As you watch Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, you can feel it crawl under your skin and make its way into your blood, hastening its pace until your heart is in your throat and you can taste steel. As you watch Santosh, you can feel it possess you, so much so that when you walk out after the credits, you feel blood on your hands.
The film follows 28-year-old Santosh, played with a quiet resilience by Shahana Goswami, as she attempts to stay afloat in the aftermath of her husband’s death in a rural area of Northern India. Santosh’s marriage was a love marriage, she deeply cared for her husband, but his family never liked her, and they refuse to let her stay on with them. Her husband was a police constable who died while working a riot — a protester felled him with a brick. A rule dictates that an officer’s spouse can inherit their position in the event of their death. Facing the loss of her independence and livelihood, Santosh takes on the job.
Suri is gimlet-eyed as she follows Santosh as she learns the workings of the police force. We look over her shoulder as Santosh peeps around corners and witnesses officers taking bribes from civilians who want to punish those who have wronged them; watch her face become delicately confused, working to understand, when superiors seem not to care about crimes committed against those of a lower caste. When a 12-year-old Dalit girl is reported missing, Santosh’s superiors seem not to care enough to find her until she is found murdered, and public outcry rightly levels the charge of casteism against the force. (The caste system, or social hierarchy, though officially abolished, still impacts cultural life, how people see others and make considerations of what a person ought and ought not do, has and doesn’t have a right to; the Dalit people are at the bottom of the hierarchy.) To protect itself and maintain its legitimacy, the force brings in a female detective, Sharma (played with a searing force by Sunita Rajwar), to investigate the girl’s death. Sharma takes the fledgeling Santosh under her wing, detecting in her the makings of a good investigator, and the two work together to apprehend the girl’s murderer.
Suri doesn’t explicate systemic corruption so much as she allows it to materialize before us with an almost pedestrian cadence; Suri has us learn about Santosh’s society in a way that feels, for lack of a better word, easy, as though it’s all we’ve known. Suri’s skill here is jaw-droppingly deft. It’s almost as if she places hazy filters before our vision one after the other, and they pile up until prejudice bleeds so heavily into fact that the light of what was once objective reality becomes a dappled collage of lived reality, pulled in all directions by various and conflicted understandings of truth and right. Bias, baked as it is into the workings of the police force, becomes learned, becomes rote, and as Suri has the film become Santosh, and as her thinking is wired into us by Suri’s diligent perspective work, the biases almost threaten to become ours. This film is a masterclass in laying bare how sinister ideology becomes espoused.
Ahead of my screening of the film, Suri said in a taped introduction that her film was “dense,” and as I have thought about Santosh since, I have found the word “dense” to truly be the best way to describe it. The film slices into Santosh’s life and, without taking pains with dialogue, exposition, or heavy-handed explanations, simply shows us what it is like to be one woman among many in India. One of Suri’s earlier films is a documentary from 2018 called Around India with a Movie Camera, and it lets life in India reveal itself over the course of 50 years. Suri finesses this mode of “letting emerge” or “revealing” in Santosh, quite literally following her fictional character here around with a movie camera to let the densely-packed layers of social and cultural mores emerge intuitively, as they would for a person a part of Santosh’s society, as they would for a person raised by such social and cultural mores.
Often we feel as though we are Santosh, or are sitting next to her. In one of the film’s most impactful scenes, Santosh, as she is searching for her suspect, stops for lunch at a restaurant. As she eats, she watches a man sitting across the room from her staring at her with an unfaltering, sleazy gaze. Santosh eats with an even pace that slowly hastens, until she is shoveling food into her mouth; when her cheeks have filled, she lets the chewed-up mush spill from her mouth in a steady stream. The man, only when disgusted by her grotesque show, looks away. It’s such a beautifully choreographed scene of the predatory gaze under which women are endlessly locked, in India and pretty well across the world, only limned in relief as Santosh militates against it.
Santosh and Sharma’s prime suspect is a Muslim boy who was trying to court the murdered girl, and they pursue him with the driving conviction that he is guilty without much evidence other than that the two texted. Suri carefully lets slip that the riot Santosh’s husband was policing was a religious protest — Muslim people in India are fairly persecuted, and it is intimated that the riot was in a Muslim neighborhood. A rickshaw driver says something offhand to Santosh — that it was likely a Muslim rioter who killed her husband — that sows a prejudice into her that emerges in small waves at first in her conviction that the Muslim boy is the killer, and then crests into a tsunami by the climax.
Suri’s brilliance is that she shows us the incredibly persuasive heft of prejudicial logic, how easy it is to fall into its charm, how once in its thrall, it has the potential to reward with catharsis in ways that rational thinking, understanding of systemic violence and colonial hangovers, simply can’t. This film is a masterpiece for how Suri has us become Santosh wholly — we understand her indignation, we applaud her stands against violent misogyny, but we also feel the greasy evils, such as corruption and Islamophobia, take hold of us, too, as they slowly take hold of Santosh.
By the film’s end, after the terrible deed of the climax has been done, justice ostensibly served, Santosh, feeling calmer after finding an outlet for her anger at the injustice that led to her husband dying in the line of duty (a lack of protection and proper protocol), takes a step back and sees the powers working around her. The systems, whose unjust cadence she learned at the film’s beginning and whose prejudiced rationality, which it used to justify its power, became a part of her, continue to work unabated to treat symptoms and not causes, continue to be corrupt and throw innocent people, society’s most marginalized, to the masses so that they can feel like justice has been served, continue to commit crimes unchallenged. Santosh’s brilliance is that it makes us feel culpable — it first has us feel persuaded by the easiness of prejudice, only to afterwards have us see that we have been beguiled. It has us see how injustice is served, feel a part in serving it, and only then does it allow us to understand what we have witnessed, what we have done. Suri’s film is a masterpiece for how it makes legible those who are under the sway of injustice, by making us one of them.
