Black Warrant

Jailers, convicts and undertrials populate Black Warrant, a seven-episode Netflix series created by Vikramaditya Motwane and Satyanshu Singh and produced under the banner of Applause Entertainment. Barring occasional detours beyond its prison setting, the show remains firmly focussed on an upright, unassuming jailer navigating a corrupt, insensitive system. It provides a sprawling overview of Delhi’s understaffed and overcrowded Tihar Jail of the 1980s from the perspective of a real-life prison superintendent. The insider’s take sets the series apart from average yarns about cops and crooks, crime and punishment. Black Warrant is no yarn. Rooted in reality, it portrays the intense struggles of a hero who is anything but a boilerplate man of action. He isn’t a cocky, hyper-masculine, strapping crusader out to flatten everything in his path.

In the 1920s, a young George Orwell was posted in Burma, as part of the Indian Imperial Police. In a famous essay titled A Hanging — written, in all likelihood, from lived experience — Orwell describes the morning of a prison execution. His unnamed narrator contrasts the minutiae of prison life with the moral shock of capital punishment. “It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man,” he writes. There is a touch of the young Orwell in Sunil (Zahan Kapoor), a rookie jailer finding his feet in Tihar, Asia’s largest and most dreaded prison. Set in the 80s, Vikramaditya Motwane and Satyanshu Singh’s series is based on the non-fiction book Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer. The real Sunil Gupta, who co-authored the book with journalist Sunetra Choudhury, was a former superintendent of Tihar, while doubling as its press relations officer and legal adviser. In his decades at the jail, Gupta oversaw the execution of several high-profile criminals, including Delhi child murderers Billa-Ranga and Kashmiri separatist Maqbool Bhat. He spoke candidly to Choudhury about his experiences. Once you put a face to the stat, how long can you look away?

For all intents and purposes, Sunil Kumar Gupta (Zahan Kapoor) is not a good fit for Tihar jail. He has a slim build and his oversized uniform hangs loosely on him. He’s grown a moustache to mask his lack of depth in an institution fuelled by testosterone; Gupta is too stuck in his ‘decent’ ways to even inadvertently cuss. He refers to his mother as ‘Mumma’ – a seemingly ordinary-but-revealing detail about his dynamic with her and how he’s been raised. He’s called ‘Baby’ by family members and neighbours – a detail almost trying too hard to sell his obvious displacement in Tihar.