‘Black Warrant’ series review: Scenes from a prison

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?

The early episodes make comic hay of Sunil’s incongruous posting. Wispy and tentative, he is a vegetarian who shudders to swear, drawing chuckles from his rough-hewn compeers, ASPs Mangat (Paramvir Singh Cheema) and Dahiya (an excellent Anurag Thakur). His immediate superior, DSP Tomar (Rahul Bhat), is just as disdainful. Sunil enters a world of violent gang feuds, torture, rampant squalor and corruption. An inmate of influence is Charles Sobhraj — the sobriquet “bikini killer” flashes on screen. Campily played by Siddhant Gupta (who was recently Nehru in Freedom at Midnight), Sobhraj becomes a Hannibal Lecter to Sunil’s Clarice Starling, mentoring him in the ways of the yard. “Make friends, old chap,” he says in that itty-bitty accent that can get under your skin.

Like the Baltimore law enforcers in The Wire, the jailers in Black Warrant struggle with the myriad complexities of their job, challenges and conflicts to which dumb brute force cannot — should not — be the answer. Hindi prison narratives are typically jailbreak stories or cloying wrongful incarceration dramas. In Black Warrant, we are told that a disproportionate number of inmates in Tihar are innocent undertrials. Yet, most of the prisoners we get to know over seven episodes admit to some form of criminal offence. A sense of fascinating unease permeates the series. It distinguishes the slow, arduous work of reform from binary notions of innocence and guilt.

Black Warrant is a grim, discomfiting series, and the flashes of levity and camaraderie only serve to reinforce the tone. Motwane does not have the canvas or budget of Sacred Games and Jubilee. Barring a few, flat domestic scenes, the drama stays confined within the prison complex, and history, like a cricket ball stuffed with contraband, has to breach its walls. There is a visit by a Sikh Home Minister, and Mangat loses sleep over his brother’s well-being, who’s fallen in with insurgents. “India is Indira and Indira is India,” Tomar quips, quoting DK Barooah, a cheeky line if you know the fate of Motwane’s 2023 documentary on the Emergency years, which was dropped by Netflix.

Unfolding in the 80s, Black Warrant at times resembles the episodic television of that era. We are boxed in with a handful of characters and their crises, and there is no central mystery to solve. Instead, circular details in the writing keep us invested — the word ‘snaap’ (snake) recurs in interesting ways, as does ‘team’ and ‘understanding’. There is some repetition, like the insistence on Sunil’s job being considered menial and disreputable. One of the funnier characters in the show is his nosy neighbour, a superstitious woman who, at one point, demands jail food to reset her stars.

As a quietly determined police officer standing apart from the system, Zahan Kapoor, a descendant of Shashi, does his grandfather proud. There is a famous scene in Deewaar where Ravi Verma, in his moral certitude, injures a street urchin stealing food for his family, and is politely schooled by AK Hangal. Sunil’s evolution is mapped in less dramatic terms, although Rajendra Gupta, in a sympathetic role, fulfils a Hangal-like part. Rahul Bhat, as always, is effective in his slimy, grunting-glowering way. Amid so much activity and tangents to chase, one is pleasantly surprised by Motwane and Singh pausing for self-tribute, in a beautiful early shot of Sunil embarking on his morning run. He looks like the kid from Udaan (2010), all grown up and fretted with purpose.

Black Warrant is currently streaming on Netflix