Netflix’s Kohrra Rips Through The Ridiculous Lies The Indian Middle Class Tells Itself

In 2021, director Leena Yadav helmed the Netflix docuseries House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths. It was based on a ritual mass suicide of ten members of a middle-class family in Delhi. The nation was at a loss; we hadn’t seen anything like it. How did no one around them know? As the investigation proceeded, the motive was even more unsettling: shared psychosis. The patriarch of the family, Lalit Bhatia, still reeling from a past trauma, had somehow convinced his family over the years to believe in his messianic powers. These powers found their culmination in a badh pooja-style suicide—the family members suspended from the ceiling in the formation of the roots of a banyan tree. While all of us shook our heads in disbelief, Yadav said something profound to me then: “It is so easy to pretend these things will never happen in our families. When, in fact, every single Indian family has secrets that no one outside knows anything about.”

In the second season of Netflix’s Kohrra, the secrets are many. As with the Burari deaths, it’s the men who go about their lives like a bull in a china shop—the women and children often having to live with the consequences. But it is the setting of Kohrra, in the fictional rural town of Dalerpura, that shows more than tells. The Indian village, romanticised with a lot of hope by Mahatma Gandhi, in his dream of self-governing village republics, is the broken spine of our nation’s morality. It is the same reason why, growing up, a child who has lived in cities is so enthusiastic about visiting his village during summer vacations. But the enthusiasm is rarely shared by the child’s mother, who knows very well the patriarchal land mines spread out for her.

Kohrra is many things. On the surface, it is, of course, a whodunit. The NRI Preeti Bajwa is found brutally murdered in her brother Baljinder’s barn. This murder unravels everything else: extramarital affairs, dubious morality, and even the bonded labour from Bihar and Jharkhand on which rural Punjab still subsists. I won’t get into the names of the multitude of characters, but in a telling scene, when a wife suspects her cheating husband, they are both unaware of how their shouting matches are impacting their daughter, who is clutching her teddy bear. They are also unaware of the husband’s ailing father, who has no option but to sit up in his bed, motionless. In another, a younger brother, caught between the ghosts of his past and his elder brother, who has always given me a cold shoulder, tells him, a crack in his voice: “You can visit all the gurudwaras you want, but you will never find peace anywhere.” There is the alcoholic man, husband of the cop played by Mona Singh, who is still reeling from the loss of their son. Mona Singh’s character, Dhanwant, attempts to fill the void through IVF. But her husband is so lost, so deep in the recesses of his guilt, that he just cannot bring himself to even deposit his semen, to the point where Dhanwant’s hawaldars physically escort him to the IVF clinic.

What do such men tell us? Do they remind us of the men around us, in our homes, workspaces? Could it be that sweet uncle who goes for a run every morning, who is seemingly soft-spoken, yet is a living, breathing terror to his daughters? What about the gentle banker, who prays till he chokes up, but doesn’t remember the last time he even touched his wife? Some groups of men congregate at a tea stall, dispensing their nuggets of wisdom on everything from the Iran war to Gaza. But once they are back in their homes, they reveal themselves to be men of a different century, egged on by the impossible standards of piety they apply to everyone but themselves.

In the book The Great Indian Middle Class (1998), the author Pavan K. Varma argues that the Indian middle class often presents itself as the guardian of national values. Yet, its everyday conduct rarely matches those claims. A widely cited observation from the book states that the middle class is quick to criticise corruption but “is not averse to using corrupt means when it suits its convenience.” The same argument holds for our patriotism, too. We take pride in symbolic displays of nationalism, such as a nuclear test or the Indian cricket team winning the World Cup, but in our personal lives, we will evade taxes, spit on the streets and speed our car by a dying man on the highway.

In Kohrra, as is true for the immediate world around us, men guard their dual worlds with their lives, often paying for it with their lives or the lives of those around them.