The protagonist of Bhakshak (“Predator”), the Netflix film directed by Pulkit and produced by Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment, was a scrappy female journalist (Bhumi Pednekar) who uncovers a small-town sex abuse racket in a shelter home involving some very powerful figures. Kartavya (“Duty”), the Netflix film from the same makers, shares a universe of sorts. It opens with the murder of a senior female journalist who arrives to uncover a small-town child abuse racket in a spiritual cult involving some very powerful figures. The protagonist is the cop who fails to protect her from those bullets; her film ended before it could begin. SHO Pawan (Saif Ali Khan) is then forced to grow a conscience and do the work of a brave reporter who is reduced to a gun-wielding uniform. Both films unfold largely under the cover of night, and have central characters who realise that doing their duty is no longer about doing their job — it’s about doing the right thing. Both also feature Sanjay Mishra in top form as the loyal subordinate.
Even though Kartavya has the more dramatic narrative, it’s more expressive in terms of both genre and subtext. It’s distinctly alive to the India we live in. A Hindi film named Kartavya usually tends to frame duty as a traditional and old-school act: like heroes exacting revenge for a wronged elder or unleashing violence to recoup lost family honour. But this one subverts the template. The 40-year-old ‘hero’ starts to bat against things like family honour, social conservatism and dated traditions. The revenge here is more of a last-ditch mission to protect younger generations — the future — from the choices of opportunistic elders and gatekeepers who keep the nation tethered to the past. His epiphany is centered on the fact it’s the youngness of the nation that has to be preserved in the face of an overwhelming culture of seniority and reverence. The plot device of the suspect being a minor ties into the Kohrra-coded conflict of how the system is rigged against the one who pulls the trigger instead of those who own the gun.
The problem with such protagonists is that they suddenly wake up and become bleeding-heart crusaders for the sake of the story: jolted either by unresolved trauma or personal tragedy. But Kartavya understands that personal is political in this climate. The cop recognises, through reasonable exchanges with his wife (Rasika Dugal), that people like him stay complicit and silent until fascism arrives at their doorstep. His disillusionment mutates into something darker and more necessary. It’s an eerily topical theme: “first they came for them, then they came for us”. This is done through a seemingly parallel track of Pawan’s younger brother eloping, and Pawan having to shield the inter-caste couple from the wrath of a Khap Panchayat setup and a bigoted father (Zakir Hussain).
What’s intuitive is that Pawan — whose name symbolises the ‘winds’ of change — is driven not by his identity as a law enforcement officer or saviour, but by his duty as a father who wants to be answerable to all the sons and daughters that will ask what their parents were doing during the decline of democracy. Unlike his contemporaries, his love as a parent is total: he does not want to leave behind a broken world for his child (who even repeats a slur he hears at a Panchayat meeting). He can’t fathom the seniors who choose reputation and ancestral ideology over bloodlines and progression.
Pawan’s rage is therefore directed at a religious institution — run by a godman who brazenly eliminates dissenters — that propagates dharm (righteousness) and karm (deeds) to its devotees so hard that kartavya (duty) is no longer an option. The casualties, of course, are those who seek the truth (brave journalists), those who are the truth (minors), and those who are capable of rewriting the truth (women). This is the kind of surrogate storytelling that directors like Sudhir Mishra and Anurag Kashyap regularly strive for, but with mixed results. It’s not so much an investigative thriller, in that we already know the chain of command and abuse. It’s more of a social drama that finds cinema in the accountability it extracts from centrists who watch and look the other way. Pawan didn’t care until he was directly affected by it.
The little touches add to the lens. The writing is smart, even when the film-making resorts to OTT crutches like voice-overs and expository dialogue. For instance, an anxious Pawan scolds his brother for “watching all those romance movies and thinking you’re Shah Rukh Khan,” before comparing their small-minded father to Amrish Puri-played villains. A self-referential nod to the producers aside, it’s also a confession that all the larger-than-life couples from Bollywood love stories would have never stood a chance in the real world — especially without the ugly courage of ‘supporting characters’ like Pawan. That he is a fan of white sneakers speaks to Khan’s Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi character in an alternate reality: an unglamorous middle-aged hero torn between who he is and who the world expects him to be.
I also like that the chain-smoking cop is presented as a man of faith (a proud Lord Shiva disciple) who uses Mahabharata analogies at the drop of a hat. In fact, one of the traitors in the film is shown to be a non-believer. It would’ve been easy for Kartavya to employ the urban-liberal gaze and critique the role of faith in an environment full of blind devotion and brainwashed citizens; it would’ve also been easy for it to go the other way and depict divinity as the only solution. But by presenting Pawan as a pious man, it actually reclaims the legitimacy of religion and mythology from the clutches of those who weaponise it as a sibling of history. There is no right or left, it suggests, when humanity itself is at stake. It’s a nifty detail in a film that often hides in plain sight.
It helps that Kartavya is technically sound, too. It creates a familiar atmosphere; the fictional town of Jhamli embodies everyday ghosts, not malignant spirits. It’s a visual manifestation of how things work: undisputed, unfussy, subdued. Of the supporting cast, Manish Chaudhari is typically sharp as Pawan’s morally ambivalent boss and a cog in the wheel of a cult-like conspiracy. Young Yudhvir Ahlawat is striking as the teenager in the middle of the manhunt; his wide-eyed and full-toothed face conveys an image of innocence lost — but almost found — in a region that resembles a war-torn valley because of him. Sanjay Mishra teases our preconceived notions of the noble veterans he plays; Zakir Hussain is unsettling as the regressive patriarch stuck in a bygone era. I get the gimmick of casting an actual journalist — in this case, Saurabh Dwivedi — as the sinister godman responsible for a slain journalist. Ironically, or maybe not, he is the weakest link. Or perhaps the intent is to show this leader as an unremarkable orator who is always putting on a performance of charisma and control.
Saif Ali Khan is never not interesting, even when the dialect is a mishmash of masculine twangs. His turn as the central character is a simmering one: Pawan has a screw loose, but how he uses that screw is what defines him. His pent-up parenthood evokes a kind of aggressive hero that would suit Shah Rukh Khan if he were to star in smaller and more rugged movies. But his portrayal of Pawan brings to mind another star who played a lone wolf in a politically charged small-town drama — Anil Kapoor in Subedaar. Whereas Kapoor’s ex-armyman battles the local establishment and demands to “let us live with our heads held high, not with our minds bowed down,” Khan’s Pawan is more verbal and explicit in his ways. But his demand is not too different in and through Kartavya: let us die a little to start living again.