The rot at the heart of Rohit Shetty’s Singham Again is not what you think it is. It is not the tired plotting, the exhausted acting, the cameos that stack up like a house of cards that should have toppled tiers ago, the repetitive direction, or even the forceful, joyless retracing of the Ramayana with a quick seed thrown at the abrogation of Article 370—and how “Naya Bharat Ka Naya Kashmir” does not have any disgruntled, stone-pelting youth. It is par for the course in a filmography that refuses to divorce violence from justice because violence is the bedrock of Shetty’s imagination. He cannot give a woman her honour back without blowing through a few SUVs. The machete is his love language. The man is his muse.
The rot at the heart of this film, and the others from this series—Singham (2011), Singham Returns (2014), Simmba (2018), and Sooryavanshi (2021)—is a counter-intuitive one. That these films do a disservice to the very thing they purport to be in service of: the police force.
DCP Bajirao Singham (Ajay Devgn) tames a drug dealer in Srinagar, and as retribution, his wife (Kareena Kapoor Khan)—from the Ministry of Culture, who helps put up a shrill, stuffy Ramlila play—is kidnapped. In the Singham films, we always get the sense that for the police, the personal is procedural; it is often a loved one who is kidnapped or raped, and this paves the path for broader justice.
Singham’s wife is taken to Sri Lanka, which requires Singham to become Rama, find his Lakshman in the Kalaripayattu-flexed Satya (Tiger Shroff), his Hanuman in Simmba (Ranveer Singh), Garuda in Sooryavanshi (Akshay Kumar), and a dangling Lady Singham (Deepika Padukone), left without a Ramayana parallel because you can never have too many devotees and also because this is how the film builds on the epic text—not by playing with it, but by heaping a story already burdened with squelching faith with even more of it. More devotion for the blind. Cripple the film with love.
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As a literary text, the Ramayana is as allusive as it is elusive. In Maryada: Searching for Dharma in the Ramayana, Arshia Sattar notes that in the text dharma is sukshma, or subtle, “present[ing] the individual with more than one equal and legitimate choice… dharma is about a multiplicity of appropriate choices, that when we choose one way of being over another, we will as often be wrong as we are right”. To see Rama dwell in the interstices of dharma and adharma as a literary conundrum keeps it alive. The moment it is resolved as a religious text, it slumps down dead. With this film, Shetty extends the life of that death, built on the carcass of police pride.
Soon, though, it becomes clear that Singham Again is actually a film about how inefficient the police force is. That in order to do their work—maintain law and order, give people the illusion of safety—they need to be mythically strong, touched by righteous rage, and imbued with godlike powers. The ranks of policemen, in hordes of jeeps and vans, always arrive late, often after the star officer Singham has already dispensed with the anti-social elements; as the force arrives, the punished men have been pummelled to their knees, needing only to be handcuffed. This keeps happening. It is Rama or nothing.
The film pushes the actual police into the background and yanks a hero front and centre. Without these heroes, the force is shown as uniformly pathetic and powerless. At best, they are an entourage, flesh given space on screen. A police station even gets broken into and burned down because the head cop, Lady Singham that is, is asleep elsewhere.
To be a functional cop, then, one has to be divine. To do your duty, you need to be a hero. The institution will not suffice, the laws from which it was birthed and within which it is circumscribed will never be enough. They say that we should not strive for a world of heroes but for one where heroes will not be necessary. The presence of a hero implies the presence of a persistent problem that institutions cannot dissolve, that only mythical muscle can.
“To glorify the police, as Singham Again does, by using the same things that make them broken—unchecked violence—is to see the police not as broken but as fundamentally okay. What is broken, then, is our expectations.”
Heroism does not elevate the mundane; it insists on its own exceptionality. To see a hero as relatable or someone in whose mould one can be cast is to see the failure of the hero film. Distance is what it craves because it is from this distance that it can yank devotion, and it is from such devotion that heroism is edified. So, by making Singham a police officer, such films do not elevate the police force so much as concede that the police need a hero to succeed.
This is the complication that undercuts these films. The easiest thing to do is to see its politics for what it is—corrosive—and use that to diminish the film itself. To see the vigilante violence of the actor, deem it problematic, and so resolve the question of the film’s validity. In his essay titled “My Generation: Anthem for a forgotten cohort”, Professor Justin E.H. Smith complicates this by saying: “To identify some work of art, literature, or entertainment as problematic is… simply to taint public perception, to inform readers or viewers that enjoyment of the work in question will likely result in some sort of subtle social sanctioning. It is a weasel word….”
I would not go so far as to call “problematic” a weasel word, but instead I call it a framework, a way of entering a work of art. The word is not one that necessarily describes the work of art, but it is a way of entering it that forecloses other entrances.
What Smith is advocating is a more unresolved grappling with art. To see Singham Again is to realise how a genre can be so deeply corrosive that it can hollow its very intention. That Rohit Shetty has long moved away from the initial instinct of putting the police force on a pedestal to putting himself on it, his streak of rancid artistry, his stamp of approval.
The police force as an institution is broken. To glorify the police by using the same things that make them broken—unchecked violence—is to see the police not as broken but as fundamentally okay. What is broken, then, is our expectations.
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When the Marxist poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini calls student protesters “on the side of reason” and the police “in the wrong”, it does not contradict his poetry, where he sides with the police because, unlike the students, they were the “sons of poor people”. He sees the police both as an idea and as a people. To divorce the police from this flesh of life then is what is problematic.
I think of this moment from Anand Patwardhan’s 2011 documentary Jai Bhim. The protesters have tonsured their heads to mourn the death of democracy. Patwardhan could have ended the scene there, and yet he extends it with a shot of a policewoman sweeping away the shed hair. Someone has to clean up the mess. That it is the policewoman doing so seems fitting, as fitting as the cause of the protesters.
Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.
