Babita Singh Reporting

Babita Singh Reporting is about a suspended sub-inspector who visits her hometown and gets obsessed with the murder case of a childhood friend. The town has secrets, sinister undercurrents and suspicious characters: a grieving wife with burn-marks on her hand, a resentful brother, an ex-flame with bruises on her face, a shady driver with a scar, the mystery of a red car, a nosy neighbour who knows more than he should. The miffed locals taunt the officer as the “sympathy hire”. She goes through some life-or-death experiences. A man unleashes his vicious dogs on her; another threatens sexual abuse; she is brutally attacked by a gang of junkies; she smashes a car into a pile of bricks; she climbs into the heart of a Ravana effigy minutes before a Dussehra blaze.

‘इतनी स्वीट बनेगी न, तो खा जाएंगे…।’ भोपाल के एक पुलिस स्टेशन में तैनात ए.एस.आई. बबिता सिंह को उसकी साथी समझाती है। पर बबिता या तो समझना नहीं चाहती या फिर हालात उसे यह समझने नहीं दे रहे हैं। पिता की मृत्यु के बाद अनुकंपा के आधार पर उसे यह नौकरी मिली है। इसीलिए उसे कोई सीरियसली नहीं लेता है। बॉस की नज़रों में उसकी काबिलियत रीलें शूट करने और लिखा-पढ़ी के काम से ज़्यादा नहीं है और घरवालों की नज़र में वह एक ऐसी नौकरी कर रही है कि उन्हें किसी को बताते हुए भी शर्म आती है। बबिता खुद को साबित करना चाहती है-नौकरी में भी, घर पर भी। कर पाएगी वह? दो हफ्ते के लिए सस्पैंड होकर ननद की गोदभराई के लिए दो साल बाद अपने होमटाउन रीवा पहुंची बबिता को उसके बचपन का दोस्त बंसी मिलता है। वह उससे कुछ कहना चाहता है। लेकिन अगले ही दिन बंसी का कत्ल हो जाता है। कातिल भी पकड़ा गया है मगर बबिता को लगता है कि पकड़ा गया शख्स बंसी का कातिल नहीं है। कौन है कातिल? क्यों हुआ बंसी का कत्ल? क्या बबिता सच का पता लगा पाई? क्या वह खुद को साबित कर पाई या फिर…?

Nimisha Sajayan in Babita Singh ReportingIn 2021, The Great Indian Kitchen — a genre-defying, gender dynamic-defining Malayalam film — brought patriarchy to the forefront in ways both casual and conscious, with its scathing social commentary highlighting the invisible, exhausting and unacknowledged labour in the domestic space that most women in our kitchens, and outside it, are still subjected to. Nimisha Sajayan walked away with the spotlight in the film — symbolised by that triumphant walkout at the end — with her character, who is simply credited as “The Wife”, reclaiming autonomy and rejecting the status quo. In many ways, The Great Indian Kitchen, directed by Jeo Baby, feels like a companion piece to Babita Singh Reporting, the new Prime Video film, that stars Sajayan as its protagonist.

Babita aka Baby is your average Indian woman, trying to navigate politics at the work-place as well as in her domestic sphere. It could be the story played out in millions of households, but the thing that makes this film different is that Babita is a cop, elevated by circumstances into her position. The fact that hers is a ‘compassionate posting’ keeps coming up: a death in Baby’s family empties up a spot at the police station, which she steps into, with her colleagues expecting her to earn her place over and over again. The fact that it parallels her home situation, as a wife and daughter-in-law, is not hidden either: dutiful bahus are expected to fill empty spots day after day, to keep the family happy.

On paper, Ambiecka Pandit’s Babita Singh Reporting is a standard police procedural. The film, streaming on Prime Video, revolves around a pliant, under-confident sub-inspector who is suddenly thrust into a murder investigation in Madhya Pradesh. Again, on paper, this is a film that follows the Indian crime drama template of foregrounding the efforts of an underdog cop going against all odds to solve a crime. The identity of the killer becomes such a film’s purpose and point. But on screen, Babita Singh Reporting is really a character study of the subservience that consumes women whole. The murder investigation happens to just be the means to an end. It is, put simply, the anti-police procedural that makes a case for a genre that has been juiced so dry by Indian streaming that it has become its own aesthetic.

Babita Singh (Nimisha Sajayan) or ‘Baby’ as colleagues, friends and family call her, is the last person one might look towards to deliver justice. Daughter of a cop who died in the line of duty, Baby was given her father’s job on compassionate grounds. A deputy to a greasy cop, SI Sethi (Rajesh Kumar), who asks her to shoot a ‘reel’ making an entrance on his motorbike in the film’s first scene, Baby would do well to simply hold on to the job. And yet, by sheer curiosity, she finds herself days away from being a part of on-field investigations, moved from mundane paperwork at the station. It’s unusual because Baby has been raised to be a generous, stoic Indian woman – (relatively) caged in her domestic life, where her agency comes with a million terms and conditions. She willingly subjects herself to patriarchy, like it’s a badge of honour