguishable from the rest of the city. Calcutta carries the burden of many bodies, its streets tinged with blood.

Anurag Kashyap made a valid point when he said Netflix India lacks imagination and courage to go beyond the obvious. Its new show Khakee The Bengal Chapter is no different as it harps on cliches and fails to add depth to a story done to death. Just changing the language from Mumbaiya Hindi to Bengali-laden Hindi couldn’t lift either the script or the sheen. In the early ‘90s, Kolkata was infested with crooks and their patron politicians. Bagha (Saswata Chatterjee) has risen above the baseline and controls the crime syndicate under Barun Roy’s (Prosenjit Chatterjee) thumb. The state is reeling under pressure from all sides and as a result, it decides to crack down on the most wanted ones. IPS Arjun Maitra (Jeet) has been tasked to manage the situation with guns and gore. Chitrangada Singh plays rival politician Nibedita Basak.