Bihar again as crime capital in Khakee, uplifted by a strong central performance by Avinash Tiwary

First things first. As a Bihari, I am tired of seeing serials and films about Bihar as a crimeland. It’s like portraying Las Vegas for its casinos only. There is much more to Bihar than guns goons and shootouts.

Director Bhav Dhulia’s 8-episode rampage into the trigger-happy hinterland is salvaged by some sagacious writing (by Neeraj Pandey) which succeeds in providing a broadened perspective on the caste equations and the ensuing violence in Bihar. Based on the real-life experiences of IPS office Amit Lodha (played with measured intensity by Karan Tacker ), Khakee: The Bihar Chapter emblazons a lasting impression by actors who play their characters with enormous scrupulosity, thereby rendering some of the serial’s excessive trigger-happy zeal not only tolerable but even riveting.

The narrative is repeatedly massacre-prone. Bihar willy-nilly is rendered as a war zone with repetitive images of caste wars where dozens are mowed down in the name of class equality. None of the bloodbath sequences are epic in their seething exertions. The characters, though, remain with you after all the unnecessary bloodshed, specially that of Chandan Mahto, the lower-caste rebel whose rise from a politician’s goon to the master of upperclass massacre is vividly mapped by Avinash Tiwari.

I have always found Tiwari’s work to be uniformly brilliant. Here in Khakee… he rises to the occasion with an imposing fervour. The body language of a disfranchised underdog transforms in front of our eyes as he charts his own destiny as a top gun of Bihar’s underworld by killing his own mentor (Ravi Kissan, in full fuelled form).

In fact, the early mentor-pupil scenes between Kissan and Tiwari are treat to watched. Tragically Kissan’s role ends too soon. Tiwari makes sure of that.

Based on Amit Lodhi’s memoir, the writing especially in the earlier episodes is crime-tuned and filled with engaging characters like Chandan Mahto’s right-hand man Chyawanprash (Jatin Sarna) and especially Chyawanprash wife Meet (played by Aishwarya Sushmita) who is at once the man of the house and the sexy woman who knows how to have her way with men. This role is so much more juicy than that of Amit Lodhi’s wife(Nikita Dutta) who tries in vain to inject some life into her eminently clichéd role of the over-busy cop’s neglected wife.

There are hardly any women characters in this masculine meditation on mayhem energized by excellent performances. I must make mention of the unfailingly competent Ashutosh Rana who as Amit Lodhi’s senior cop has the best line on corruption in Bihar: “Idealism in the bureaucracy should be like the wife’s gold jewellery, to be taken out of the locker for special occasions and then put away again.”

Moments such as the above are so fraught with ironical humour, that I got the feeling I was in the midst of something really special here, only for the narrative to be bogged down repeatedly by images of rural violence that only have the relevance of serving as punctuation marks in a tale that tears into Bihar’s mythical crime culture.

Strangely, the story is narrated in a voiceover by the character of an honest but frustrated cop played ably by Abhimanyu Singh, although the story is told from another cop Amit Lodhi’s viewpoint. This ownership discrepancy fits in quite well with the theme of power usurpation that is such an inherent part of this serial’s Bihar.

Khakee: The Bihar Chapter is set in that awkward phase between audio cassettes and CDs when the world seemed far more chaotic than it does today. Nostalgia is not a driving force here. Crime recall is.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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