Culturally speaking, America’s great blind spot remains class. Everyone, from billionaires to hourly workers living paycheck to paycheck, likes to think they’re middle class. Yet class is coded into every social transaction, like it or not. It’s the same in India, where the caste system may have been banned by the constitution since 1950. The lowest castes – the so-called “untouchables,” the Dalits – face a system designed to keep them incapable of gaining justice, and it’s a system in which Santosh (Goswami) realizes she is now a cog.
Young and recently widowed, she finds herself with no choice but to become a police officer like her dead husband. It’s supposed to be a boon. He was killed in a riot, and she is basically offered what was supposed to be his new assignment under a program designed to support women in her situation. So she goes in with no training, a bloodstained uniform, and no clue that she’s not really supposed to investigate anything. It’s not her inexperience, but just that no one does their job, and barriers are set up to make sure that no one – especially the Dalit villagers on the cop’s beat – can even file a report. No report, no crime, even when a 15-year-old girl’s body is dragged from a well.
For her narrative feature debut, British writer/director Sandhya Suri has shifted her attention from the interface of British and Indian culture that was the focus of her first two films, both documentaries. Her first, 2005’s I for India, looked at her father’s experience as an Indian migrant to England. Her follow-up, 2018’s Around India With a Movie Camera, used archival footage taken by British cinematographers during the Raj. But Santosh is a profoundly Indian story, where the only traces of the old British occupation are men playing cricket and the sandy, military-style uniforms Santosh and her fellow cops wear.
Suri isn’t interested in making Santosh a hero, even if she is the only person with authority that is prepared to investigate the case. She’s too compromised by her own involvement in that very same system that excludes the Dalit, a job she only took for the money but that leaves her dragging mourners away as they protest the lack of police interest. As her battle-weary boss, Geeta (the excellently jaded Rajwar), puts it, everything here is an act, from pretending to care to pretending not to care. Wanna do some good? Well, if the law is unjust, then justice means breaking the law.
As a single woman who’s barely hanging on, Santosh’s complicity in the state’s cruelty has more than an element of survival to it, and Suri explores that kind of desperation with empathy. But when Santosh takes part in the torture of the only suspect – a Muslim boy, the only person lower in social standing than a Dalit – it’s harder to feel sympathy. In such moments there’s something of Claude Zidi’s César-winning dark comedy Les Ripoux about Santosh’s relationship with Geeta, as she teaches the younger woman that navigating a structurally corrupt system means getting your hands dirty and even occasionally bloody.
In such moments, star Goswami is a perfect vehicle for Suri’s understated, seething indictment of the root-and-branch corruption of this small Northern Indian town. Her performance, by turns broken and surprisingly brutal, catches the intoxication of having just a little bit of power, and the nauseating terror of realizing you’re still not that far from the bottom of the heap.
Separate from the multitudinous reasons to praise Santosh as a work of political art, there is an issue that hangs over its release. This film, made in India with a Hindi-speaking cast, was the United Kingdom’s selection for the Best International Film for this year’s Academy Award.
One cannot blame Santosh for this honor. One also cannot blame the UK for this. The absurd rules of the Academy state that, to be considered an international film, a nation’s submission cannot be in English. As a result, in the last decade the UK has submitted films in Welsh (the only indigenous language to ever have been nominated), Persian, Urdu, Bema, Chichewa, and German. It’s not unreasonable to note this makes the Academy complicit in the othering of anyone that doesn’t speak English, and also the ridiculous implication that anyone that speaks English is basically an honorary American. The absurdity of this situation, when Ken Loach’s magnificent and inspiring final film The Old Oak had to be released in the U.S. with subtitles because the accents were too thick for delicate American ears, is impossible to ignore.
Yet it’s fortunate that the UK has been able to put its international weight behind Santosh, because the film was denied a release in India by the country’s Central Board of Film Certification. It seems that its depiction of institutional misogyny, police incompetence, and the continued strength of the caste system didn’t sit well with the censors. If nothing else, that’s a sign that it’s served its purpose by hitting the powerful uncomfortably close to the bone.
This article appears in January 31 • 2025.
