As with all new things, however, we must treat Paatal Lok with suspicion – contrary to the acclaim it receives for being critical of contemporary society, they withhold deep ambiguities. To be sure, it is part of a shake up in the popular arts, which regularly occurs every decade or so – we have had Sacred Games, Leila, Ghoul, Mirzapur, Jamtara and others already. Yet, this new wave does not just offer a critical look at society, but reflects an ambiguous and often self-contradicting morality. This does not rise simply due to the mostly tragic and dark endings. Rather, it is present throughout the stories, in the details of every episode. They create moments of genuine confusion, where the camera itself oscillates between a critical distance towards the morally ambiguous characters and identification with the violent structures it attempts to criticize.
The most obvious of these moments come up in the depiction of sexuality. In a strange way, most of these series seem to share a fascination with rape and rough sex – nearly all onscreen sex is non-consensual or semi-consensual. But the problem here is not a moralist one related to whether rapes ought to be shown on screen or not. Rather, it is about how rape and sexual domination seem inscribed into the texture of the stories themselves. Why do they repeat so much? We can see in Paatal Lok, that the consensual sex between the high-brow media figure Mehra and his subordinate Sara is respectably hidden from view, while the rape of a woman and, in another scene, a child are shown to us
The irony of sexual fantasies is that they’re always about something other than sex. So it is with the sex in Paatal Lok too. We can draw the connections in many directions, beginning from the humiliation of the transgender. It is as if transgender bodies are meant to be humiliated in these universes, where their story is not about the overcoming of humiliation. They exist, and they are humiliated, sometimes mutilated. For Mehra, sex becomes the affirmation of his identity as he goes through a rough patch, and he gets his life back on track as he carries on his affair. The affair between Mukherji and Shukla turns out to be one of mutual help – Shukla helps Mukherji to sort out her life and offers a promising career, while Mukherji offers her body. Their sex is supported by Mukherji reciting Shukla’s poetry, and Shukla’s sacred thread – Mukherji had previously had an affair with a Dalit man, whom she later ditches because of his caste. But it is Mehra who gives us the key to these sequences in Paatal Lok. The two defining moments for Mehra are the one in which he scoffs at “liberals” and claims to see through the CBI’s terrorist plot story. The second defining moment comes at the end when, in spite of having his illusions of being someone important enough to be assassinated shattered, he returns to his role as a self-righteous journalist.
Against Mehra are placed Subinspector Hathiram Chaudhary and journalist Sara Mathews. Hathiram in the end submits to the system, while Sara rebels by handing in her resignation. They both take small revenges against the system they despise.
But what connection do these three characters have with the depiction of sexuality? Precisely that the helplessness that Mehra displays in the early episodes gets him into bed with the much younger and attractive Sara, and this is the fantasy that is all pervading. Mehra’s helplessness turns into a ruthless opportunism, as he plays on sympathies to get his ends. The helplessness in the face of a “system”, which seems insurmountable to the upper castes even in their fiction, turns out to be a fictional helplessness, supposed to get them into bed and to help them partake in different pleasures.
This guilty pleasure is what structures the sex scenes, and to be sure, the whole series. When Sara is introduced to a new intern, Rahul Thakur, her first reaction is to call out his privilege; but later on, she nevertheless goes on to develop a friendship with him. Hathiram similarly figures out the nefarious plots abound in politics, and tells the villain Bajpayi that he has it figured out, but nevertheless agrees to submit to the will of Bajpayi. Both retain their contact with power, but only after going through a cleansing of conscience – by denouncing power in speech, they consider themselves absolved of their sins.
The series occurs within the neo-feudal constellation of institutions – politics, police, media, the people, and the underworld. This constellation is in fact a slightly reordered form of the feudal estate system, with competition within each group and a broad alliance among the different groups. In this constellation, we are told, there is no choice but to be complicit to the violence carried out by it. Politics offers little hope in Paatal Lok, with the only promising political leader – a Dalit – beheaded within a few scenes of his appearance.
The alliance cannot change, and so the protagonists in the series become complicit in it. Or they carry out token protests, to satisfy their own conscience. Most of all, they are convinced that the agent of change can only be from among themselves, but they cannot seem to imagine how they will do it. In their complicity, an ironic enjoyment sets in, officially the police is condemned as corrupt, but it is nevertheless affirmed, the media is condemned as dishonest, but one nevertheless has to stay in it, violence is condemned but one nevertheless remains complicit in it. The added twist is that rapes become a source of visual pleasure, with the camera gazing at it attentively, just as the scenes of violence and humiliation have been sources of masochistic pleasure for long.
