On Martyrs of Shahi Kabir

Ronth (Patrol) is the latest addition to Shahi Kabir’s ‘Copaganda’ universe. Unlike his previous outings like Nayattu or Officer on Duty, where silhouettes of his vision were evident, Kabir’s design of the “martyr cop” as an aesthetic paradigm for police brutalities takes full shape in Ronth. To this end, he mainly employs the possibilities of the “parallax view” (in its literal sense, parallax is the various shifts in the perception of an object when viewed from different angles), both as a narrative device within the movie and as the way for it to operate in the socio-cultural milieu where it is being watched.

Even though the articulation of the martyr cop becomes more complete in Ronth, it would be a mistake to contain and locate it within the limits of a single movie. It is more of a phantasmic lament that meanders across Kabir’s oeuvre, right from Joseph (2018), the very first movie he penned.

Ronth follows the story of two policemen, a rookie and a veteran, as they navigate through a grotesque world confronting the criminal, the wretched, and sometimes the specters of their own neurosis, with a subtext of biased commentary on how the police force in Kerala struggle to maneuver within a supposed ethical and institutional impasse constructed by power hierarchies and societal scrutiny. In the final act, the movie unabashedly fictionalizes an actual incident of honor killing in the most insensitive way imaginable.

Even though the conflicts and contradictions may appear familiar, at least in a general sense, fictions are usually about people who do not exist. In Kabir’s universe, however, they are more than imaginary; they are proxies of reality, and this works because reality itself is partly fictional in its experience. For example, a news story also has a narrative style, a framework, a point of view, a political perspective, and so on. Cinema, as we understand now, goes beyond the realm of pure amusement; it constructs reality and even defines what amusement is. It has always been used as a weapon of hate by various regimes, and its history as a medium for propaganda goes back to the history of cinema itself. D. W. Griffith’s overtly racist film Birth of a Nation, which glorified the KKK and demonized the Black Americans, came out in 1915. A century and a decade later, in 2025, “The Kerala Story,” one of the vilest propaganda films ever made, has been given the award for best direction at the 71st National Film Awards of India. Propaganda films are not homogenous in their form or function; they are a spectrum ranging from extremely blatant, like the scores of Nazi propaganda films by directors like Leni Riefenstahl, to almost invisible, like Perfect Days by Wim Wenders, which romanticizes the alienation and exploitation of the working class. ‘Copagandas’ are a subgenre of this category that specifically deals with cops and policing. 

With the emergence of what was later called the ‘new-generation cinema’, Malayalam cinema went through a massive change and sometimes subversion in its aesthetics. Over the course of the last 15 years, it has critiqued everything right-wing, like patriarchy, casteism, religious fundamentalism, social prejudices, etc., in its way, except for the glorification of cops. Of course it has broken some of the stylistic tropes; the super cop of the yesteryear potboilers has largely disappeared, but what has replaced it is an even bigger monster. The angry upper-caste macho is now a fractured human and therefore more entitled. Interestingly, the movie Traffic, released in 2011, which is widely regarded as the first movie in the new wave, is also a mild copaganda but not as lethal as Ronth because nobody does it like Shahi Kabir.

The central characters of Ronth are Yohannan and Dinnath. Yohannan is a hardened cop with a short fuse, portrayed by a terrific Dileesh Pothan. He is introduced as someone who lacks the stereotypical authoritative phallus, living with an insecure, paranoid wife. The movie later goes to great lengths to fix his masculinity. In one of the odd melodramatic scenes, we see him quite emotionally explaining that he is in fact trying to protect his fragile wife and is not a weak, henpecked husband as his colleagues call him. His many outbursts and meltdowns throughout the movie are also prosthetics for this missing phallus. Yohannan is no Bharath Chandran or Dirty Harry; there is no moral schism that makes him shy away from taking a bribe or bending the law for his masters. He is clearly constructed as a direct representation of the angry cop you see on the streets who occasionally slaps people. Dinnath, on the other hand, is a fish out of water who is soft-spoken, naive, and empathetic. His characterization is more nuanced than Yohannan’s, as he simultaneously represents the idealistic policeman who falls prey to the vicious anti-police ecosystem and the civilian who he is policing. The arguments and theories for the repressive policing are mainly laid out in his interactions with Yohannan. Kabir adopts a question-answer mode to present his thesis, where Dinnath asks the questions, which a civilian might ask, and Yohannan answers them, both verbally and visually. The answers posited are essentially sermons on why the police behave in a certain way that could be misconstrued as violence, why they should be allowed to function with impunity, and why the very act of questioning the police itself could be part of the problem.

It is curious to note that what informs the actions of the cops in Ronth is not the letter of the law as we know it but an overarching law of obedience and perception that operates through the threat of repercussions. They are shown as props in a perennial state of fear, forced to act on self-preservation and stripped of any agency and autonomy. Dinnath is the only one shown as challenging this to an extent, but the movie is quick to dismiss his dissent as naivety, to which he ultimately succumbs. However, this trepidation seems to disappear when the police abuse their power. The movie unconsciously contradicts its own strawman and reveals that the determinate reason for this bipolarity is in fact the same force of prejudicial framework of the real world that has defined what is grievable and who is punishable. In a privileged upper-caste household, we see Yohannan yelling at Dinnath for not being courteous to the lady who asked him to pull his stunt in some colony. Later we see the same Yohannan who advised restraint earlier pulling an extremely violent stunt in a colony, just as she said. The law manifests itself as pretentious in privileged spaces and punitive in marginalized spaces. 

There is a parable in Kafka’s The Trial about a man from the village trying to enter the “Law” and a gatekeeper who stops him. After trying everything, the man tries to bribe the gatekeeper. The gatekeeper accepts the bribe but still denies him entry. He then explains that he only accepted the bribe just so that the man feels he has tried everything in his power. The gatekeeper defines the act of taking a bribe as selfless and in service of the other. In an attempt to subvert the public perception of policemen taking bribes, Kabir adds a similar rationalization in Ronth. In one of the scenes, Yohannan helps a priest by securing him some money as compensation for minor damage to his car. Later it is revealed that the priest himself is in violation of the law, as he was drunk. Yohannan then tells the priest a parable of his own where God grants the policemen a moral right to the money in the hands of the unworthy and then asks the priest if he thinks he is worthy of that money. The priest takes the cue and gives the money to Yohannan. Dinnath later confronts Yohannan and tells him he didn’t become a cop to rip people off like that. Yohannan’s immediate response, “Sure, Bharath Chandran, sir,” is something that momentarily leaves the movie’s unconscious ideological core bare. The dialogue directly acknowledges the aesthetic and representational shift from the idealistic yesteryear super cop to the misunderstood martyr cop. Finally a parallactic switch, which is a recurring plot device in the movie, reveals the truth. A frustrated Yohannan explains that he took the bribe only to repair the damaged police vehicle, as the departmental red tape makes it impossible for the funds to arrive on time. Like most of the scenes in the opening act, the bribery scene is designed specifically to build the martyr aura. Yohannan, just like the gatekeeper, redefines the act of taking bribes as an act of selfless service. The scene is a parable in itself. The moral is that a corrupt policeman is in fact the victim who is forced to besmirch his dignity for the greater good, and therefore, not only is taking bribes selfless but also gallant and heroic. Let’s examine another scene where the same narrative pattern, an act of police excess—a parallactic shift—a moral justification, plays out. A couple of youths are shown doing nothing other than hanging out in a public place. Dinnath, the good cop, asks them politely to cede their rights and go home, to which they show some reluctance. Yohannan immediately pounces on them and goes full ballistic, and they scram in fear. Yohannan then begins his counsel to Dinnath by asking him if he is a priest to preach to them and ends it with a jibe at the IPC. He blatantly tells him, “People are behaving themselves only because of the fear of cops beating them up.” Here we don’t see the finesse with which the bribery scene is executed, probably because the scene is only reinforcing an existing defense for police violence, but it perfectly puts forward the idea that even though it may appear as cops taking a bribe or assaulting civilians, it is only a parallactic misjudgment; brutalities always happen under the conditions that make them imperative. 

Kerala police have always been exemplary in proving Noam Chomsky right when he said, “The primary function of the police is to protect state power and the system that privileges the few at the expense of the many.” From custodial murders to public firings, the history of police atrocities goes back to the creation of the state itself. While all these infamous cases are well documented, the everyday violence has largely gone under the radar, but not anymore. Social media shamings and mobile phone recordings have made the cover-ups hard and shifted the narratives. It is in this context that movies like Ronth come to the fore from the imaginations of cops. The case of Bindu, the Dalit worker who was wrongly arrested and tortured in Thiruvananthapuram just 4 months ago, will directly remind us of a scene from one of the movies Kabir wrote, Officer on Duty, which was released just a month prior to the incident. It is the introduction scene of the hero, Hari, where he flies off the handle on his subordinates for not identifying the criminals by just looking at them. Interestingly, be it Hari or Yohannan, we see the origin of their violence sometimes overlapping the origin story of the stereotypical serial killer we see in movies: toxic households, personal traumas, moral ambiguities, psychological isolation, and so on. The personal hurdles of the lead characters in a movie are nothing novel; it is a typical plot device used to create conflict in a story. Here, however, it is used as a justification for violence, and it comes in handy for Hari, Yohannan, and pretty much every other cop in Kabir’s universe, as all of them are of the opinion that in order for the police to exercise law-preserving violence, it inevitably falls upon them to use illegal violence.

Kabir’s fictional universe is a theater of violence. He invokes the martyr presence by condemning his heroes to suffer in this world of murder, madness, suicide, and manipulation. However, it is always the plebeian at the high seat in his colosseum. Power functions in the reverse order; the hunter becomes the hunted, and the oppressed becomes the oppressor. In Nayattu what hunts the heroes is the imaginary political capital and bargaining power of the Dalits, and in Ronth it is the social auditing and awareness of atrocities committed on Dalits. It is not at all surprising that, in such a design, the community that suffers the most at the hands of the police in the real world becomes the villains in the imaginary.

In the third act, Ronth enters a territory sans common decency. It draws direct parallels from an actual honor killing case of a Dalit youth and symbolically acquits the cops who allegedly aided the perpetrators. Yohannan’s phone call to the abductors, in the movie, is a phone call to the real world as well; it creatively breaks the fourth wall without literally acknowledging the audience. As shown in the movie, a phone conversation of an ASI offering his help to the prime accused surfaced in the media during the actual incident as well. It revealed the complicity of the cops and their collusion with the perpetrators, which ultimately led to a criminal case and the subsequent termination of the officer in question along with departmental actions against everyone involved. In the movie, however, the phone call is shown only as a negotiation tactic. In order to absolve the cops, the movie even goes to the length of painting the murder just as an accident while shifting the blame partly onto the victim himself in the process. The accidental drowning theory, which was initially floated by the police as opposed to the forensic findings of forceful drowning in the actual case, is what Kabir obviously chooses for his movie. The final act is three-pronged in its effect: it subverts the public perception, it vindicates the policemen, and it puts forward the theory that it doesn’t matter whether you’re soft and naive, like Dinnath, or curt and cautious, like Yohannan, you will eventually fall by the same sword, for every cop is a martyr walking. The movie ends in a shot of two policemen washing the blood of another off the streets. Ironically echoing Neruda, Kabir says, “Come and see the blood (of cops) in the streets.” The scene is specifically designed to emphasize the (imagined) banality of the incident. Ronth is a feel-bad movie; there is no catharsis, but it pleads “not guilty” to the outside world, and judging from the reception, the verdict has been largely favorable.

Ronth, as we have seen here, posits that the world inside the movie and the one outside it, where it is being watched as a movie, are one and the same, and in both of these worlds, truth and fiction have the same structure or In other words, the movie wants itself to be mistaken for reality. This relegation of cinema to propaganda, nonetheless, does not make Ronth a bad watch at all, and in fact what makes it dangerous is the very fact that it is a brilliantly done film. As Richard Brody wrote, “The worst thing about The Birth of a Nation is how good it is.”