‘Black Warrant’ review: It’s the little things that make this Tihar series sing
Vikramaditya Motwane and Satyanshu Singh's series is a dense, fascinating look at the closed world of Tihar jail in the 1980s
“People say prison is a trashcan, but it’s really a circus,” DSP Tomar (Rahul Bhat) tells his new jailers. Black Warrant suggests that hangings are the circus’ circus. The sentenced are celebrities of the prison world. The visiting hangmen are celebrities for the Tihar staff. Inmates become nervy; reporters start asking questions. Everyone’s on edge—all except ASP Dahiya (Anurag Thakur), grinning broadly as he massages banana pulp onto a noose.
The best Hindi streaming shows of the past few years are carefully built from the ground up, the longer runtimes allowing for more complex narratives but also challenge creators to populate and make believable specific universes—stock markets, village councils, counterfeit operations. I didn’t know hanging ropes were once smoothened with mashed banana. It’s not a vital piece of information; you’d miss it altogether if you weren’t paying attention for those three seconds in the second episode. But it's sort of detail that gives me confidence, tells me the makers have burrowed deep inside their setting.
The ins and outs of prison life are laid out methodically by showrunners Vikarmaditya Motwane and Satyanshu Singh and co-writer Arkesh Ajay: the division of inmates into B and C class (there is no A), the ‘numberdaars’ who act as the first line of guards, the complicated economy of favours that keeps the whole thing going. It's this brick-laying that gives the series a sense of order, even as it immediately plunges its protagonist into crisis. The first thing ASP Sunil Kumar Gupta (Zahan Kapoor) faces is rejection; the superintendent takes one look at the timid, slight man and tells him, this isn’t for you. And though he manages to get his application through, his first day is a disaster. As they meet the inmates for the first time, two men are fighting over the right to say they killed a snake on the grounds (it can take 15 days off your sentence—another terrific detail). Tomar is about to dismiss them when Sunil suggests they look into the matter. One of the inmates is affiliated with a gang—Sunil’s instinct is that the other caught the snake. He’s chasing after the ghost of justice, while everyone else is thinking about power and pride. Tomar spells it out a little later, yelling over the clatter of weaving machines, “The most fragile thing in jail is reputation.”
This is the pattern for the series. Sunil tries to find the just angle in a situation and inevitably makes things difficult for the exasperated Tomar and his fellow ASPs Dahiya and Mangat (Paramvir Cheema). Dahiya, played with brash delight by Thakur, is the anti-Sunil, a cussing, meat-eating Haryani to his formal, vegetarian self. Mangat is a quieter presence, troubled by the situation back home in Punjab; of the three jailers, he’s the one we know least about at the end of seven episodes.
This series isn’t about just any jail—it’s specifically a look at Tihar in the early 1980s, based on Sunetra Choudhury and Sunil Gupta’s nonfiction book, Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer (2019). Home Minister Zail Singh turns up in the first episode for a surprise inspection. The execution of killers Ranga and Billa is the subject of the second. We see how the events of 1984 affect the Sardar gang and Mangat (the episode starts with the Sikh inmates gathered in one cell, one of them defiantly singing at the guards, interrupted by news reports of Blue Star and Indira Gandhi’s assassination). Sunil goes on a date that could be out of a Basu Chatterji movie. And then there’s Charles.
When Charles Sobhraj materialises in the first episode (he really just… appears) to help Sunil out, I assumed he’d be a big part of the show. Instead, Motwane and Singh do something unexpected. Charles is their wildcard, turning up once an episode or not at all, sought out by Sunil only when he needs to pull levers he can’t reach. Tihar’s celebrity prisoner, Charles is treated with kid gloves by the authorities, whom he keeps in line through blackmail and bribery. Sidhant Gupta makes weird and wonderful choices with his performance, giving Charles an unplace-able accent, a movie star’s vanity, and a disregard for personal space that makes his every conversation with Sunil gleam with seduction and menace.
The stories that play off more recent flashpoints are a bit awkward. In the third episode, over 200 protesting students from JNU are put in jail. It goes nowhere interesting; the kids are nervous left-y types, in deliberate contrast to Garvit (Kamal Batra), a quick-witted student inmate from Shri Ram College of Commerce who gets a lovely subplot with a young researcher. The execution of Kashmiri separatist Maqbool Bhatt is also handled gingerly—no politics, though showing the dignified Bhatt playing badminton with Sunil is a nice touch.
Motwane directs three episodes and hands the reigns to Singh, Ajay, Ambiecka Pandit and Rohin Raveendran for the rest. It’s a less expansive series than his last one, Jubilee, but with the same burnished look and an agile score. There are a dozen memorable performances—and Kapoor’s earnestness grounds it all—but I was particularly taken by Bhat as the wary, weary Tomar, who keeps telling his subordinates to stick together even as his real family is disintegrating. I’ll end with a character we see only a couple of times, a B-class prisoner, played by Amit Jairath, who works as a typist. While dictating, Sunil notices him wince and massage his fingers. When asked the reason, the man says that he was once tortured to extract a false confession. Is he one of the lucky ones, living in relative comfort, allowed to wear a kurta instead of jail clothes, typing the details of someone else’s hanging? Just another little detail in a show that sings because of so many little details.
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Business NewsLoungeArt And Culture‘Black Warrant’ review: It’s the little things that make this Tihar series sing
First Published:10 Jan 2025, 01:52 PM IST
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