Mumbai, India – Nimisha Sajayan delivers a career-defining performance in Amazon Prime Video’s Babita Singh Reporting, a slow-burn crime drama that shines a light on the impossible balancing act faced by women in the police force. As the titular officer investigating the murder of her childhood friend, Sajayan conveys a quiet, long-suffering intelligence that often exceeds the film’s uneven screenplay. While the big reveal doesn’t land as intended, the film succeeds in conveying the sheer scale of Babita’s struggle: she takes the blame for a media leak to attend a family wedding, faces snide comments from her in-laws, and navigates a casteist husband who boasts about being progressive while reminding her of her “lower” caste status. Meanwhile, the police system reminds her that her position is only a result of her father’s death in the line of duty.
Babita Singh Reporting is part of a growing cohort of recent Indian films and TV shows where female police officers are tasked with similar balancing acts. From Geetika Vidya Ohlyan and Saloni Batra in Soni (2018) to Shefali Shah and Rasika Dugal in Delhi Crime, Raveena Tandon in Aranyak, Sanya Malhotra in Kathal, Sonakshi Sinha in Dahaad, Shahana Goswami in Santosh, and Bhumi Pednekar in Daldal, these characters are trying to do the right thing despite being representatives of a patriarchal, heteronormative state. This new wave of female cops is a definite upgrade on previous Bollywood iterations, which often swung between unidimensional ‘sexy cops’ or officers who were just as ‘macho’ as their male counterparts.
The narrative tension manifests along the axes of caste and gender. In Santosh, the protagonist gets her job through “compassionate recruitment” after her husband’s death, only to be sabotaged when she tries to bring powerful, upper-caste perpetrators to justice. In Dahaad, Sonakshi’s character changes her last name to avoid caste judgments. In Delhi Crime, DCP Vartika Chaturvedi’s daughter sees her as part of a system that has failed the city’s women, while her subordinate Neeti Singh faces a husband who expects her to be both a fierce policewoman and a submissive wife. The oxymoron “Madam Sir” perfectly encapsulates the impasse faced by women officers, who are worn down by a social order that refuses to fully accept them, even as they fight to uphold it.
