The Great Indian Waste of Potential
Despite its ambitions to be a crime drama at the grandest scale, The Great Indian Murder (2022) falls into a trap of stereotypes and cliches, offering only an amalgamation of old ideas wrapped in a shiny new box.
Everything about The Great Indian Murder—the 2022 Hotstar web series directed by Tigmanshu Dhulia—spells ambition: The grand cast of characters, the high production value, and a plot-line that traverses a conspiracy to near every corner of the country.
And of course, then there’s the title itself; those four words which were surely enough to get producers and executives salivating. ‘The Great Indian Murder’ promise complete fulfilment to the algorithm. From the trailer onwards, we get a promise of a high-profile murder mystery, offering the full gamut of Indian experiences: dirty politics and sex scandals, the terrible rich and the hopeless poor, good cops and bad cops, tribals and Naxals, murder, espionage, and more murder.
In nine episodes, Dhulia’s series—based on Vikas Swarup’s best-selling novel Six Suspects (2008)—aims to take an ‘Agatha Christie’ approach to a murder mystery, but on the grandest scale possible: a murder that connects the whole country.
It’s a wide net, and this breadth of The Great Indian Murder sacrifices the show of its depth. From the very first minutes into the first episode, characters are immediately caricaturised: The businessman who can only talk sleazy on the phone, the police chief who is gruff and mean to his subordinates, the Bollywood starlet who is busy and glamorous, the corrupt godman, the greasy politician. The characters lack any real complexity, and even when the series adds wonderful convolutions and complications, these traditional stereotypes of the various Indian tropes continue to overshadow the plot itself.
That aforementioned plot goes like this: Vicky Rai (Jatin Goswami) is a rich, young businessman, and the son of Jagganath Rai (Ashutosh Rana), the Home Minister of Chhattisgarh. Vicky is the absolute caricature of a heartless wealthy man with no redeemable quality: he disrespects, attacks, and pimps out women; he attacks his own family members; he has little regard for the rule of law and order or the judiciary; and after being acquitted of a rape and murder case, he decides to celebrate with a tone-deaf grand party in his farmhouse near New Delhi.
And as the fireworks go off to celebrate Vicky’s freedom in front of a crowd at the family lawn, someone also fires a gun-shot. Vicky is slain. And thus begins the story of his great Indian murder.
Dhulia has experience in the cinematic world of crime and punishment, especially relating to the world outside the glitzy urbane of Indian society. Popular in the role of Ramadhir Singh in Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur, he also directed films like Paan Singh Tomar and Saheb Biwi aur Gangster. In The Great Indian Murder, Dhulia thinks bigger than ever before, starting in the capital and then traversing the breadth of the country for clues, from Raipur, Kolkata, Chennai, the Andaman Islands, to small towns in Jharkhand and Rajasthan and more. This series is also actor Ajay Devgn’s first OTT show as a producer.
In trying to be everything for everybody, the show loses any tonal consistency: it’s amusing, light, deep, fast, and slow, all together. It is a frustrating oxymoron: sometimes intelligent, ambitious, and exciting; sometimes shallow, stereotyped, and unwatchable. It tests the viewer and rewards them, often in the same episode.
The slain in The Great Indian Murder—Vicky Rai—has made a number of enemies, including his own father, a sister whom he has abused (Ritu Rai), a former bureaucrat who begins to have disillusions of being Mahatma Gandhi (Mohan Kumar), and a Bollywood star whom he humiliated (Shabnam Saxena). There are also two gun-wielding suspects who are arrested at the party (Munna and Eketi).
With each episode, viewers are introduced to an ever-enlarging vortex of drama, of causes-and-effects that could have eventually led to the bold assassination of one of the country’s most powerful men. Episode 2 deals with Vicky’s father Jagganath Rai—his political rise, ambitions, connections and rivalries, and the people both within his and his opposing party who would wish Jagganath or Vicky dead.
Then, the vortex expands further to cover a larger radius. A stone idol of the god Ingetayi is stolen from the Andaman Islands, bringing the tribesman Eketi (P.R. Mani) to the mainland in search of the statue—a search that will eventually embroil him into the larger Vicky Rai conspiracy, too. Munna (Shashank Arora), a small-time thief from the slum areas of Delhi, has a curious, mysterious connection with the Rai family, and good reason for wishing vengeance upon Vicky. A child is kidnapped in Delhi. A Naxalite leader is discovered hiding in the slums. A bureaucrat begins an extra-marital affair. Other politicians are easily seduced. The Army gets involved in framing a suspect. The stolen statue from the Andamans carries a supernatural curse. The chief minister’s seat in Chhattisgarh is at stake. An undercover journalist breaks all codes of conduct to spy on the suspects. Love blooms across class lines.
Everything is happening; everything is connected.
And of course, the police get involved. Here, we meet two of the central characters to the series: Suraj Yadav of the CBI (played by Pratik Gandhi) and Sudha Bhardwaj (Richa Chadha). Dhulia’s show displays immense patience and trust in the viewer, as Chadha—arguably the biggest star in the series—hardly features until the third episode, nearly one-third of the way into the story. Yadav and Bhardwaj have been set-up together as awkward partners to crack this case. Each has a different approach, and in the case of Yadav, a different motivation, too. It is through their interviews and investigations that the knots of The Great Indian Murder are unravelled—while simultaneously, new knots are tightened elsewhere.
These complexities—and the cat-and-mouse game between the two investigating officers and their suspects—provide a satisfying sense of intrigue to the show. In its grand scale, The Great Indian Murder succeeds in its choice to tell this tale as a longform series—rather than a two or three hour-long film—pays dividends for the show’s creators.
But there is hardly anything else in the series that dares to breaks the cliches that audiences have already seen on Indian screens in recent decades. What The Great Indian Murder offers is an amalgamation of old ideas wrapped in a shiny new box of higher production value. But the (mostly) wooden acting, stale characters, and a lack of nuance limits this show from being as great as it aspires to be.
The Great Indian Murder works best in the ‘big picture’, in its whole rather than the pieces. The rivalry between father and son, the tribal community that has lost its invaluable artifact, the journalist who strives to get to the bottom of the case. The destination is somwhat satisfying; the journey, highly uncoordinated. Father and son turn against each other with intent to murder on mere whims. Journalist Arun Deskhmukh (Amey Wagh) stumbles upon clue after clue with ease. The CBI officer hardly portrays a second dimension as he steers the case into a questionable new direction. The characters are hardly developed well-enough to make their actions believable.
The Great Indian Murder works best in the ‘big picture’, in its whole rather than the pieces. The rivalry between father and son, the tribal community that has lost its invaluable artifact, the journalist who strives to get to the bottom of the case. The destination is somewhat satisfying; the journey, highly uncoordinated.
It is in the two officers—Yadav and Bhardwaj—that The Great Indian Murder offers its most frustrating waste of talent. Both Pratik Gandhi and Richa Chadha come into this series on the laurels of fine acting performances in the past. However, neither actor is hardly allowed the opportunity by this lazy script to break out of their boxes of cliché. Yadav is devious, with the intent to serve his bigger masters; Bhardwaj is earnest and hard-working. And it is to these cardboard cut-out characteristics that they remain for most of the series, never rising beyond the occasion.
If there are bright sparks in the acting department, they are provided by Munna and Eketi, the first two suspects to be caught with weapons at Vicky Rai’s party, and two of the most marginalised characters in the show, weakened by the larger will of the powerful system. Shashank Arora as Munna is a crook with a deeper heart; he wears a gamut of emotions in his eyes, revelling in the shade of grey between right and wrong. Eketi, meanwhile—the tribesman from Andaman played by P.R. Mani—is a true revelation. Apart from the few glimpses of his life on the island, he is a constant outsider wherever he travels in search of the Ingetayi statue. He has trouble communicating, or proving his innocence, and justifying his cause. It’s a role written to be stereotyped; and yet, Mani creates a character with real purpose and drive, one who the audience understands even without the words to comprehend him.
As The Great Indian Murder races towards its nine-episode conclusion, it wraps itself into a dense package of surface-level entertainment: action sequences, chase scenes, backstabbing, revenge, and some surprising plot twists. But, in trying to be everything for everybody, the show loses any tonal consistency: it’s amusing, light, deep, fast, and slow, all together. It is a frustrating oxymoron: sometimes intelligent, ambitious, and exciting; sometimes shallow, stereotyped, and unwatchable. It tests the viewer and rewards them, often in the same episode.
Since the recent explosion of OTT platforms, foreign-produced crime and mystery-driven dramas have ruled the roost. Truer true crime, higher stakes, more salacious scandals. The Great Indian Murder seeks to capitalise on this audience, while also offering the Indian ‘heartland’ storylines that have gained popularity, too. The drama packs up all of this—and much more—as the storyline works circularly around the night of Vicky Rai’s murder, connecting one scene of the crime to dozens of other scenes that form our country’s complicated jigsaw puzzle.
And yet, the show’s ends up working counterproductive to its own self, undercutting the same intrigue that should be fuelling its engines. The ‘conclusion’ of this mystery opens the door for a new mystery, another thread to unravel. The finale left me curious to see the webs untangled; and yet, the show’s flaws made me ultimately interested in the identity of the actual murderer.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose creative work has appeared in Epiphany, Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, The Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, Fifty Two, FirstPost, and more. Karan’s debut novel A Beautiful Decay will be published by the Aleph Book Company in 2022. You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
