Whose story is it anyway? Amazon Prime's Raakh revisits a crime and its unsettling truths

The new Hindi series Raakh opens with a disclaimer: it's 'fiction inspired from real-life events'. The nuts and bolts of the plot are evidently drawn from the Geeta and Sanjay Chopra murder in Delhi in 1978, for which two men named Billa and Ranga were hanged. The children here are Suman and Sahil Arora, and the killers, Babu and Rajjo.

But the starting block is unchanged: adolescent siblings, a naval officer's only kids, heading to a radio recording, get a lift from a car and meet their end in Delhi Ridge in 1978.

Created and written by Anusha Nandakumar and Sandeep Saket, co-directed by them and Prosit Roy, Raakh is set in a decade when the city police were introduced to forensic science. Though the text on screen indicating timelines is initially confusing, and the substance of a voiceover in the finale is cliched, Raakh in its entirety is special.


Ali Fazal plays SI Jayprakash Jatav, investigator in this 8-episode series. Sonali Bendre and Aamir Bashir are the parents. Akash Makhija and Ramandeep Yadav play Babu and Rajjo. The primary and supporting cast's brilliance is complemented by Manas Mittal's restrained editing. Through Saumyananda Sahi's lens, the Ridge is terrifying and magnificent all at once.

SI Jatav, a dalit struggling to be taken seriously in the force, appears to have been conceived as a counterpoint to Babu and Rajjo, as a reminder that not everyone becomes twisted by the difficult circumstances of their birth. Towards this end, Raakh credits the fictional Jatav for Babu and Rajjo's arrest so as to position him as a hero, though Billa and Ranga were caught by military personnel who encountered them on a train.

Centering Jatav further required the script to unequivocally establish Babu and Rajjo's guilt. But the Billa-Ranga case was not as crystal clear as Raakh's fictionalisation. Last year's Black Warrant acknowledged that the duo had claimed their confessions were obtained under duress. Raakh sidesteps this truth and rumours that raged through 1970s Delhi about poor men being scapegoated to protect powerful individuals behind the crime.

This creative decision merits a conversation about whose stories a society chooses to tell. The fact is, Geeta and Sanjay, Suman and Sahil, are people in whom the average OTT viewer can see themselves, unlike impoverished victims. Moreover, Billa and Ranga are 'the Other' for the same viewer, not 'people like us', the sort that force us to address the criminality in our own circles.

Their families are also unlikely to have the wherewithal or will to contest a form of fictionalisation designed to leave no doubt about the actual people on whom it is based. Millionaires who drive luxury cars over pedestrians, or shoot bartenders at high-society parties, have legal teams that would challenge such writing. These factors are particularly evident in the stories that the true-crime series Delhi Crime has picked to chronicle so far.

That said, Raakh becomes an excellent study of the psychology of brutality by expending as much space on the murderers' fictionalised stories as on the victims' family and the probe. An explanation need not be a justification. But it does help us figure out how and why crimes occur.

Raakh's writers have the skill to not cross the line from profiling to sympathising where sympathy is uncalled for. Rajjo's background, though, lends itself to a nuanced representation of how patriarchal definitions of masculinity impact men who lack self-assurance. A related sub-plot poignantly showcases Delhi's LGBT-plus community in the 1970s.

Raakh gives us a clear sense of time and place. A significant reference to the Emergency, and the National Family Planning Programme's slogan, 'Hum do hamare do' painted at a bus stop where the murdered children once stood, underline the pathos in this saga.

This is an emotionally engrossing account of undiluted evil, and the cruel randomness that life visited upon a family one fine day.