‘Raakh’ Series Review: A Decent but Distant Delhi Crime Drama

Two teen-aged siblings wait at a bus stop on a rainy day. The sister is on her way to sing at a radio station; her brother accompanies (and annoys) her. They are offered a lift from two strangers in a fiat. They accept, but do not return. The panicked parents inform the police. The investigation is led by rookie SI Jayprakash; the kidnapping case soon morphs into a gruesome murder case and a nationwide manhunt. This search is intercut with the ‘adventures’ of Babu and Rajjo, the two criminals, in the days leading up to the abduction. These are separate timelines a week apart, but they run parallel to each other in how the police trace the escalating journey of the killers; the present must catch up with the past before the crime enters the future. Either way, they become a definitive moment in history.

The image of two children taking a lift in the rain remains etched into the cultural fabric of a young nation. Given that Raakh is loosely based on the infamous Ranga-Billa case in 1978, you might say that the 8-episode series shares a universe with Black Warrant, the Netflix show that sees the aftermath of this moment through the lens of a Tihar jailer in one of its episodes. But Raakh is actually the ancestor of Delhi Crime (2019), the Richie Mehta-helmed procedural inspired by the 2012 Nirbhaya case. Both are haunted by the ghosts of an empty bus stop, and both introduce fictional cops into an ‘adapted’ story. More importantly, both shows are centered on canon events of a city at different stages of (d)evolution.

If Delhi Crime grieved the mutation of Delhi from cautionary silhouette to dark shadow, Raakh maps the social transition of the city from place to adjective; from urban wilderness to wild civilisation. It’s essentially the origin story of the capital-sized notoriety we know and fear today. This is where it all began: the irreversible “time” in Once Upon a Time. That’s not to say there weren’t monsters and men before the case. It’s just that the fear and paranoia surrounding this crime changed the perception of the city to an extent where the residents themselves began to internalize it. The irony being: the two madmen in question weren’t from Delhi, they simply arrived and inextricably distorted the DNA of the region.

The metaphor sounds clunky when it’s spelt out by the pensive protagonist: “not long ago, it was possible to see deer and other beasts in these areas…” (and his journalist friend completes the obvious prompt with “and now we see the beastliness of humans”). The characters speak like they are aware that they’re in the midst of a history-altering tragedy. But it’s more effective when the New Delhi of yore is drawn out from the visual and narrative details. For instance, an early scene shows the two kids, Sahil and Suman Arora, missing the bus home and taking a lift from (decent) strangers. You expect the worst, but it’s a normal act of kindness. They’ve done it before. Suspicion lies in the eyes of the modern beholder; new-age viewers are inclined to wonder why the father didn’t drop them. It says something that most of us are brought up to doubt the most innocuous of gestures. But it’s almost as if the scene itself doesn’t know that it’s a prophecy of the darkness ahead.

The reactions of the authorities, too, suggest that this is an inflection point for a country still coming to terms with the trauma of its adolescence and the psychological consequences of the partition. It’s not just the fact that the cops aren’t technically equipped to deal with such primal acts of violence. You can tell they haven’t encountered something quite as brutal in everyday life. It’s the debut of class rage as we know it: where the abandoned sections of society seem to use Bollywood’s angry-young-man and anti-establishment tropes as a ruse to target the upper echelons and empower themselves in the wrong ways.

It’s why, unlike a Delhi Crime, the series chooses to devote so much footage to the murderers. It’s to reveal the architecture of madness that nobody within the country saw coming, because they were too busy battling external threats. That the victims are children of a retired army-man — a 1971 war hero at that — further bolsters this subtext. The “hum do hamare do” (we two, our two) plastered on the bus stop is a potent detail. The popular family-planning slogan feels like a cruel reminder of a law-abiding family whose two kids are taken away. And it acquires a sinister edge when one of the two men is suspected to be a casualty of the forced sterilisation campaign during the Emergency. As a result, his savagery emerges as a last-ditch reclamation of masculinity.

This silent epidemic of marginalisation and oppression extends to the show’s choice of hero. In reality, the military had a role to play in the nabbing of the two killers: a lyrical end to a tragedy that started with the shattering of a defense-forces family. But fiction looks for a more rounded sense of commentary: the complicity of the ‘system’. In keeping with the streaming landscape, Raakh opts for an underdog sub-inspector, Jayprakash (Ali Fazal), who himself is a victim of caste discrimination within the force. The reservation of it all is implicit to the script. I wouldn’t call it Delhi-police propaganda, because it’s a man trying to crack the case despite the institution. He has a fraught relationship with his father (Rakesh Bedi), a retired constable who continues to wow the police station with his mutton dishes to stay visible and maintain equations with his former bosses. He’s a man who has accepted that merit is a myth for those like him, in stark contrast to his son, who resents him for ‘currying’ favour.

The tension between father and son is one of the more perceptive aspects of Raakh. There’s an exchange between them that brings to mind Murad’s spirited defiance to his subservient dad in Gully Boy. Jayprakash is studying for his civil-services exams when the case lands in his lap; he is constantly in a battle to prove himself to an SP (Dibyendu Bhattacharya) who likes him but struggles to take him seriously. It’s a nice subplot, especially because Jayprakash is the counterargument of the criminals he’s after; he refuses to succumb to his circumstances. His mantra reflects this: “the real fight is to not lose hope”. It’s not the most original motif, but it’s effective in the context of this story’s telling. It doesn’t take long to register that his subordinate is Muslim, as is his girlfriend.

As fundamentally solid as Raakh looks, however, there is a sense of structure and convention about it. It’s as if the series derives its cinema of grimness from a genre that already exists. Once the first few episodes lay the ground for a chase, the novelty of this world is replaced by the familiarity of a ‘setting’. To echo its theme of social scale, the goodness of Raakh belongs to the second tier. Each of its tracks is a level inferior to the corresponding portions in the genre’s best titles. The track of the criminals feels a bit filmy and, at times, unnecessary: a rung below the one in Paatal Lok (which shares director Prosit Roy). The track of the reporter (a miscast Anshul Chauhan) is a rung below the ones in Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story and Scoop. The track of the manhunt is a rung below the ones in Delhi Crime, Poacher and Paatal Lok. The staging of the city as a predator is a rung lower than the one in Khauf. Even the grief of the parents (Aamir Bashir, Sonali Bendre) is executed a few rungs below the core of Trial By Fire.

A show like Raakh shouldn’t be comparable by design, but the difficulty of watching it isn’t entirely earned. It’s more attached to the facts it adapts, not the truth it explores. Of the cast, Akash Makhija and Ramandeep Yadav have the more eye-catching roles as the depraved Ranga-Billa surrogates. They’re both fine; a light-eyed Makhija, as the psychopathic Babu, has a Vijay Varma-coded vibe going, though Yadav has the more complex trajectory from petty-thief cowardice to cold-blooded assault. But it’s hard to get over certain decisions (like the explicit depictions) and the creative dependence of the series on them. I get the intent, but the characterisations become a device of shock value to offset the linearity of the case. I like Ali Fazal’s portrayal of SI Jayprakash; there’s an emotional frenzy about him that supplies the stakes of needing a win. It’s a performance that could’ve sustained a full-fledged police procedural, with only passing implications of the demons he pursues. But Raakh doesn’t trust the unseen and the unsaid; it settles for the literal, a cardinal mistake for a ‘horror’ show. What else can justify Jayprakash’s girlfriend reminding him that “light” (prakash) is part of his name?

The series does well to stay rooted in the anatomy of crime in a pre-technology and early-forensics era. I often find it fascinating to watch the grammar of a 1970s investigation — the analog-styled reliance on instinct, landlines, paperwork, radio alerts, wanted posters, witness sketches, press leads, and the sheer toil of tracking the randomness of human nature. But period texture is the bare minimum for a show of this caliber. There has to be more than a final voice-over (as an article, of course), along with the crutch of curated conversation (“how did they think they’d get away?”) and verbal thought-bubbles. Perhaps we are wired to expect more. The closest Raakh comes to more is when it offers an alternate reality of the bus-stop incident. It’s a lovely little touch, one that bottles the wistfulness of a Delhi that nearly lived — and an India that almost happened.