Prosit Roy’s Raakh revisits the notorious Ranga-Billa case through a brutal, unsparing lens, refusing any empathy for its killers. Rooted in individual choice rather than systemic alibis, the series tracks their conscious descent into violence while centring Ali Fazal’s sensitive cop Jayprakash Jatav, whose emotional engagement with victims reshapes the familiar OTT police procedural template.
When Prosit Roy set about working on Raakh—the gritty police procedural that’s the toast of streaming right now—he was very clear on what he was saying. It was a retelling of the chilling, often-told account of Ranga-Billa who, 48 years ago, abducted and murdered siblings Geeta and Sanjay Chopra in Delhi. It was also the story of SI Jayprakash Jatav, a sensitive, mild-mannered young police officer working on the case. Much like Paatal Lok, whose first season Roy directed, Raakh would also deal with a very primordial texture of violence.
What it wasn’t is the kind of narrative reconstruction that leans into sympathy for the devil. “I never wanted my audience to feel any empathy for these two monsters. We tried to hunt their mind and figure out why they were doing what they were doing. There was no answer,” the very pleasant Roy tells us.
The first season of Paatal Lok depicts the horrific wrongs dealt out to its antagonists, including the dreadful, remorseless, hammer-murderer Hathoda Tyagi (Abhishek Banerjee). In his new show, Roy inverts the ontological inquiry of the crime, letting his villains lay out their gruesome trail of blood with the agency of consciousness.
“We didn’t opt for the message that they are because there is systemic failure. It’s also about individual choices, and they made theirs. Rajjo has the opportunity to go and work for Mannu Chuhemaar as a rat exterminator, but he chooses to be with Babu, who exploits the insecurity inside him. Similarly, when they reverse the car to abduct the kids, that is by choice… they could go on after having passed Suman and Sahil at the bus stand, but they choose to come back.”
“They are what they are by choice. But yes, they’re also human—and that’s the most scary part,” he adds. “What they did to these kids leaves us with no empathy for them.”
It’s not just monstrosity that the show explores. It is a delicate portrait of human life and its conscious will to exist despite everything. A significant part of it is its protagonist, essayed by Ali Fazal, who marries fortitude and pluck to catch the murderers after a long, harrowing chase. Roy recalls how he decided to work with the actor after watching Srijit Mukherji’s short from the anthology series Ray (2021), where Fazal played a corporate shark undergoing a sudden psychological unravelling.
“I wanted to cast someone who’s never worn a uniform. There are so many cops in the OTT space today—I’ve done a very popular cop myself in the past,” says Roy, who utilised Fazal’s existing geography of acting work to arrive at a thoroughly fresh template for a genre of characters that has been central in Indian cinema.
“Jayprakash isn’t merely investigating—he’s feeling what the victims and their bereaved are going through,” Roy says of the character. Of course, the fact that Fazal had a “period-appropriate face” made the decision even easier. “It was interesting to look for a quality in him that would make him an introvert because—and I had this conversation with Ali—most of his characters so far have been on the edge, out there, extroverted… So he was really interested in exploring this.”
Writers Anusha Nandakumar and Sandeep Saket give Jayprakash an interesting accoutrement of determinants, the first of which is the absence of the upper-class existence that is ubiquitous on screen. Jayprakash is the son of a constable (a refreshingly inert Rakesh Bedi) in the force, a sexagenarian who wears the seemingly innocent and endearing crown of the affable bauji known for his cracking mutton curry. Jayprakash wants to rise above this life with its humbling everyday reminders, by clearing a higher government exam. Unlike Paatal Lok’s Hathiram Chaudhary—which is another masterful character in its own way—is a relentless, if sometimes naïve, optimist, without the world-weariness that we’ve come to expect of this world.
The parents of the children—names changed to Suman and Sahil Arora—are played by Sonali Bendre (Mona Arora) and Aamir Bashir (Ashok Arora). Bendre, playing the mother, portrays the grieving mother’s denial with a tender volatility, while Bashir paints his character’s disbelief in his own stunning way. “The character’s an army man. He’s served his country and kept it safe. But he couldn’t keep his own children safe,” Roy tells us about the conversations he had with Bashir, who wears that sense of defeat on his face with superb conviction.
Towards the end of the second episode, Ashok arrives at the site of the murder, where the bloodied bodies of his children lie wrapped around each other. The camera frames the children a little bit away from the foreground, as the police attempt to contain the media flow arriving at the site. In the previous shot, Ashok has broken this line of control and is heading fast towards the bodies. The camera returns to the second shot, where it’s confirmed to Ashok, still metres away, that the battered bodies are indeed his own children. He falls to his knees and lets out a pained “haaye rabba” (“oh my god”). “It is a moment of failure, and only a soldier could feel it that way,” says Roy.