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To hear director Karan Kapadia and producer Ashi Dua talk about Hunkkaar is to understand that some projects consume you until every sharp edge is carved out.
Long before the JioHotstar series found its identity, the team spent nearly a year in the writers' room to sharpen it, assembled an enviable ensemble to lead it and kept toying with multiple names as the title till, in the final lap, that the definitive name struck like a jolt: Hunkkaar — a heavy, defiant Hindi and Sanskrit term for a battle cry, echoing through India’s freedom struggle and classic poetry as a metaphor for speaking truth to power and roaring against systemic injustice.
"It just slapped me in the face as a title," Karan tells THR India about the show, gearing to release on September 25.
Born out of discussions between Kapadia, co-director Nitya Mehra, and Dua following Big Girls Don't Cry, the show tackles the pervasive epidemic of sexual violence through a visceral David-versus-Goliath lens. To bring its David Fincher-esque atmosphere of mounting dread and psychological trauma to life, the team assembled a powerhouse ensemble led by Fatima Sana Shaikh, breakout star Aneet Padda, Arjun Mathur, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Zoya Hussain and Raghubir Yadav.
"Mukesh Chhabra played a big role in getting this fabulous cast together," Dua says.
Ahead of its premiere, Kapadia and Dua sat down with The Hollywood Reporter India to discuss the origins of the project, navigating sensitivity without losing narrative bite, and directing fast-rising star Aneet Padda.
At what point did Hunkkaar start taking active shape? Was it something that was always on the cards, or did it develop alongside Big Girls Don't Cry?
Karan Kapadia: It actually happened parallelly with Big Girls Don't Cry. Nitya (Mehra) and I had read an article about the subject matter and we knew this was a story that had to be told. I started developing it parallelly post-COVID through Big Girls. We were going to shoot it right after Big Girls..., which we ended up doing.
Ashi Dua: They both coincided. We ended up getting the support of Applause Entertainment, and at the time Sameer Nair was part of it and he completely backed it, supported it, and enabled Karan and Nitya to tell the story the way they envisioned. He championed the show like a legend.
Ashi, whenever your name is attached to a project, there’s an expectation of something original and edgy. What is your criterion as a producer to greenlight a title?
Ashi: Every project goes through its own journey. On Hunkkaar, Karan and Nitya wanted to tell this story, and then we figured out how to do the research and put the writers' room together. It became something we all wanted to tell together.
There are so many stories I still want to tell that get stuck at their own stages because of various factors. But the idea is always to produce stories that are engaging and entertaining, yet create some sort of impact as well. With Hunkkaar, Karan and Nitya were so clear about telling it as authentically as possible.
Crime thrillers are a staple on streaming platforms. What were the essential dos and don’ts in the writers' room when developing this?
Karan: It took me close to a year to get it to where I wanted. First I wrote the story out, and broke that into a beat sheet with the writers in the room. Then each writer took their episodes and worked on their drafts. It came back to me, I overwrote on that, and we repeated that process until we got to where I wanted in terms of tone and mentality.
The big dos and don’ts for me were staying away from any controversies vis-a-vis religion or anything like that. I wanted to stay closer to a problem in our country, which is the epidemic of rape. As a society, we need to address this together... it was a salute to the women of our country who are fighting the good fight. I didn't want us to miss the woods for the trees— this is a David versus Goliath story about speaking your truth, no matter the consequences.
You mentioned getting the tone correct on paper first. How would you define the visual and psychological tone of Hunkkaar?
Karan: The tone has this sense of dread and fear about it, trying to emulate what our protagonist's state of mind is at any given point. David Fincher does this really well in his work. I wanted to invoke this sense of paranoia in our characters — the desperation to seek justice before they are taken out or silenced, because the case had this angle of your life being in danger.
I wanted the audience to have this sense of eeriness that looms in the energy of the series; from set design and lighting to staging and performances. The tone had to reflect the psychological journey and trauma of what our characters go through. We don't really talk about the inner journey of trauma of victims in our country. When something like this happens, you have to relive this experience 14 or 15 times — telling a lawyer, a judge, an investigating officer, going through another medical report. The horror and trauma never leave you. It was very important to address the psychological effect of what this does to a human being when someone violates you without consent.
Also, this underdog story resonates greatly in the tone because it’s an out-of-work lawyer, a first-time police officer, and a 17-year-old girl in a family without the resources to take on an enemy that virtually has the power of a state. But the most important thing for me is that it’s a triumph of the human spirit. No matter how heavily stacked the odds are, there's always hope, and we must never give in. That's the lasting message of our show.
Ashi: At the same time, it’s extremely engaging and entertaining to a point where you're at the edge of your seat wondering what’s next. That’s the beauty of how it's been written and shot — no matter what it’s trying to say, it keeps you hooked and entertained.
Ashi, as a producer, what was it like assembling this cast?
Ashi: We are really thrilled! When we did our previous show, Big Girls Don't Cry, which Karan and Nitya directed, Aneet Padda was in that show. When they had to cast for this role, Karan and Nitya were very clear that they wanted Aneet here. In hindsight, she’s become this huge star and we’re all thrilled about that. Mukesh Chhabra did the casting for the show and did a phenomenal job. When they cast Aneet, it was purely because of how perfect she was for the role.
Karan: I was very clear that we wanted Aneet. She was someone we knew had the talent. We had worked with her on Big Girls.. and on a short film before that. We knew she had the chops to play the nuance of this role.
Which short film?
Karan: It's a short that Nitya directed before this called Khatti Meethi Yaadein, which came out on the platform Waves. That's actually the very first thing we did with her.
Ashi: The rest of the cast is so incredible too. This is Fatima Sana Shaikh's first outing on OTT in a show, playing a cop named Jasleen. The other actors — Raghubir Yadav, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Zoya Hussain, Arjun Mathur — are fantastic too.
Among many standout things in Big Girls Don't Cry, Aneet Padda was exceptionally compelling even before Saiyaara happened. What does Hunkkaar unlock for her as a performer that we haven't seen yet?
Ashi: She's just so endearing to watch. Fabulously talented, and so compelling that even pre-Saiyaara, I would tell Karan that you just can't stop looking at her. She’s very real, stands out, and is extremely compelling to watch.
Karan: Aneet is a very organic actor. She’s very method-oriented in that sense — she builds up, prepares, and puts herself in that headspace way before we come to shoot. If we were shooting a crucial scene of her character's testimony, she’d be sitting quietly brooding and actually imbibing what that character is thinking.
As an artist, she’s phenomenal in her timing, delivery, and expression. The amount of emotional intelligence she brings to a scene, just with her eyes, says so much. You just have to add a couple of fine details and texturing here and there, and you’ve got it. Very often, she’d nail it in the first or second take. She comes from a school of artists where she forgets herself as a person and engulfs herself in the process.
For a maker, you've already won half the battle right there.