Murder, they wrote

This story begins with some spoilers. If you’re still watching Black Warrant, you’d rather skip the next paragraph.

In the final episode of the Netflix crime series, the Sikh Tihar jailer, Mangat, sits on a cot, drink in hand—his eyes pools of despair. “Do you know who the real enemy is?” He says to his colleague Sunil Gupta, “Those who play the game of politics.” It is 1984. Gupta is visiting Mangat after he, along with every Sikh jailer and warder, has been removed from Tihar before the arrival of Indira Gandhi’s assassins. Suspicion runs deep inside the jail as the streets outside burn. These scenes bring to life the horrific events of that year, described in detail in the pages of the 2019 book upon which the series is based. Except for one thing: Mangat never existed. 

“The fictionalisation happens in the merging of characters,” shares Sunetra Choudhary, author of Gupta’s memoir, who was once a familiar face on NDTV and is now the political editor at Hindustan Times. Her book is a rare, riveting insider account of that infamous prison from the perspective of the man who served as Tihar’s press relations and legal officer for 35 years. In the series, Gupta is a few feet shorter, but still lanky. DSP Tomar’s character is an amalgamation of several officers mentioned in the book; as is the journalist Pratibha Sen. “In the book, we talk about the assassination, the riots and the Sikhs being moved out of the jail in 1984. In the series, the character of Mangat is invented to show that whole aspect. But the idea is still the same; the text is the same.” 

The show’s success is testament to the sustained, even growing, popularity of the true (and the true adjacent) crime genre in India. Where we once sat transfixed in front of our television sets watching the sansani khez of the days pulped into weekly doses of kitsch on CID in the 1990s, Crime Patrol in the 2000s, Savdhaan India in the 2010s, we now watch resurrected real-life murderers, scamsters, terrorists, and criminals of all shades stalking the OTT ether. As this mass obsession unfolds and multiplies, India’s leading production houses seem to be in hot pursuit of beat reporters—to option their books, consult on screenplays, and, to employ as researchers. When fact and fiction merge—when art imitates real life to mine deeper meaning about the human condition—what do journalists bring to these writer’s rooms? 

In 2019, a team from SonyLIV wandered into the Zee News office in Mumbai, looking for the resident editor Sanjay Singh. Hansal Mehta’s Scam 1992 was nearing completion and they had come across Singh’s 2004 book, Telgi: Ek Reporter ki Diary which features notes from the years he spent investigating the mastermind behind the stamp paper scam (valued at Rs 40,000 crore at the time of his arrest), who once lavished Rs 80 lakh in one night on a dancer in a Mumbai bar. Bemused and intrigued by this hand of fate that was dusting the cobwebs off the case that arguably made his career, Singh signed a contract and began to sit in on Zoom calls with the writers to explain the sheer breadth of Telgi’s operation. He also supplied them with newsreels to help shape the character, and Applause Production’s legal team with boxes of paperwork as evidence to protect them from potential lawsuits. 

“My book was about the journey of a journalist, but the series ended up being about the journey of the scamster. They have a word for this sort of thing: humanisation,” Singh says wryly. Still, he saw an opportunity and quit his day job. He has since written more books, four of which are now being worked into web series—including an Abbas Mastan adaptation of his 2023 book Ek Thi Sheena Bora, and a Sanjay Gupta adaptation of his 2022 book, Criminals in Uniform. “I understand that their job is to tell complex stories in a simple, entertaining way so creative liberties will be taken. But I realised I don’t want to be too involved in things like screenplays,” he says. “My job is to tell the story. I can’t write in a flowery language, but my facts and data are solid.” 

A few shades more dramatic is the prose of Hussain Zaidi, one of India’s best-known crime writers—the OG, if you will—into this nonfiction-to-Bollywood pipeline. “When my first book, Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blast came out in 2001, the Mid-Day editor Tariq Ansari saw the potential to make it into a movie. He introduced Anurag Kashyap and me. We spoke in detail about the book, he showed me the screenplay, and I made my suggestions. He chose to reverse the order of events in the book. It was brilliant. And I suggested that we mention the reason for the blast at the end of the movie, since everyone thought it had something to do with communal tension.” 

Zaidi’s bestsellers have been precious source material for some massive Bollywood productions. His 2012 exposé Dongri to Dubai: Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia became Sanjay Gupta’s Shootout at Wadala. He co-wrote the screenplay for Kabir Khan’s 2015 film Phantom, adapted from his book Mumbai Avengers. The 2019 book, Class of 83: The Punishers of Mumbai Police became a Netflix film starring Bobby Deol, just a year later. Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s 2023 film Gangubai Kathiawadi took a page off Mafia Queens of Mumbai, with reportage from journalist Jane Borges, in 2011. It isn’t even just his own books—the first Mardaani is based on a concept that Zaidi brought to Aditya Chopra, and he also helped with the research and development of the web series Scoop (he was Jigna Vora’s editor at The Asian Age) and Indian Police Force, even though the stories weren’t his.   

“I didn’t want to leave journalism,” says Zaidi, who now operates almost entirely in the author-screenplay writer space, and is currently working on a book on the mafia queens of India. “But it’s all about pandering to corporations and politicians now. I always thought I’d be happier being a lion for one day rather than a sheep for a hundred.” The books (and the movies that followed) did help him pay his EMIs, and now he’s “a man willing to work on non-fiction and good crime stories in any capacity”. In his opinion, you can easily tell the good from the bad: “I realised that wherever there is good research by a journalist or a former cop, or even by the team, it turns out very well.”  

Deepu Sebastian Edmond is no stranger to rigorous research, nor to having his work inspire screen adaptations. Rajkummar Rao plays him in Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh, a film inspired by Sebastian Edmond’s interviews with the late AMU professor Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras. A 2015 investigative report in The Indian Express that tracked the astonishing scale of internet scams in small town India became the Netflix show Jamtara: Sabka Number Aayega. When he heard about it in January 2020, he put out a tweet: “I believe mine was the first major story on the phishing scam operating out of one of the country's most backward districts.” 

The series’ writer reached out, and soon, Sebastian Edmond found himself at the writer’s table. “They’d begun work on season 2 and needed help with developing the story. I made sure we didn’t do the research sitting in an office in Mumbai. You have to go to the ground.” So he took a team and visited Jamtara three to four times to find out what was happening now, since “the scam in Jamtara changes every six months or so”. 

On every web series he’s worked on since, Sebastian Edmond has bought the same level of exhaustive, in-depth research.  For Anubhav Sinha’s IC:814: The Kandahar Hijack, “talking to the crew of IC 814 was very eye-opening. Most of them hadn’t been aware of their PTSD. In post-hijack interviews, law enforcement saw everyone who survived as a potential suspect. That only heightened their trauma. Those conversations helped us to see IC:814 in a different light. We even consulted a mental health expert about how we can present this in the show,” he adds. 

Former entertainment journalist Dipti Nagpaul, who now runs a content creation studio Bookmark Productions (whose past work includes Angry Young Men and The Archies), also remembers some interesting findings from her time as a researcher for the second season of Criminal Justice in 2019. “The original British series which we were adapting from was on marital rape,” she says. “Our challenge was: how do you Indianise it given that marital rape is not even a crime as per the Indian Penal Code?” 

“The original series has a cop couple, and we wanted that dynamic in ours as well, but we wondered, is this even a common thing in India?” she recalls. “We found that not only is it common, but also that cop couples have a high number of divorces. It is also not uncommon for women cops to show up battered at their jobs.” She spent two months doing the legwork for this project, interviewing prisoners, lawyers and therapists. Armed with all that research, she spent several days with writer Apurva Asrani to find the characters and make them their own.  

While Nagpaul isn’t drawn to crime as such anymore—the implicit voyeurism disturbs her—she says she has wanted to help bridge the gap between what we see on screen and IRL since she was a young reporter with The Indian Express. The idea of journalists as researchers on fiction projects had already taken root. In 2012, Dibakar Banerjee had asked her to work on what would become Shanghai (which she couldn’t); Anurag Kashyap had famously sent off his writers into the Indian hinterland to research for Gangs of Wasseypur. “We as journalists have access, we can open doors that filmmakers and producers might struggle with, because they’re starting from scratch,” she says. “We are also able to bring in a lot more nuance and intersectional context because we’re clued into it.”

It was in search of exactly that kind of intersectional context that Vikas Chandra, creative producer on Reema Kagti’s Dahaad, connected with the Rajasthan-based Dalit writer and activist Bhanwar Meghwanshi in 2021. “I worked as a content consultant on all eight episodes,” says Meghwanshi in Hindi. “I spoke with Reema and the writers several times. They were curious about the caste surname, and if the circumstances mentioned in the story are the grassroot experience—especially when it comes to caste identity. I looked closely into the character, dialogues and tone, especially that of Sonakshi Sinha’s cop to ensure that nothing hurt the sentiments of the community, and that all information is correct.” 

Authenticity, fidelity to reality, colour and immunity from lawsuits are all noble reasons to hire journalists on fiction projects—especially now that you see a battery of YouTubers bring that Manohar Kahaniyan-style pulp fiction ethos to their true crime “investigations”. “At the heart of all this is storytelling,” says Choudhary, “We may not be dialogue writers, but we are trained in getting the real story out.”

OTT’s explosion, paired with the death of TV news, she says, has meant that everyone—creators, reporters and audience—has realised there’s a wealth of fascinating stories that need to be told. “The truth will always be stranger than fiction. We need more of this.” Sebastian Edmond, who went down this road because he wanted a break from his day job, now works on three-four projects a year. He is skeptical about how integral journalists remain to crime dramas; their role being subject to production budgets and the whims of showrunners. But maybe it will last: “Journalists are after all cheap to hire,” he laughs.