Santosh review - powerful study of prejudice and police corruption

Held up by the censors in India though screened at Cannes and nominated for an International Oscar, Sandhya Suri’s 2024 film Santosh serves as a bookend to Payal Kapadia’s poignant All We Imagine As Light, about women in Mumbai experiencing less hassled lives outside the city. Suri’s heroine moves in the reverse direction. 

She is Santosh (Shahana Goswami), wife of a handsome young policeman in a state that is apparently a disguised Utter Pradesh, where the film was shot. Hers is a “love marriage”, and her grief when her husband is killed on duty at an anti-police riot is palpable. As she stares at his garlanded portrait, her head in her mother’s lap stroked by her mother’s braceleted hand, her motionless features are a study in profound sorrow. Her in-laws are no consolation: they vilify her as a cursed witch, extravagant, lazy and hostile.

These evocative opening scenes are a signal of the fine film-making to come. The handheld camera follows Santosh through busy streets choked with men on scooters, the soundtrack alive with sounds of shouting men, revving engines and yapping dogs. In the scene where the two sets of parents meet to argue stridently over what will happen to Santosh now, we see only a partial view of the room, her largely unseen mother-in-law’s vituperative dismissal of her captured in an impatient swat of her hand. We are immersed in her sound-world as much as in the sights around her. 

Soon Santosh has to explore new territory, where goats and lambs are added to the soundtrack. Arguably the best option available to her is doing “lady police work”, a delicate term that masks the reality of being a dogsbody. She is, unlike a third of the women in the area, literate, and is accepted to do the job. Now she has to grapple with the vagaries of the intensely male world of the police, which at best is condescendingly paternal, and at worst, viciously misogynist. In a ripe exchange between two policemen, one compares his milk-less buffalo to his wife, as “two at home with teats”, both useless, he implies, to laughter from the other cop. Santosh sits silently listening, her eyes widening.At first sight she has an ally, Geeta (Sunita Rajwar), an older policewoman with an authoritative manner and wryly cynical approach to her work. Just how cynical Santosh will discover when they are given a case of a missing teenager, Devika, who has been raped and killed and thrown down a well. As she is a low-caste Dalit, traditionally used to do the filthiest jobs, often in sewers, her illiterate father is given short shrift by the police, who force him to crouch at their feet and advise him to pay the itinerant cobbler-come-scribe 50 rupees to write up a report. Santosh, enraged by her their dilatory and insensitive approach, is encouraged by Geeta to lead the pursuit.

The hunt closes in on Devika’s Muslim boyfriend Saleem (Arbaz Khan), who vehemently protests his innocence, with Santosh pulling the net tight and triggering a tragedy. But she becomes a media darling, credited with tracking the killer, unaware that she was left to take the lead by officers unwilling to be seen to fail in making the arrest. And she learns disturbing things about Geeta’s working methods. Her superior may advocate equal roles for women to the TV news cameras, but it’s progress that will come at a price. Closer to the truth of Geeta’s views is that policewomen are neither touchables nor untouchables in Indian society, just performers playing the role of servants. 

During this performance, Santosh discovers, a woman can misplace key elements of her femininity, the traits that make her a person of integrity. In the final scenes she casts off her trousered uniform, lets her flow loose again and returns to wearing a sari and shawl as she heads to the big city. When a little beggar girl sells her a pack of biscuits, she divests herself of her nose-jewel too, a symbol of her married, potentially submissive state.Suri, a documentarian in the past, captures scenes of atmospheric authenticity, richly detailed in depicting the threadbare lives of these rural areas, where bodies have to go to a morgue with no electricity, and the body must be positioned on a large block of ice. The daughter of a bicycle-shop owner, Santosh stands in an ambiguous place in this pyramid caste system, as is neatly encapsulated in a scene where she is offered a beaker of water at the village elder’s house and can’t bring herself to drink it, having seen the fetid conditions of the local well. 

The script carefully weaves all the prejudices of the various factions together: the police inspector who claims young women’s liberalism, their jeans and phones, has led to the upsurge in rape cases; the Dalits, who see the poisoning of their well with dead animals as the work of the upper castes; who in turn accuse the Dalits of poisoning their own wells to gain attention for their cause.

The tensions among the castes are on open display. Official punishments may be immediate and peremptory: a young man caught in a tryst with his girlfriend by Santosh has to stand outside, where she orders him to do 20 squats, saying sorry to the girl with each one. Few have privacy. The police conduct interviews outdoors, surrounded by milling dogs, for all to overhear. Most of the officers “on duty 24/7” seem to be men gathered gossiping around tables. Geeta demonstrates her status by sitting joshing with them, her body language expansive. 

Absorbing all around her, Santosh initially becomes louder, adopting a sterner voice and a harsher attitude; a performance of a police officer, indeed. But by the close, she is again showing that powerful stillness that’s barely a pressure cooker of unspoken emotions. Goswami is superb, but it’s a film full of minutely nuanced performances with a compellingly sombre message. 

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