For all intents and purposes, Sunil Kumar Gupta (Zahan Kapoor) is not a good fit for Tihar jail. He has a slim build and his oversized uniform hangs loosely on him. He’s grown a moustache to mask his lack of depth in an institution fuelled by testosterone; Gupta is too stuck in his ‘decent’ ways to even inadvertently cuss. He refers to his mother as ‘Mumma’ – a seemingly ordinary-but-revealing detail about his dynamic with her and how he’s been raised. He’s called ‘Baby’ by family members and neighbours – a detail almost trying too hard to sell his obvious displacement in Tihar.
Belonging to a middle-class family (presumably) in West Delhi – Gupta lands himself between a rock and a hard place when he applies for the position as a jailer in one of India’s maximum security prisons, home to India’s most notorious criminals among thousands of clueless undertrials. It’s a fascinating peek into India’s law enforcement and justice system, while also being an antithesis to what we’ve come to expect from the Bollywood cop films and shows.
A still from Black Warrant. Photo: Screengrab from video.
Based on Gupta’s memoir Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer (2019) co-written with Sunetra Choudhury, the Netflix series – created by Vikramaditya Motwane and Satyanshu Singh – is primarily set in the early 1980s. It’s the era of Gold Spots (a soft drink), prank calls on landlines, and employment exchanges. A lawyer by degree, Gupta takes up the job in Tihar to help with the household. He has no idea how his life is about to go topsy-turvy in the coming years, around fabled serial killers like Charles Sobhraj, and being in charge of and overseeing the executions of Billa and Ranga and Kashmiri separatist leaders like Maqbool Bhat.
Motwane and Singh’s show is remarkable in the way it leans into the outsider’s gaze, entering the prison. Through Gupta’s eyes – we might as well have been air-dropped in the wild west. Coming from a ‘pure vegetarian’ family, Gupta is too naive about the world, too idealistic about how it works, too immersed in vague niceties of someone ‘respectable’ – to discover his own voice. During the first few episodes of this seven-episode series, he simply stands around unable to process his surroundings – only a few seconds away from barfing in a corner.
Deputy superintendent of police (DSP) Tomar (Rahul Bhat), Gupta’s senior in prison, gives him his first assignment by asking him to determine who is telling the truth between two inmates about having killed a snake. In Tihar, killing a snake comes with a reward of reducing 15 days from one’s sentence. Like everyone else, Gupta comes into this argument completely cold. This simple assignment becomes his induction into the complicated nature of truth, how nothing is what it seems, and how far people are willing to go for the tiniest of mercies – especially the desperate inmates. At the end of the exercise, Gupta also dabbles for the first time with the unknowability of some truths – something that haunts cops and investigators for their entire lives.
A still from Black Warrant. Photo: Screengrab from video.
Kapoor’s Sunil Gupta is ably supported by two sensational characters, Dahiya (Anurag Thakur) and Mangat (Parmvir Singh Cheema). All three upstart jailers are mentored by DSP Tomar – a wily, overconfident cop who overestimates his ability to deliver peace between rival gangs in the prison. It’s another case of excellent casting from Mukesh Chhabra, where he finds actors lending a meta-life to their on-screen characters. Rahul Bhat has the leftover shades of a celebrity in the way he looks and wears his aviators – one can almost imagine him playing a Singham in his own story. But the way Bhat grounds his actions in prison with the track of a concerned father/husband, he makes us empathise with his corrupt ways, even if we never fully agree with him.
Anurag Thakur’s Dahiya is the revelation of the show – playing the casually-violent Haryanvi cop who talks in sync-song and isn’t shy about tying inmates and beating them to pulp. The series affords him a beautiful subplot, allowing him to showcase his softer side, his lack of vocabulary during difficult conversations and his unbridled rage at a betrayal from a trusted friend. If Dahiya is an uncontrollable forest fire, Paramvir Singh Cheema’s Mangat is a dam. Trying to calm things between his comrades, Mangat usually keeps his troubles to himself – preferring to drown them in alcohol. There’s a terrific scene where Mangat confronts Tomar’s blatant discrimination against the Sikh members of the jail administration, in the aftermath of the Indira Gandhi assassination. Tomar’s racism is laid bare, coldly and clinically.
Black Warrant has a special appearance by Siddhant Gupta (who previously worked with Motwane on Jubilee) as Charles Sobhraj. Gupta has little to do – swivelling in and out of the show as he pleases – but he brings an opacity and slipperiness to Sobhraj. He hisses his dialogues in English with a French-inflection, keeping the enigma alive.
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It’s Zahan Kapoor’s Sunil Kumar Gupta who remains the centre-piece of Black Warrant, from start to finish. Kapoor is excellent in showcasing a boy pretending to be a man, but someone who isn’t afraid to dust himself off and get back up after being knocked down more than once. Kapoor’s Gupta brings back the vintage grace of an earlier India where people let their actions do the talking. He doesn’t believe in biting off more than he can chew, but it also doesn’t mean that he uses it as an excuse to do nothing. Sunil Kumar Gupta shares a heartbreaking subplot with the jail’s accountant, Saini sahab (Rajendra Gupta) – who gets swatted like a fly when he tries to do the right thing, bringing him to terms with his sheer disposability as a person.
A still from Black Warrant. Photo: Screengrab from video.
The show works because of how beautifully acted it is. But it’s the technicians who deserve a shout-out. Saumyananda Sahi, who earlier shot Trial By Fire (2023), brings the same compassion to his frames for the outcast inmates. The episodes are tightly directed by Rohin Raveendran, Ambiecka Pandit, Satyanshu Singh, Arkesh Ajay and finally Motwane – who directs three out of the seven episodes. The show has Motwane’s visual flair and his inherent cinephilia in certain choices, like the way he shoots Sobhraj like a ‘70s movie star.
Black Warrant has something few Indian shows have – the journalistic rigour to uncover the backstories of inmates, the complicated nature of their crimes and the due process which led them to their legal fate. It’s no surprise then that one of the show’s producers is Confluence Media, founded by investigative journalist Josy Joseph. Through Sunil Kumar Gupta – the show-runners dig deep into the power-dynamics between jailers and inmates, India’s justice system and how it doesn’t do enough to alleviate the poor and the desperate from its maze.
As someone says in the show, jails are considered the ‘trash can’ for civilised society. All it takes is someone earnest to humanise them. Evil, after all, is not a person. It’s a chain of actions while engulfed in total darkness. It can be prevented, all it needs is someone to show them the light.
