The powerful and unsettling Paatal Lok, the Amazon Prime Video series that rightfully ranks among the best web shows made in India, kicked off with the unearthing of a plot to kill the editor-in-chief of a news channel. The show’s Season 2 opens with a gory murder. The killer opening is not the only divergence between the two seasons.
Paatal Lok Season 2 is set in a world apart. Foraying into a corner of India they know little about, Inspector Hathi Ram Chaudhary (Jaideep Ahlawat), jaded but as strong-willed as ever, and Imran Ansari (Ishwak Singh), now an Assistant Commissioner of Police charged with investigating the sensational murder of a high-profile and shadowy Nagaland businessman-politician, dive in deep, their eyes and minds open.
ACP Ansari brings Hathi Ram (who is still languishing in the Outer Jamuna Paar police station) on board because a missing person case the latter is handling appears to have a bearing on the larger murder probe. The duo lands in Dimapur and is instantly hit by a maelstrom of challenges that put them to the severest test of their careers.
Finding the culprit isn’t all there is to the sensitive outing. It also involves comprehending and processing the intricacies and angularities of a culture, society and history far removed from the ones that they are accustomed to dealing with.
Creator Sudip Sharma and director-cinematographer Avinash Arun Dhaware, aided by co-writers Abhishek Banerjee (Season 1’s “Hathoda” Tyagi), Rahul Kanojia and Tamal Sen, dexterously integrate the discovery by two outsiders of Nagaland and its complexities into the fast-paced, riveting police procedural that descends into a can of worms waiting to be disembowelled.
The brutal murder of Jonathan Thom (Kaguirong Gonmei), founder of the Nagaland Democratic Forum who holds the key to a proposed business summit in Delhi that promises to bring thousands of crores of rupees into the northeastern state, throws up a slew of questions about skewed models of development formulated behind closed doors by a handful of people with conflicting interests.
Hathi Ram, Ansari and a handful of other key characters, including the former’s wife Renu (Gul Panag), who has his hands full taking care of an orphaned five-year-old boy), and his erstwhile SHO Virk (Anurag Arora), now with the Narcotics cell of Delhi Police, serve as a link to the past.
However, the case that the doughty inspector pursues, first in response to an express order from the higher-ups and then driven by a purely personal motive, has nothing in common with the conspiracy he cracked last time around without getting any official credit for it. The narrative pans out not so much as an extension of the preceding season but as a marked departure from it.
The change of location and, to a certain extent, personnel – one significant addition, Kohima Superintendent of Police Meghna Barua, is portrayed by Tillotama Shome – perceptibly impact the substance and spirit of the show.
One might perhaps quibble that Season 2 does not possess the psychological crackle and sociopolitical sweep of a stuck-in-a-rut policeman’s collision with the nexus between Delhi’s influential swish set and its dark netherworld peopled by men and women who have nothing to lose.
But by no reckoning does the Nagaland chapter, crafted with finesse and efficacy, lack potency.
The plunge into a region that is rarely, if ever, depicted with veracity and empathy by makers of Hindi movies and web shows, is a worthwhile risk. It pays off.
Within the fractured spectrum that Nagaland’s political schisms and socio-economic fissures open up, Sudip Sharma creates an involving thriller that generates intrigue and sucks the audience in.
Hathi Ram expectedly hogs the limelight, part of which he shares with ACP Ansari and SP Meghna Barua, but it isn’t the two Delhi cops who are the only ones who matter in this story in which spectres of the past haunt a region fighting to put its many fractures behind it.
The script has ample room for an array of important and secondary characters who complete the snarled picture engendered by a political system and law and order machinery that snuff out individuality, tear families apart, rob youngsters of hope and leave them seething with anger.
Each of the women here – Rose Lizo (Merenla Insong), caught in a spiral of messy relationships, brazen exploitation and drug addiction; Asenla Thom (Rozelle Mero), Jonathan’s conflicted widow; Grace Reddy (Theyie Keditsu), wife of the super ambitious special adviser to the government Kapil Reddy (Nagesh Kukunoor); and Esther Shipong (Mengu Suokhrie), supervisor at a rehab centre is doomed to pay for the sins of men.
And then there are the men themselves led by Reddy, an ambitious Hyderabad native who has made Nagaland his home. The spotlight is also on the slain Jonathan’s estranged son Reuben (LC Sekhose), headstrong and violence-prone.
Reuben Thom represents the restlessness of the state’s youth aggravated by violence and receding hopes of a turnaround. Rage also fuels the actions of a sniper on the prowl (Prashant Tamang), a man who has scores to settle. He asserts that you must kill only when you have no other choice. He clearly does not adhere to that adage.
At the other end of the spectrum is the ailing Rongthong Ken (played by filmmaker Jahnu Barua), who wishes to see the proposed business summit in Delhi materialise no matter what.
What plays out in the microcosm that these individuals inhabit reflects larger truths about morality and greed couched in the pretence of service for the greater good.
Like we did in Season 1, we encounter (in Delhi and Kohima) drug peddlers, hawala operators, petty criminals and migrants struggling to survive on the margins.
Hathi Ram and Ansari are brought together by two unrelated cases that intersect – the Naga politician’s killing and a Bihari migrant’s disappearance. The two cases prove hard to crack and take a toll on lives that matter to Hathi Ram. A sense of guilt compels him to throw caution to the wind.
Jaideep Ahlawat is completely subsumed by Inspector Hathi Ram Chaudhary that it becomes impossible to separate the actor from the character.
Ishwak Singh delivers another stellar performance. The woman Tillotama Shome plays is a tad underwritten but that does not hold her back a whit.
The biggest plus point of Paatal Lok Season 2 are members of the cast who are drawn from the Northeast. They lend diversity and authenticity to the show by helping it seamlessly incorporate many tongues – Assamese, Nagamese, Hindi and English.
They bring the narrative alive and add colour and depth to the disturbing, universally resonant drama of revenge and self-aggrandisement.
The bar was set so high in Paatal Lok that the new season has had to press every little detail and element into service so as not to fall short. That the team gets as close as they do to replicating the quality of the first season is itself a marvel.
Watch Paatal Lok Season 2 because it is nothing like what has gone before but is just as transfixing.
#Good #Season