Babita Singh Reporting is about a suspended sub-inspector who visits her hometown and gets obsessed with the murder case of a childhood friend. The town has secrets, sinister undercurrents and suspicious characters: a grieving wife with burn-marks on her hand, a resentful brother, an ex-flame with bruises on her face, a shady driver with a scar, the mystery of a red car, a nosy neighbour who knows more than he should. The miffed locals taunt the officer as the “sympathy hire”. She goes through some life-or-death experiences. A man unleashes his vicious dogs on her; another threatens sexual abuse; she is brutally attacked by a gang of junkies; she smashes a car into a pile of bricks; she climbs into the heart of a Ravana effigy minutes before a Dussehra blaze.
Yet, somehow, these aren’t the scariest parts of the film. It’s the casual microaggressions at home — the place that reduces her to a dutiful wife, daughter-in-law, and follower of orders. It’s the intangible horror of Indian homemaking. It’s the way her seemingly gentle husband guilts her for having a job. It’s the way he manipulates her into taking a trip and handling his sister’s baby shower. It’s the way his family fat-shames her and passes comments about her thyroid condition. It’s the way nobody helps her when she’s struggling to carry gift-boxes to the door. It’s the way her husband breaks into crocodile tears and plays the victim when she shows any sign of defiance; she ends up soothing him like a baby. It’s the way he upsets her, says terrible things, and then sweet-talks her back to normal so that she continues to serve his family. It’s the way she is asked to touch the feet of elderly relatives and manage everyone’s demands. One of the tensest “set-pieces” features her playing the host and frantically tending to guests in the crowded hall: all with an injured foot.
The interplay of a brooding cop’s personal and professional identities is a genre as old as time. As are the investigation-of-patriarchy and excavation-of-India motifs. Many titles come to mind. The protagonist Babita “Baby” Singh is a hybrid of two of actor Nimisha Sajayan’s great characters; the domestic situation is a descendent of the wife’s conflict in Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen, and the gendered crime drama evokes the spirited forest officer from Richie Mehta’s Poacher. A catchy song used in the making of a reel during the opening scene is from Subedaar, the recent Anil Kapoor starrer about a retired soldier who returns to his toxic hometown. Her desire to discover a language of agency in a sexist household has strands of English Vinglish.
The ghost of executive producer Sudip Sharma’s Kohrra 2 also looms large. There’s a bit of Mona Singh’s character in the use of the case as catharsis; her own investigation is coloured by the condescensions of a male-dominated police force. Barun Sobti plays the childhood friend here, but as in the series, he’s the only Good Guy and the catalyst of change. Baby’s findings also echo an early Sobti movie, Halahal, where the morality of the victim — and the automatic reverence towards the dead — is thrown into doubt. Since it’s a man, he is spoken of respectfully and carefully, unlike the murdered girl(s) in both Kohrra 2 and Halahal.
Despite all the familiarity and references, though, Babita Singh Reporting is very much its own entity. When done well, the grammar of everyday oppression never feels like a template; every little story is original in its own manner. Director Ambiecka Pandit and writer Amita Vyas trust the dimensions to diversify our notions of small-town masculinity and prejudice. Babita’s natural nickname is “Baby” (just like Jennifer Grey’s is in Dirty Dancing), but it’s almost as if she’s allowing herself to be addressed as a term of endearment to please everyone else at the cost of her own dignity; it fuels the entitlement of men like her boss and husband. When they call her Baby, it feels like a license to infantilise her and simulate a sense of ownership.
Despite a rushed climax, I like that the film-making resists broad strokes. It’s not just the visual touches, like the colour of masculinity infecting the walls of houses. The people here are complicated too; nobody is fully bad or good. The husband Sharad (a solid Anshumaan Pushkar), for example, displays moments of tenderness from time to time. He makes you (and her) want those parts of him. But it often feels like an abuser showing aftercare; he’s the kind of man who expects her to be grateful that he does not beat her up and punish her like other husbands. The gaslighting is normalised: all he does is remind her that he chose her despite her caste and ‘size’. There are no patriarchy-smashing epiphanies and one-liners either; her transformation feels like more of a personal arc than a social statement. The resolution is not absolute; it’s ‘baby’ steps, not some swaggy you-go-girl overhaul of her agency. There’s the usual Dussehra metaphor, but the film subverts the symbolism: the triumph of good can only happen if the demons within are exorcised first.
It says something that Babita’s pursuit of an answer contains multitudes. It’s not as simple as wanting to get to the bottom of a case in order to prove herself. She gets consumed by the need to know what really happened to him, because she is also trying to rescue herself. Like the protagonist of Shoojit Sircar’s October, who finds direction in the meaning he assigns to a tragic accident, Babita turns her curiosity about her friend’s fate into her coming-of-age device. The case starts as an escape for her until it becomes a reckoning. Babita reframes her chance to keep leaving the house as the guilt of failing the only man who ever defended her. She is haunted by Bansi’s requests to meet her before he dies, so it mutates into a crusade that shames the previous versions of her.
Credit to Sobti for nailing the ‘humanity’ of the one scene he has; it becomes the foundation of Baby’s journey towards Babita. He leaves some room for ambiguity. As a result, the more she digs into his life, the more she gets stranded on the bridge between who she is and what she wants to believe. It’s almost as if Babita is aching to know and befriend her childhood buddy better through her relentless chase. She seems to be driven by the heaviness of realising that the world has no place for noble men like him — and she stops at nothing to preserve this thought. They are spiritual siblings of sorts: people-pleasers whose goodness is exploited by those who can. What happened to him is not too different from what’s befalling her. Both are humans who have been slowly erased by the indoor erosions of plain sight, not external attacks: by the quiet responsibility of loving, not the loud spectacle of surviving.
Babita Singh Reporting cements the reputation of Nimisha Sajayan as India’s finest young actor. She has the most remarkable of faces: a life-face, not a cinema-face. Watch it closely in any of her roles, and you can sense the cumulation of being rather than the expression of doing; you can’t tell if she’s glaring in rage or observing from a cage. Her ‘Baby’ continues a series of female characters who internalise their marginalisation to a degree where exploding is the only option left. Even the way Baby moves and runs feels like she’s been conditioned to carry her weight as a burden, not a body. The explosions here pose as two memorable breakdown scenes: one as a cop who keeps hitting dead ends, the other as a friend who recognises the futility of closure. In the process, she lays bare the question that nobody is willing to ask: is it really a crime if everyone is looking? It’s an extraordinary turn, one that changes the tenor of the title. “Reporting” morphs from an official salutation of duty into the sound of registering her presence — and whispering truth to power.