A 17-year-old girl walks into a police station. Her name is Meenu Rawat, but anonymity is going to be her shield. Her anxious parents try to lodge her complaint. But the first hurdle is a sign of things to come. A devout officer going around distributing prasad to his colleagues puts a sticky ladoo in her hand. The girl is paralysed with fear. The sacred sweet not only reveals the permeation of blind faith in a law enforcement space; it also reminds her of a trust betrayed. By her elders, who admitted her into a god-fearing school run by a spiritual organisation. By the teachers and parents, who were too brainwashed to question their holy ways. By a middle-class culture that forces its citizens to seek refuge in the flowery proverbs of dodgy orators. And by the beloved godman, who preyed on her under the guise of a ‘purification ritual’. Meenu, a minor, breaks the gaze of the sweet, regains her numbness, and places herself in the sticky hands of a system that normalises poisoned apples. The family takes all night to file a sexual assault report against the cult leader, Sunil “Baapji” Chakosi. And it’s only the beginning.
This first scene of Hunkkaar: The Roar is shaped by a sense of foreboding. Not just tonally, though. For the average viewer, the genre is in an age of overkill; that it qualifies as a ‘genre’ speaks volumes of a nation that sees abuse as a common theme. Most social dramas these days (Assi, Daayra) are centered on it, but they are consumed by either opportunism or rage. The victim or survivor often carries the burden of having to be an all-in-one totem of anti-establishment angst; of having to expose institutional rot from behind the umbrella of gender violence and patriarchy; of having to be symbols that demand accountability from leaders and men in a testosterone-drenched country. What this pressure does is reduce the central figure — and their horrifying experience — to a binary medium that explores a wider chasm. Just as they become political pawns in the real world, they become narrative surrogates in movies and shows.
But Hunkkaar, like this year’s Kohrra 2, stays aware of these contradictions. If anything, it leans into the invisibilization of identity: by wading into the aftermath of a familiar crime that revolves around everything but justice. There are long stretches where Meenu Rawat disappears or remains a mute observer, even as the ‘adults’ use her life as a catalyst — a Nirbhaya-coded emblem — for personal and cultural awakenings. The three allies, who believe (in) her, are all minorities of their own settings: a rookie female cop (Fatima Sana Shaikh, as ACP Jasleen Singh Soin), a down-and-out lawyer (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, as prosecutor Bhalerao), and a bleeding-heart news anchor (Arjun Mathur, as Amitabh Sinha). Each of them is an underdog swimming against a toxic tide; they fight the good fight, derive closure within their own homes, and form the triangular dimensions of the case. But I like that, despite their efforts, the spotlight is ultimately yanked back onto Meenu Rawat: a human who resists the permanence of a metaphor; a woman who refuses the responsibility of a hashtag.
In essence, Hunkkaar is that rare beast: a well-performed and intuitive Hindi series that mines the uncomfortable fence between procedural reality and public perception, between deep-rooted prejudice and disruptive truth. It’s alive to the India we live in: the escalation of trials by morality and media, the twin towers of power and intimidation, the inconvenience of courage, and the slow erasure of innocence (until proven guilty). The writing expands on the shapeless irony of the ‘role’ played by the protagonist. It’s one thing that Meenu has to concede the stage to the guardians of her spirit; it’s almost like she’s the unsung hero in the arcs of the lawyer, cop and journalist, not the other way around. But it’s another thing altogether that she is the one made to feel like the criminal too.
Meenu spends much of the series masked in a dupatta to protect her identity. She is shunted from one safehouse to another with her parents and forced to begin again, as if she’s on the run from the law. She is under police protection, but her imprisonment is total. Every move is scrutinised, and even if she so much as steps out for street food, she is judged for “not behaving like a rape victim”. You’d think Meenu were the predator accused of violation; the series doesn’t shy away from dwelling on the contrasts of the dynamic. The guru’s arrest under the POCSO act is mourned by his devotees, he is worshipped in jail, reporters and followers hound the girl, and those who question him bear the brunt of the masses.
Hunkkaar also has the unique distinction of dismantling the perfect-victim syndrome. Meenu, like the victim in Kohrra 2, is subjected to the usual character assassination; her ‘sins’ involve underage drinking, a forged driving license, and affinity towards a male teacher. But once her family is put under the scanner, the screenplay dares the audience to see one wrongdoing as evidence of another; the moral ambiguity of the father, in particular, is held against the credibility of his daughter. Similarly, ACP Jasleen is not free from professional mistakes; Bhalerao’s textbook idealism is at odds with his competence as a lawyer; male saviour Amitabh Sinha’s TRP-fuelled arrogance stands in the way of his crusade. Not all of them are likeable, and their desperate actions haunt the legitimacy of the case. It’s as if Meenu is paying the price for being normal, not flawed.
The craft of Hunkkaar is a rare win for a story so contemporary. Unlike most shows, the filmmaking isn’t of the director-for-hire variety; it doesn’t merely exist to keep the narrative moving. The close-ups of all the tics and fidgety hands supply the nervy body language of the story. The shot-taking is ambitious — like the camera tracking out from a guest’s face through a glass door and switching focus the moment we reach the two faces discussing him. The montages are nicely conceptualised: like a voice-cut of social media trolls (“liberandu” sounds worse when heard), or the dystopian sight of multiple news channels parroting the same terms (“we are unbiased, but…”) and brief supplied by the overlords.
Some of the dramatic touches flirt with indulgence. For instance, a collage of dead witnesses reading out their own statements in a stage-play aesthetic (soiled hands stifle their mouths); the timeline jumps between the bail hearings and the main hearing; the location-agnostic plot points; or a series of murders being intercut with a mosquito-swatting boss. But the background score — a repeat offender in social entertainment — is wonderfully composed. It’s not every day you hear the images and see the sound of an environment. The music doesn’t tell us what to feel so much as internalise the mindspace of the characters; it’s placed to punctuate people, not explain scenes. It’s all orchestral strings and pianos, reflecting the interplay between tension and tragedy.
The premise overcomes its chinks, because the courtroom drama feels rightly detached from the outside world. Regardless of the time lapses, there’s an exacting rhythm to the case that reveals the toll it takes on everyone involved. The arguments are sharply observed, but infused with the frustration of navigating a system rigged against those who cannot afford to wait. A heartbreaking sequence features Meenu sitting blankly in court — watching her own truth being dissected and argued by strangers — a night after being ghosted by a classmate who couldn’t handle the stress of being her new friend. In most stories, the two would’ve found love in a hopeless place, but the bond is cut short before they even dare to dream. In most cases, the witnesses on stand would awaken from their slumber or be intimidated into cowardice, but here there’s one who remains brainwashed despite her friend Meenu’s reasoning. There is no female solidarity. It’s a neat touch, because she lays bare the cult mentality without the series judging her; “it’s not her fault, this is her truth,” the level-headed prosecutor tells an anguished Meenu.
The choice of antagonist is another interesting aspect of Hunkkaar. At first, it feels like Baapji (whose abbreviation reads as BPJ) is a safe choice. A sinister godman always leaves room for broad strokes. From hit shows like Ashram to movies like Kartavya, even questionable performances can be passed off as performative intent. Perhaps the prospect of a societal postmortem is deeper if the offender were the founding editor of a political magazine: the sort of conflicting figure that draws out rape apologists and conspiracy theorists who conflate ideology with character. In context of the story, this is the equivalent of a celebrated liberal like Amitabh Sinha on trial. But a leader like Sunil Chakosi is the more cinematic version of entitled men who treat their intellect as a drug for consent. His colourful ruse, and therefore his audacity, is easier to fathom: the vile finger that Meenu mentions in her official statement is the finger that silences and sways. Raghubir Yadav is impactful as this monster; the public image of Baapji ties into Yadav’s quirky-harmless-patriarch roles, so the plausibility of the crime is harder to process.
The cast is perhaps the strongest suit of the series. Nearly every actor — across primary and secondary spaces — is at the top of their game. Fatima Sana Shaikh delivers a restrained turn as the cop, almost as if she knows that Jasleen’s reactions are more important than her agency; she’s an extension of the character who cannot afford to hijack Meenu’s journey. There’s nobody like Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub when it comes to playing upstanding men in modern Hindi cinema (Scoop, Real Kashmir Football Club), which is funny, given his debut as the murderous Delhi creep in No One Killed Jessica; the prosecutor here dispenses plenty of ready-made wisdom, but Ayyub is the only one who can make it sound convincing.
We spend years taking veterans like Rajesh Sharma for granted, so it feels rewarding to single out his performance as Meenu’s father: an Indian man humbled between religious devotion and parenthood. His daughter accuses the man he worships, so his disillusionment is in a constant state of flux. Sharma is responsible for some of the show’s most moving scenes: like the patriarch’s feral breakdown when he hears the lawyer — in their first meeting — admit that he believes the girl. The response is a startling mix of relief (because someone does) and shame (because he didn’t); Sharma exudes this subtext the second his chest crumples.
Finally, there’s Aneet Kaur Padda, whose meteoric Saiyaara fame is in danger of concealing her talent as an actor. She knows her craft; the stardom is almost incidental. Hunkkaar was shot before Saiyaara, but in an age of curated careers and manufactured charm, there’s something about her presence that’s natural and untrained. Take her dialogue delivery, for example, where the impetus is on the dissonance of feeling rather than the intonation or clarity of speech: somewhere between Alia Bhatt and Radhika Madan. It makes you wonder — and not question — why Meenu Rawat is different from the rest; why she sees sense that others cannot; why she’s not as indoctrinated as her classmates.
Meenu’s ‘mask’ becomes her identity over time. Padda works with her eyes alone to cement the superhero allegory (evoking Split’s “the broken are the more evolved” quote) — until the climactic monologue, where her vulnerability liberates her from the duality of victimhood. It’s a memorable scene: even as Meenu gears through rage, fear, disgust, disappointment, shame, strength, pain and rebellion, sometimes all within the same sentence. It’s like watching a girl resenting and accepting her accelerated mutation into a woman. The release unfolds like an alternate reality of sorts — an ending that’s at once actual and imaginary, euphoric and muted, truthful and wishful. The silence that follows is a stillness that Hunkkaar understands better than much of its ilk. After all, justice is no longer the currency of closure; it’s the price of catharsis.