Recently, there has been a significant resurgence of Hindi films with women-centric narratives, ones that often centre intersectional politics. They present a feminism that moves beyond the usual ‘upper’-class, ‘upper’-caste, urban mystification and relocates it instead to rural, peripheral spaces. The good thing about these narratives is that they aren’t as performative. They embody fully fleshed-out women characters who are granted actual agency.

These characters are capable of critical thought and are not nauseatingly moralistic or self-sacrificing. These films are genuinely pleasurable to watch, precisely because of the ethos of their settings — the outskirts of big cities or remote villages. So when Babita Singh Reporting was released, I was fairly excited. 

From the makers of Paatal Lok and starring Nimisha Sajayan, the film has received unexpected backlash, though only from reviewers who seemingly went in expecting an engaging thriller rather than elaborate social commentary. That, however, is precisely where the film works best.

Masked as a quirky murder mystery in which the investigation is led by a police officer who just happens to be a woman, the premise sounds reductive at its worst. Something similar to Mardaani, essentially relying on an androgynous notion of feminism that says a woman can be just as ‘macho’ as a man. That framing is itself a disservice to the genre. However, Babita Singh Reporting doesn’t do that.

Marital labour and the politics of compliance 

Babita Singh, nicknamed ‘Baby’, both endearingly and condescendingly by her husband and co-workers, holds a low-ranking police job she got through what’s essentially ‘sympathy recruitment’. The Babita we meet at the start of the film is someone who always shrinks herself, someone who does everything possible to avoid making the people around her uncomfortable.

She is meek, constantly being pushed around, and reluctant to take up space, whether that means speaking up at work or being pulled into shooting reels for her superiors. At home, where she lives with her husband, she is just as quiet and compliant, responding to patriarchal marital demands without much complaint, even though she holds down quite a demanding job.

Babita Singh (Nimisha Sajayan) in a scene from Babita Singh Reporting. Image Credit: Amazon MGM/Film Squad/Act Three/Prime Video

When she’s pressured into visiting her in-laws in a remote town called Rewa, she wilfully takes the blame for a drug bust botched by her seniors, accepting a suspension that she then bargains down to leave. Once in Rewa, from the very first day, she meticulously strives to perform the role of a dutiful, hard-working daughter-in-law, an obvious overcompensation for her long absences due to work. None of what she does is particularly atypical of a working married woman in India: the careful tiptoeing required to avoid her in-laws’ micro-aggressions, as if simply choosing to earn an income were somehow blasphemous.

The family prides itself on being ‘friendly’, an exception to the norm, yet still treats Baby as help in subtler ways, even dipping into her earnings for extravagant expenses. When her tantrum-prone sister-in-law insists on a new ‘modern’ saree for her baby shower, for instance, Baby agrees to shell out ten thousand rupees from her own pocket. Most of the family’s interactions with her are simply orders in disguise, which she obliges.

Body-shaming as a means of patriarchal control

As someone prone to shrinking themselves, Baby also absorbs her in-laws’ constant, low-grade body-shaming. Being handed sugar-free ice cream, for instance, is infuriating at its most pointed and faintly absurd at its most petty. The film is saturated with body-related motifs, jogging, sugar-free food, and thyroid trouble, so that even when the audience isn’t consciously registering Babita’s body, the film keeps steering attention back to it.

Babita Singh (Nimisha Sajayan) in a scene from Babita Singh Reporting. Image Credit: Amazon MGM/Film Squad/Act Three/Prime Video

Throughout the narrative, Babita’s body either functions as a vessel for embarrassment or for quiet rage. Many of her choices trace back to this logic: if she can be the dutiful daughter-in-law, perhaps her in-laws will eventually look past her body and see her worth; and if she cannot perform aesthetic labour for them, she can at least perform domestic labour. She endures the snarky remarks, but it is not hard to see that all this is slowly pushing Baby to a mental saturation that will only inevitably push her towards a breakdown.

In that small town, a steady stream of passive-aggression seems a blinding reality. Her husband urges her not to meet her long-lost best friend, a reunion that would have potentially stopped the latter’s murder. When she chooses to investigate the death herself, her husband offers her little more than minuscule, begrudging sympathy and no real support.

The radicality of taking up space

Babita is a semi-decent wife and a semi-decent police officer. She tries. Her fearless sleuthing only forces her to confront further instances of systemic misogyny, including domestic violence, an egotistical fellow officer, and dowry demands, leaving her caught in a paralysing dilemma so many women face: to be a dutiful wife or a dutiful employee.

Babita Singh (Nimisha Sajayan) and Sharad Vashesht
(Anshumaan Pushkar) in a scene from Babita Singh Reporting. Image Credit: Amazon MGM/Film Squad/Act Three/Prime Video

Yet her in-laws and her husband turn on her the moment the investigation becomes too personally consuming and starts eating into her usefulness at home. Disappointed by what he sees as her uncharacteristic non-compliance, her husband breaks down and reminds her that he married her within a month of meeting her, insinuating that she would have struggled to find a match because of her looks. It’s cruelty dressed up as vulnerability, and it was an important inciting point in the film.

A climactic altercation with a relative leaves her dazed, and she ends up driving drunk. It is a small, telling collapse after a lifetime of holding herself together for other people. The film closes on a note of freedom, however fleeting: the investigation reaches a successful conclusion, and Babita leaves for home, ambiguously leaving her husband behind. But more than the case being solved, what she walks away with is something harder won: a sense of dignity for the first time in her life. 

Babita Singh (Nimisha Sajayan) in a scene from Babita Singh Reporting. Image Credit: Amazon MGM/Film Squad/Act Three/Prime Video

As a heavier woman myself, what the film does well is the unflinching portrayal of body-shaming. Babita constantly shrinking herself is a legitimate psychological reaction to both patriarchy and rigid standards of beauty. While body-shaming is a smaller aspect of a larger patriarchal problem that Babita Singh Reporting attempts to show, it was an important element to add to the layering of marginalisation. This is where the film excels.

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