‘Black Warrant’ Series Review: A Smart, Subversive And Self-Contained Jailhouse Drama
Vikramaditya Motwane’s well-performed series on Netflix swims against the tide
Directors: Vikramaditya Motwane, Satyanshu Singh, Ambiecka Pandit, Rohin Raveendran, Arkesh Ajay
Writers: Vikramaditya Motwane, Satyanshu Singh, Arkesh Ajay
Cast: Zahan Kapoor, Rahul Bhat, Paramvir Cheema, Anurag Thakur, Tota Roy Chowdhury, Rajendra Gupta, Sidhant Gupta, Rajshri Deshpande
Streaming on: Netflix
Black Warrant, created by Vikramaditya Motwane and Satyanshu Singh, is a sprawling seven-episode series centered on the lawlessness of Delhi’s Tihar Jail in the 1980s. Based on the book Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer (2019) by Sunil Kumar Gupta and Sunetra Choudhury, it unfolds from the perspective of its co-author and former superintendent Gupta. A baby-faced Sunil (Zahan Kapoor) arrives as one of three new recruits at the notoriously short-staffed Tihar. It’s a space seething with primal angst: 1300 inmates, including 1000 undertrials and a handful of rookie officers, occupy a complex made for 700.
There’s a class and caste system, unchecked violence, gang wars, drug trading and police complicity. Sunil, an outsider, recognises its corruption and chaos. He tries to change things. Every episode is structured around different real-life incidents and cases — a botched hanging; the execution of a separatist leader; a student jailbreak; a hunger strike. All along, there’s the lingering presence of an infamous criminal on the premises.
Black Warrant is skilfully written, performed and crafted. It’s not hard-hitting so much as casually unsparing. Unlike most Indian streaming productions, it can be processed at two levels. First, through the lens of its subversive relationship with cinema. Whether it’s that iconic shot of an inmate exiting the iron doors of Central Jail or the echoey “sazaye maut (to be hanged till death)” verdict pronounced in court, the lock-up is an inextricable device of commercial Hindi film. But it’s often been more of an exotic world — a passing symptom — that supplies primary arcs of cops, gangsters and everything in between. This series not only humanises and destigmatises a “colourful” setting, but also reveals itself as a workplace drama. The part is now the whole.
Jail is an office of sorts, where the employees are cursed with the threat of permanent employment. A hanging acquires the tension of a do-or-die project, complete with last-minute ‘adjustments’. A stolen blanket leads to a budget blame game. A misplaced landline call is the catalyst of a romance. An affair with the boss’ wife triggers a spat between buddies. A poor accountant is made a scapegoat. A student researching the facility falls for a dashing undertrial. A reporter has her interview interrupted by a law-graduate jailer. The superintendent loses his mind on discovering that his beloved vegetable garden was used to hide drugs.
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This chasm between reality and fiction is all the more pronounced, because Black Warrant is set in an era coming off a spate of angry-young-man and cop-driven potboilers. Sunil confesses that he dreamed of joining the force after getting inspired by Dharmendra’s supercop Sunil from Ankhen (1968). His love interest ‘proposes’ bashfully via another Bollywood-coded reference, reminding him that Dharmendra also played an inspector named Sunil in Boy Friend (1961). To convey the fame of the two veteran executioners, they’re called “the Rajesh Khanna and Dilip Kumar of the jail universe”. The three gangs of Tihar — the Haddis, Tyagis and Sardars — are given an intro-montage with a retro score. ‘Bikini Killer’ Charles Sobhraj gets a stylish entry shot and a bunch of musical cues. A jailbreak adopts the pulpy-flashback tone of a heist.
Yet, despite these influences, the series keeps teasing our mainstream conditioning. It rarely resorts to easy tropes and resolutions. For instance, one expects the girl that ‘prank-calls’ Sunil to be a sneaky journalist who’s trying to exploit his naivety. But it never happens; this cross connection is genuine. One expects the corrupt superintendent, Rajesh Tomar (an in-form Rahul Bhat), to be a Shawshank Redemption-coded villain. He’s apathetic to the plight of those around him; his opportunism drives Sunil to the brink. But the nod to Tomar’s broken personal life implies that he has no choice. The full antagonisation never happens. Ditto for Sunil’s Haryanvi colleague, Dahiya (a scene-stealing Anurag Thakur), who starts off like the typically crass sidekick destined to die a gruesome death. Or his Sikh colleague, Mangat (Paramvir Singh Cheema; in Tabbar mode), who’s so haunted by domestic problems that he hits all the notes of a tragic alcoholic. But the lid stays on the pressure cooker. The explosions never come, as if to prove that no amount of storytelling can liberate the inmates — including the officers — from the unsparing nonfictions of prison.
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There is also no room for plot twists or dramatic character fates. At times, this beat-less journey can make for a difficult viewing experience. There’s no emotional hook. But all it needs is a little perspective shift. When the story is in its telling, the focus turns to the inherent suspense of everyday living. The little details feel bigger. Like the panicked face of a doctor, and the reactions of the supervisors, when the pulse of an ‘executed’ inmate refuses to stop. Or the voice of a man when he confronts his wife’s oblivious lover. Or the jailers almost concealing the rowdy mechanisms of Tihar from a visiting minister — until the very last moment. Or even Sunil’s defeated eyes when his superior accuses him of caring for the prisoners too much.
The non-cinema extends to how the historical details of the decade don’t just exist as period and production-design markers. The Indian cricket team’s 1983 World Cup win is written into the drama; the guards are too busy listening to the radio to heed a silent attack in the yard. The 1984 Anti-Sikh riots play a key role in turning Mangat against a system; his brother getting radicalised and leaving home punctures Mangat’s ambivalence. Moti Mahal takeaways become a bargaining tool with superstar resident Charles Sobhraj (I can’t tell if Sidhant Gupta’s big swings — as Nehru in Freedom At Midnight and now as an oddly metrosexual Sobhraj — are great or terrible; this, in itself, is the victory of camp). An old employee too tired to cook after long days is seen talking about a Maggi packet. A glimpse of an ‘Ideal Boy (Adarsh Baalak)’ comic strip in a character’s room hints at his evolution. The Ranga-Billa case — which results in Tihar’s first execution — not only ends Sunil’s suspension, it irrevocably alters his relationship with the job. The series treads the tricky line between perceiving the offenders and condemning the society that creates them.
Zahan Kapoor, as Sunil, capitalises on the promise he showed in Hansal Mehta’s Faraaz (2022). Perhaps his remarkable screen face is rooted in his lineage: he’s the grandson of Shashi Kapoor and great grandson of Prithviraj Kapoor. But Kapoor turns his diminutive physical frame into its own performance; he makes the head — full of emotional intelligence and adolescent spirit — look older and wiser than the body. There’s a lot of pantomime stage prowess in how he walks and talks; he nails the West Delhi twang, and even though he loses this twang in subsequent episodes, it doesn’t affect our reading of him. Sunil’s growing sense of agency doesn’t follow the patterns of a regular underdog story. His principles aren't unshakable. He doesn't hesitate to snitch out a friend to save his own livelihood; his alt-masculinity approach is hardly pristine. He finds himself selling out when he needs the funds to do something noble. His transformation is messy, yet it's also not romanticised. He has to work within the system, regardless of how repulsed he is. Sunil’s struggle to open a legal aid clinic for impoverished convicts brings to mind the sheltered virtue and entrepreneurial spirit of Ranbir Kapoor in Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year (2009).
The true impact of Black Warrant, however, emerges through the lens of its political identity. Many euphemisms are used to describe Asia’s largest prison: “a trashcan, where jailers are the lid” or “working here is a double life sentence”. But every department of film-making combines to paint this Tihar as a microcosm of a post-partition, newly independent India. The concept of a controlled, self-sufficient and locally governed complex is only a concept; the reality is a free jungle where it's still the survival of the fittest. Prisoners, like citizens, keep multiplying only to divide themselves into factions; a uniform is all that separates them. At one point, SI Tomar, like a self-serving administrator, resists giving into the demands of a protest because “today they're asking for blankets, tomorrow it could be free will”. From canteen bill scams and supply rackets, Tihar is very much a country begging to be streamlined and rebuilt. Sikh prisoners streaming into the complex in 1984 evoke India’s role in the Bangladesh Liberation War. The glimpse of a peacock, the national bird, becomes a sign of hope in the “filth”.
The title of the show, Black Warrant, refers to the death sentence signed by judges. Over the course of its seven episodes, the title comes to represent something more specific to this act: the symbolic breaking of the nib of the pen that signs the dreaded document. While it signifies the tradition of never re-using a pen that signs a life away, the series politicises — and expands — the meaning of this practice. As Sunil answers in his interview, it perhaps alludes to the breaking of a chain of social oppression and genetic victimhood. In the kingdom of Black Warrant, Sunil is a Nehru-coded socialist hero who sees everyone as a product of their circumstances; he’s like a Raj Kapoor protagonist in an Amitabh Bachchan environment. Sunil doesn't set out to expose the illusion of order and justice; he starts out of compulsion to be a breadwinner. He goes from earning a living to organising the prose of punishment. His patriotism is a consequence and his idealism is flawed; he learns to compromise in the process, trading his chaste habits (he abandons his vegetarianism and cusses like a sailor by the end) to be an effective ‘manager’.
In a way, the entire series is about a man who signs the black warrant of a tumultuous and self-cannibalising India. He breaks the nib. But a wonderfully wry final scene suggests that becoming a sovereign democracy isn’t enough — the dysfunction persists. The ink never dries. A series like this is defined by the irony that, as we stand today, the faulty chain powers newer and slicker cycles. Guardians like Sunil have run out of pens.