Black Warrant: Right Answer to A Crucial Question

Tihar Jail is a prison complex which is one of the largest complexes of prisons in India located in Tihar within Delhi. Black Warrant, helmed by the talented filmmaker Vikramaditya Motwane, takes us on a journey inside this prison to show what exactly goes on behind the walls. Black Warrant, a seven-part OTT series released on Netflix is based on Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer co-authored by jailer Sunil Kumar Gupta and journalist Sunetra Chowdhary.

The story unfolds from the point of view of Sunil Kumar Gupta (Zahan Kapoor) from the point he steps in for the face-to-face interview for the job of ASP in Tihar Jail. He is taunted right through the interview because he lacks the physique expected of a jailor, appears timid, diffident and nervous. He does not get selected. The other two candidates, portrayed brilliantly by Paramveer Cheema as the Sardar and Anurag Thakur as the Harianvi bring across the multiple shades in their characters extremely well. The disappointed Sunil is both surprised and happy when a tall, handsome and very charismatic man (Siddhant Gupta) helps him get reinstated. When a curious Sunil asks around who that English-speaking, suave man is, he learns it is Charles Sobhraj. The film ends when Charles Sobhraj escapes his five-star cell just after the assassination of the then PM Indira Gandhi in 1984.

The story begins with the preparations for the hanging of Billa and Ranga for the killing of Sanjay and his sister Geeta Chopra in August 1978. The flashbacks of the brutal killings and rape are cinematographed in grainy Black-and-white which gives it a texture of a past and also softens the brutality. The hanging takes place in January 1982 and the series begins a little before.

Black Warrant is a journey about the toughening up of the soft-natured, tender and shy Sunil Gupta, a staunch vegetarian who could not utter a single maa-behen gaali and is taunted by his two colleagues for this. For such a soft-natured young man, it is a big challenge to stand and watch the hanging of the two killers, never mind the brutality of their crime. But he begins to train himself to gain a strong physique, practices swear words and cuss words in secret followed by practicing it on the prisoners. By the end of the series, Sunil Kumar Gupta has grown in confidence, in stature and in strategy which pushes him to open a Legal Aid cell for prisoners who do not have the funds to appoint lawyers to fight their cases.

As the aged Saini (Rajender Gupta), the jail accountant says, “most of the prisoners are under-trials behind bars for years with their cases not having reached the courts. Many of them are suspected of being innocent but have no means to fight their cases.” Sadly, the same Saini is falsely accused of corruption in order to save the actually guilty Head Jailor Rajesh Tomar (Rahul Bhatt) and his boss (Joy Sengupta) who have cut down on the number of blankets to be given to each prisoner and pocketed the difference themselves. The jail librarian is a doctor who hired two killers to have his wife killed for a meager sum of Rs.500. The two killers are hanged but the doctor gets to meet his lover secretly in the prison every week in exchange for a handsome agreement with the jail staff and the two killers.

Tomar is corrupt, true, but he also takes care of his staff each one of who is open to violent attacks by the prisoners. He has created a small garden in the jail complex and handles it himself. He does not quite like it when Sunil begins to question him but does not make any attempt to undermine or punish him.

Each of them is quite unhappy in their personal lives. Tomar’s wife has walked out of with the growing daughter. Mukhopadhyay, the Jail Super (Tota Roychoudhury is brilliant) has a very unhappy married life. Cheema becomes an alcoholic because his brother has become a rebel back home and the happy-go-lucky Harianvi guy was having a torrid affair with Mukhopadhyay’s wife. Sunil Gupta’s girlfriend Priya leaves him in the end.

The entire series is strongly character-driven and the incidents naturally emerge out of the characters and their interactions, revealing layer by layer, the toughening up of Sunil Kumar Gupta with Zahan Kapoor bringing off the most outstanding debut-performance in recent times. The tragic struggles of the prisoners where there are already three gangs at war with each other, one involved in alchohol smuggling, one pushing drugs through the prison and a Sardar gang as well, all with the connivance of the top prison brass who take their cuts from these behind-bars dealings. Sunil, however, brings radical changes in the prison environment by the time the series ends on an open note without being judgmental about anything or anyone.

The production design is wonderful, beginning with Tomar’s well-furnished office, through Charles Sobhraj’s three-star room with posters and cut-outs of his crimes, down to the lower middle class home of Sunil and his parents and the prison cells with their dirt, the simmering anger among the prisoners and their desperation to get out.

The music and the sound design are excellent and so is the razor-sharp editing which cuts through the scenes like a sharp knife but softens in the scenes within Sunil’s middle-class home with the neighbor who begs for some “prison food”.

Why does the judge break the nib of his fountain pen after signing the death warrant of a prisoner? Black Warrant might just give you the right answer!!!

(The author is a film scholar. Views personal.)