‘Kohrra' Season 2 Series Review: The Masterful Return of the Social Procedural

There is no dearth of slow-burning crime dramas in India. Every other show is a gloomy police procedural with an identical template: one gory case, two mismatched detectives, personal lives that reflect the subtext of the whodunit, and an investigation that doubles up as the postmortem of a country. The anticipation of the twist becomes its own cat-and-mouse game between the film-makers and the audience. The genre fatigue is real; it’s easier to blend into this fog of atmospheric puzzles than stand out. But Kohrra 2, much like Kohrra (2023), manages to do both at once. You sense the genre was invented for stories like these — stories where even the red herrings are just as socially valid as the reveal; stories where every detour supplies different shades of truth; stories where a place unfolds as an accumulation of time and not an isolated setting; stories where noir is nothing but reality persevering. It’s exceptionally staged, performed and written: a masterclass in suspense as a subset of cultural curiosity rather than narrative momentum. Its one-hour-long finale is close to television perfection. And it trusts the oppression of blending in over the tragedy of standing out.

On the surface, the plot is all too familiar. Like the first season, it opens with an NRI found dead at the crack of dawn. Only this time it’s a woman named Preet (Pooja Bhamrah) in the fictional town of Dalerpura. Enter Amarpal Garundi (Barun Sobti), the newly married officer in search of a new beginning. After working under Ludhiana sub-inspector Balbir Singh in Kohrra, Garundi finds himself assisting SI Dhanwant Kaur (Mona Singh) for this case. A sullen Kaur has returned from a year-long suspension; Garundi is intimidated by her. The two dig in and learn that Preet was spoken of as the quintessential “problem woman”: messy, unapologetic, mercurial. Nearly every man in her life had a motive: the unfaithful husband (Rannvijay Singha) she had left behind in the US, the slut-shaming brother (Anuraag Arora) whose home she sought refuge in, the shady lover she had taken in Dalerpura, even her brother's in-laws who often threatened him for being careless with his inheritance. The consensus is that Preet troubled society with her audacity and rage; she dared to break on her own terms.

Kaur and Garundi follow these leads, fuelled by confirmation biases. The usual suspect is patriarchy. The signs are scattered across the investigation. When one of the suspects is nabbed, he rats out his girlfriend only to be informed that she refused to do the same. In the flashbacks, we see that Preet was slapped by her husband and brother on separate occasions. She is violently pushed in a lovers’ spat. A man speaks for his wife before sending her inside (she stands behind the metal bars of their window) and telling the cops that Preet was characterless at best; he insists that he cannot speak ill of the departed before doing precisely that. You’d think Preet is being maligned because she’s not there to defend herself; her ‘mistake’ was that she refused to defend herself when she was alive.

The cops’ own lives reflect it too. Kaur’s superior treats her with kid gloves, all but admitting that hers is a pity appointment (compare this to the recent Daldal, where obnoxious male colleagues joke about gender quotas). When Kaur complains about Garundi early on, the chief asks her to forgive his “human errors” just like she was forgiven by the department; even Preet’s emotional husband throws in a “men slip up” while describing his long marriage. Similarly, an otherwise-muted Garundi puts on a show of casual sexism the moment he’s in public; “one boss at home, another at work,” he quips, like a WhatsApp uncle inciting chuckles at a get-together. When his doting wife invites his sister-in-law to stay with them, Garundi throws himself into work so that he can stay out of the house and avoid reminders of their torrid affair; his self-preservation instincts prevent him from empathising with her situation. Even Kaur’s domestic identity stems from a distrust of male entitlement. She is the breadwinner of a faded household, but she can’t stop herself from blaming her husband — his drinking, his fatherhood, his inherent privileges — for the death of their only child.

Basically, the writing frames the more overt symptoms of North Indian conflict: land disputes, toxic masculinity, internalised misogyny, caste pride, dysfunctional families. At one point, the father of a suspect insists that his son is a good person because he doesn’t do drugs; Garundi scoffs at the irony of a Punjabi man claiming moral high ground for not falling prey to its most documented crisis. One of the episodes, called “Three’s a Crowd,” expertly reveals this dynamic across the board: Garundi and two women in his home, Kaur with a ghost of a man and her memories, cheating husbands and their mistresses. But that’s the smokescreen of Kohrra 2. These are the headlines we are more conditioned to recognise: ‘mainstream’ issues that tend to erase the plurality of prejudice. It’s about auditing the legacy of generational scars; it’s also about acknowledging that every region is the fragment of a country constantly in motion. Which isn’t to say they’re narrative gimmicks or implausible scenarios; it’s just that none of them are allowed to exist as a secluded entity. The series is so steadfast in its excavation of Punjab that each trope feels like a shovel unearthing ancient artifacts of trauma. Writers and co-creators Sudip Sharma, Diggi Sisodia and Gunjit Chopra craft a narrative where systemic rot cannot be viewed in a vacuum; it’s a land tethered to its storied past, shackled to the very history that partitioned its spirit.

The clues were always there. But our struggle to see them stems from the invisibilisation of accountability and context in public discourse. Take, for instance, the manner of Preet’s murder. Her body is found impaled on a vegetable cutter (pointing to perhaps a gendered and domestic angle), but it’s in a barn where cattle are caged and fed. Think of the many cattle allegories that are revised in the sunny Punjabs sold to us by commercial cinema. Think of the chains that hold those whose lives are expunged in a nation where minorities are vilified and pitted against other minorities; there is a hierarchy to oppression just as there is a pecking order of power. The zoom-out is slow but steady. The two cops chase the case, covering demographics that range from the social media generation to the gatekeepers of Sikh traditionalism. But unfolding in the shadows is the seemingly unconnected journey of Arun, a Jharkhandi worker in search of a father who left home as a bonded labourer 20 years ago. The anti-migrant tensions run still and deep in this ‘parallel’ story of feudal slavery and loss. This thread may seem specific to Punjab — and it is, for anyone who’s read about its volatile relationship with outsiders and reclaimed identity — but it also speaks to the national malaise of marginalisation and dehumanised communities. At first Arun’s quest feels like a separate film, but the convergence is almost poignant. It becomes the beating heart of a show that’s more interested in the consequences of geopolitical decay.

In other words, the investigation evolves into a portrait of a place that cannot outrun its past. It’s easy to blame the errant bullets when the triggers were faulty to begin with. There are designs of this. A prime suspect harbours a strong antagonism towards the police force, because he’s a monster moulded by the carnage of the mid-1990s insurgency. Both Garundi and Kaur, too, mirror the motif in their private arcs. His shame — of betraying a brother and sullying his home — drives him to start afresh with a wife unaware of his ‘human errors’. But his past haunts him through the circumstances of his sister-in-law’s visit; the consequences continue to bleed into his future. Ditto for Kaur, who spends her post-work hours picking up her drunken husband from shady bars. She’s so haunted by grief that she often parks her car at the site of the accident. Even the ingrained patriarchy of the landlords is linked to their trivial ownership of humans. More than one character believes that they do their servants a favour by keeping them alive and fed: a trait not too different from the way they see women. It’s like watching a story that spans generations sieved through a single crime. The twist is that modern-day Punjab is a coming-of-rage protagonist posing as the vintage hero.

The craft in this season is more concerned with the humanisation of these themes. There are pockets of levity to offset the scale of the narrative. One of the chases through Manali is playfully scored to Sukhbir’s iconic dance anthem “Oh Ho Ho Ho,” as if to tease the rest of India’s cliched perception of Punjab (as well as the cops who work the case through the lens of this image). Another source of humour is Garundi’s banter with his subordinate (I could hear Barun Sobti say “G*ndu” all day), and his nerves around Kaur. She scolds him for not following protocol a couple of times, so he tries to be mildly funny around her for validation; it’s not comedy for the sake of laughs but character-driven humour. It’s why their better moments revolve around Garundi’s unpretentious gestures — like the way he reflexively hands her water every time she throws up. He sees the ugliest parts of her life but observes without judgment, seldom offering any advice until he’s spoken to. Sobti brings a calibrated sense of compassion to Garundi this season — you can tell he’s willing to change, but not in a not-all-men sort of manner (his Halahal character walked so that Garundi could run). He’s still the guy who slaps his forehead when he blurts out “women are crazy” to his female boss; he’s also still the guy who expects his sins to go away if he ignores them long enough. In Dhanwant Kaur, he’s rephrasing his ideas of seniority and womanhood after the doomed tryst with his sister-in-law. Mona Singh extends her golden run with a performance that straddles the line between victimhood and survival. She wants to see herself in Preet, so her main-character energy limits her ability to look beyond herself as the one wronged: a conceit that also echoes through the central case.

I like that there’s no real demarcation between the cops’ personal and professional selves. They function and behave like people who struggle to compartmentalise. Unlike in other shows, you can tell that they make the commute from their houses to work every morning and carry emotional baggage; every decision is influenced by what they might have seen earlier in the day or week. Again, this ties into the show’s language of treating any disease as more of a genetic defect than a sudden infection. Which brings me to the most significant triumph of the bilingual series: the casting (by Nikita Grover). Every single role, no matter how big or small, is perfectly represented. All the characters look like they’re on their own trajectories — consumed by the toll of living and breathing — until they collide with the investigation. It’s one of the great ensembles of Indian long-form storytelling, in the league of Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story.

Two ‘supporting’ turns knocked the wind out of me. Both of them are male characters aching to be seen. Prayrak Mehta’s Arun, the Jharkhandi migrant worker looking for his father, is a young man so bent by discrimination that he appears physically and intellectually diminished. Mehta’s performance is incredibly felt, turning Arun into an unstable son who is replicating the fate of his father without quite realising it; he’s been shackled for so long that freedom itself feels like a form of abuse. And there’s Pradhuman Singh Mall’s Jagdish, the husband of Dhanwant Kaur, who defies binary labels of masculinity. Jagdish is racked with guilt, and everything he does becomes a cry for help. As a man, he expects the camera to follow him, jostling for its gaze, but it’s too busy processing the grief of his partner. He is responsible for the show’s most memorable scenes — all of which feature a ‘release’ of sorts, almost as a way of hijacking a story that conspires to treat his trauma as a footnote. Arun and Jagdish are essentially mirror images of each other from opposing social brackets. Yet they’re leashed in the same kind of barn: away from the eyes of the world that searches for motive in the mayhem of culpability; away from the view of an India that’s wired to interpret darkness as blindness. After all, is it really a murder if nobody's looking? Is it really a crime unless somebody is killed?