'Ardh Satya': The violence and contradictions of the on-screen cop

Directed by Govind Nihalani, the 1983 film is unsettling even now, not because of its depiction of police brutality but because of the recognition of how it is embedded in our society

When two young college lecturers, Jyotsna (Smita Patil) and Sneha (Ila Arun), arrive at a mill in Bombay (now Mumbai) to interview striking labourers, they meet the sub-inspector of police, Anant Velankar (Om Puri). Velankar and Jyotsna are acquainted from before, and he is on duty at the factory to prevent any disturbance. He advises the academics to leave the site as trouble is about to break out soon. As they walk away, Sneha asks Jyotsna how she knows Velankar, adding: “Did you see he was drunk?” Looking back, Jyotsna catches a glimpse of Velankar leading a lathi charge on the protesting labourers. A little later in the film, having read and learnt about police brutality, Jytosna, who is now in a relationship with Anant, tells him to leave his job. “My husband will not be a policeman,” she declares.

 

 

Produced by the National Film Development Corporation and directed by Govind Nihalani, ‘Ardh Satya’ (1983) is a visceral interrogation of the functioning of the Indian police. Its protagonist, Velankar, is a reluctant officer: He is forced into the police by his father (Amrish Puri), who is a constable. When Jyotsna and Velankar meet for the first time, at a party, early in the film, he tells her that he does not drink. However, as he gets embroiled more and more in the demanding life of a police officer, Velankar takes to drinking. And alcohol releases his frustrations with life in the form of volcanic anger. In his inebriated state, he calls up Jyotsna at times or gets into fights. Towards the end of the film, he brutally assaults a suspect in custody, killing him.

 

Film and literary scholar M. K. Raghavendra writes that the “police have consistently represented the authority of the state in Hindi cinema”; however, the nature of this authority has changed over the decades. By the early 1970s, films like ‘Zanjeer’ (1973), directed by Prakash Mehra, made its cop hero, Vijay, played by Amitabh Bachchan in his break-out role, both the arbiter of morality and a conduit for popular grievance as “the angry young man”. In other films of the decade, such as ‘Sholay’ (1975), directed by Ramesh Sippy, and ‘Deewaar’ (1975), directed by Yash Chopra, the police prevent extra-legal revenge or deliver justice.

 

In recent years, however, the moral authority of the police in these films has been challenged. In his autobiography ‘Water in a Broken Pot’ (2023), Yogesh Maitreya writes about how meetings of Dalit Panthers in Bombay in the 1970s were routinely attacked by the police and “in reality, the police were seemingly angry about Dalits who were demanding their rights and seeking justice”. By the 1980s, writes Raghavendra, “the police were shown as weak” in films like ‘Tezaab’, directed by N. Chandra, “because the state was seen to have been weakened by divisive forces”.

 

Written by Vijay Tendulkar, ‘Ardh Satya’ represents these divisive forces through the nexus of politics and crime through the sinister character of Rama Shetty (Sadashiv Amrapukar). A gangster running illegal gambling dens, Shetty gets repeatedly into confrontations with Velankar. When Velankar arrests his men, Shetty gets them released. When Velankar tries to arrest him on a murder charge, Shetty uses his influence with senior officers to avoid the arrest. Then, Shetty stands for elections to the municipal corporation and becomes an influential politician, and Velankar has to appeal to him for help, when he is suspended for the custodial death.

 

Velankar offers to pay Shetty to get his suspension cancelled, but the criminal wants more: He wants Velankar to be his man in the police. Unwilling to accept such a fate, he kills Shetty. In their review of the films selected for the 1984 Filmotsav film festival, film scholars Roy Armes and Ashish Rajadhyaksha describe ‘Ardh Satya’ as a “forceful piece of film-making” but critique it for “drawing every last bit of impact from the macho-style violence which it purports to criticize”. While on the one hand, the film is critical of extra-legal police violence, such as custodial torture, rape and murder, drawing on media reports of such incidents, its climax ultimately is also a form of vigilante justice.

 

Having watched ‘Ardh Satya’ innumerable times, I turned to it again after reading a recent opinion piece by the novelist and academic Saikat Majumdar, in which he asks: “Why does the Delhi police hit with such brutality?” Majumdar is referring to the recent incidents of alleged police brutality on protestors against purported irregularities of the Election Commission of India’s Special Intensive Revision of voter lists. At the same time, news emerged of two police encounters of alleged rapists in my home state of West Bengal, raising concerns about women’s safety and the rule of law. Violence, however, is not an exception in Indian public life; it is the norm. Anthropologist Thomas Blom Hansen, in his book ‘The Law of Force: The Violent Heart of Indian Politics’ (2021), writes that “violence has been of foundational importance in Indian politics and practical governance and policing for many decades” and now “violence is no longer politics by other means… It is political life itself.”

 

What makes ‘Ardh Satya’ unsettling even now is not merely depictions of police brutality, but the recognition that violence is embedded in the very structures of power. Velankar’s predicament exposes the contradictions of an institution expected to uphold the law and yet forced to work beyond it. This is embodied in the titular poem, written by Dilip Chitre for this film. Velankar’s final act of violence offers no resolution; it reproduces the structure against which he has struggled. The “half-truth” of the title captures the enduring failure of justice in a society governed by force. 

 

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Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist