The Great Indian Murder – Online HINDI

A secondary character in The Great Indian Murder, produced by Ajay Devgn Films, puts the murky goings-on in perspective: “Dilli bhi toh gol-gol hain… Shaher chhahe kitna bhi bada ho bade logon ka circle hamesha chhota hi hota hai.” That line conveys the essence of writer-director Tigmanshu Dhulia’s adaptation of Vikas Swarup’s Six Suspects, a murder mystery that doubles up as a lucid commentary on India’s many implacable schisms.

The book (published over a decade ago) wasn’t exactly a novel for the ages. The Disney+Hotstar series isn’t a definitive, trailblazing story of crime and comeuppance either. But thanks to the circuitous, back-and-forth spin that Dhulia and his co-writers (Vijay Maurya and Puneet Sharma) put on the freewheeling reworking of the story for the screen, The Great Indian Murder isn’t wanting in either intrigue or insight.

Multiple plotlines are woven (not unlike the way it was in the tome) around the murder of the debauched son of a corrupt politician during a party he hosts to celebrate his acquittal in a murder case with the aid of money power and doctored evidence.

The rot in the vitals of a vast, complex and sharply divided nation is what The Great Indian Murder delves into. It alludes, if only in passing, to December 6, 1992, a day that marked the beginning of a dramatic paradigm shift in Indian politics. One key character, sitting in his home in Raipur, also talks of the future carving out of Chhattisgarh from Madhya Pradesh and exults: “Naya rajya, naya raj, naya neta.”

All hopes of renewal stay on paper. Nothing changes. With its stress firmly on continual, cynical, cussed political shenanigans, The Great Indian Murder lays bare the skulduggery, criminality, corruption and toxicity of a powerful cabal that exploits its grip on the levers of authority to mint money and prey on the dispossessed and desperate.