Santosh: A Stark Reflection on Class, Caste, and Corruption in Modern India

Featured & Cover Santosh A Stark Reflection on Class Caste and Corruption in Modern India

In the realm of cultural discourse, America’s persistent blind spot remains class. Regardless of their financial status—be it billionaires or hourly wage earners scraping by—most Americans identify themselves as middle class. However, class distinctions are subtly woven into every social interaction, whether acknowledged or not. This phenomenon is mirrored in India, where, despite the constitutional ban on the caste system since 1950, its shadow lingers. The Dalits, historically labeled as “untouchables,” continue to face systemic barriers designed to deny them justice. It’s within this deeply entrenched framework that Santosh Goswami finds herself ensnared, becoming a small part of a vast, indifferent mechanism.

Santosh, a young woman grappling with the recent loss of her husband, is left with few choices. Her path leads her to a role as a police officer—a job she assumes not out of ambition but necessity. Her husband’s death in a riot secures her this position under a program intended to support widows of fallen officers. However, she steps into this role untrained, donning a uniform still stained with her husband’s blood, and unaware of the grim reality: she’s not expected to do any real policing. The issue isn’t her lack of experience but rather a system meticulously designed to ensure that justice remains out of reach, especially for Dalit communities. Bureaucratic barriers prevent even the filing of basic police reports. After all, if there’s no report, there’s technically no crime—even when a 15-year-old girl’s lifeless body is pulled from a well.

British writer-director Sandhya Suri, in her first narrative feature, shifts her focus from the British-Indian cultural intersections explored in her earlier documentaries. Her debut, I for India (2005), examined her father’s life as an Indian immigrant in the UK, while Around India With a Movie Camera (2018) stitched together archival footage from the British Raj era. In contrast, Santosh is deeply rooted in contemporary India, with only faint echoes of colonial influence, visible in scenes of men playing cricket or the military-style uniforms worn by Santosh and her colleagues.

Suri resists the temptation to portray Santosh as a traditional hero. Although she’s the sole authority figure willing to investigate the crime, Santosh remains entangled in the very system that marginalizes the Dalit community. Her job is less a calling and more a means of financial survival, yet it places her in situations where she’s complicit in the injustices she witnesses. In one unsettling scene, she forcefully drags grieving family members away from a protest, embodying the same apathy she once despised. Her superior, Geeta, played with jaded brilliance by Rajwar, cynically sums up the environment: “Everything here is an act, from pretending to care to pretending not to care.” Geeta’s bleak philosophy underscores the film’s moral complexity—if the law is unjust, then perhaps true justice requires breaking it.

Santosh’s moral compromises are not born of malice but of survival. Suri’s empathetic lens reveals the desperation that drives her, though that sympathy frays when Santosh participates in the torture of the case’s only suspect—a young Muslim boy, positioned even lower in India’s rigid social hierarchy than the Dalits. In these harrowing moments, the film recalls Claude Zidi’s dark comedy Les Ripoux, as Geeta mentors Santosh in navigating the murky waters of systemic corruption. Geeta’s lessons are brutal: to survive in this environment, one must not only accept but sometimes enforce its cruelty.

Santosh Goswami’s portrayal is a masterclass in nuance. Her performance oscillates between vulnerability and unsettling brutality, capturing both the intoxicating rush of newfound authority and the creeping dread of realizing that power is fleeting. She embodies the paradox of a woman who has risen slightly above the oppressed, only to become an instrument of their oppression. Her internal struggle reflects a universal truth: proximity to power can corrupt, even as it fails to shield one from the very injustices it perpetuates.

Beyond its searing critique of caste and corruption, Santosh has sparked a separate debate tied to its international reception. Despite being an Indian film, spoken in Hindi, and featuring an Indian cast, it was selected by the United Kingdom as its submission for Best International Feature Film at this year’s Academy Awards. This choice raises questions about national representation in global cinema. Can a film so intrinsically tied to Indian realities authentically represent the UK on the world stage? Or does this decision reflect the increasingly fluid boundaries of cinematic identity in a globalized world?

Regardless of its Oscar trajectory, Santosh stands as a powerful work of political art. Suri’s film doesn’t offer easy answers or moral clarity. Instead, it immerses viewers in the gray areas where survival and complicity intertwine. The film’s unflinching gaze forces audiences to confront uncomfortable truths—not just about India’s caste dynamics, but about the universal human tendency to adapt to injustice when survival is at stake.

At its core, Santosh is more than a crime story. It’s a meditation on power—how it’s gained, wielded, and ultimately how it corrupts. It challenges the notion of heroism, suggesting that in a system designed to oppress, even those with the best intentions can become perpetrators. Suri’s direction ensures that every frame carries the weight of this moral ambiguity, from the dusty, sun-bleached streets of the village to the claustrophobic police station where justice goes to die.

In the end, Santosh’s journey is less about solving a crime and more about navigating the moral wreckage left in its wake. The film’s haunting final moments linger long after the credits roll, a stark reminder that in places where justice is a performance, the cost of playing along is one’s soul.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More Related Stories

-+=