The Berlin Wall, Eastern Europe, 221B Baker Street, Manhattan, Hudson, Thames… crime suspense films often take us on a virtual tour to these destinations. But India as a backdrop has remained relatively ‘untouched’. But Homi Adajania’s Murder Mubarak (2024) based on Anuja Chauhan’s novel Club You to Death, brings crime suspense home to India. The film is about a murder that takes place inside an elite club in Delhi, the investigation into which leads to another murder and uncovers dark secrets beneath the masks of its splashy members. Says Chauhan, “For me, my fiction was very much my thing. I wasn’t trying to please anyone.”
Just to flashback a bit, Sharandindu Bandopadhyay and Satyajit Ray had created the fictional characters Detective Satyanweshi Byomkesh Bakshi and Private Investigator Pradosh Mitter (Feluda). Both were educated young Bengalis who used their intellect and common sense to unravel mysteries in Calcutta, Jodhpur and Varanasi in Chriyakhana (1967), Sonar Kella (1974), Joy Baba Felunath (1979) and more recently in Detective Byomkesh Bakshy (2015). But these have been the exceptions. Reason? The trade demands of force-fitted dance numbers, redundant romance and other loud fillers violate the fundamental tautness of narrative that this genre demands. Not to speak of the dilution of the investigators’ personality from an intellect-led one to a routine cardboard cut-out one.
But a few Indian commercial filmmakers have sincerely tried to bring back the fundamentals of crime suspense thrillers with India as the backdrop. In Khamosh (1985), member after member of a film unit shooting at Pahalgam in Kashmir gets murdered in the locale’s magnificent streams, trees and boat houses. Is the sleepwalking Shabana the culprit or is it the womanising film producer Dayal? In Rahasya (2014), the 18-year-old daughter of a doctor couple is found dead in a plush Mumbai flat. More murders and chases in the bylanes of Mumbai happen. But wait, don’t the throats of the victims appear to have been slit with surgical precision? The mystery of Kahaani (2012) begins in the nether of Kolkata metro and surfaces to the labyrinth of overground traffic signature yellow taxis and tea shops. Finally, inside an oceanic mass of Durga Puja revellers, the dots between a psychopathic contract-killer, a non-existent character, and a corrupt intelligence official connect.
The period film Death in the Gunj (2017), set in 1979, was even more significant of this ‘homecoming of crime’ as it was an English language film set in McClucksieganj—a small town in Bihar where a group of family and friends head for a getaway. But the simple soul Shutu gets bullied and teased mercilessly by the more flamboyant members of the entourage. Does Shutu die? Or does he continue as a living nightmare?
While box office reception to Kahaani was impressive, the others enjoy a cult status, giving young filmmakers the confidence to invest more in this genre, and bring their stories ‘home’ to India.
Balaji Vittal
Film commentator and author
Posts on X: @vittalbalaji