Text and Context: Newer shades of khaki in Tamil cinema – The shifting dynamics of the silver screen cop

Watched ‘Vettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu’ again on the big screen? Here’s how cops in Tamil cinema are finding more dignity in writing while also becoming a mirror to examine the fundamentally broken system they are part of

(Originally published in The Hindu on June 30, 2023)

An uber-cool police officer slams a man’s face on a boiling hot pan. A hero in khaki does not mind using a few bullets on some goons to get to the climax. If it’s the hero that a team of policemen are chasing, they neither have plot armour nor human rights.

These may seem like routine scenes in Indian masala cinema, but if such norms of the genre no longer please you, if you are beginning to notice how normalised police brutality is and how insipidly cops are written when they are not the leads, there are chances it has a lot to do with a change in how filmmakers are seeing and digging into the khaki.

As noticeable in Tamil cinema especially, the cop finds more dignity on one hand while also becoming a mirror to examine the fundamentally broken system they are a part of.

An easy launchpad for younger actors, the Tamil cinema police has predominantly been a do-gooder hero battling terrorists/local mafia, taking revenge after a personal tragedy, or occasionally becoming a detective and breaking a sweat with a serial killer on the loose/ unorganised crime.

In 2000s, we saw creators subvert the routine. For instance, a star like Ajith Kumar doing an unabashedly negative shade in Mankathaor director Hari’s insistence on setting his cop films in the rural background, or Gautham Menon giving his zeal to the sub-genre through a trilogy (Vettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu is back on the big screen) where he traces the life of the same police officer but in different stages of his life.

These were all pivotal in leading to how the cop evolved in the 2010s and the 2020s.

Holding a mirror to a broken system

What filmmaker Vetri Maaran said in an interview about writing police characters best elucidates the current zeitgeist. He says he can never write a heroic, unidimensional good cop because the world they thrive in is fundamentally flawed and the system they operate is discriminatory. Without a doubt, Vetri Maaran………

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