The pens behind the guns

After Kaala Paani, screenwriter couple Sandeep Saket and Anusha Nandakumar have now trained their pens on Rohit Shetty’s Singham universe. Pic/Anurag Ahire

While most of us are going gaga over the actors joining Rohit Shetty's "cop universe", there are two new entrants to the same world who have been quietly working behind the scenes, patiently shaping it, scene by scene.

Meet Sandeep Saket and Anusha Nandakumar, both part of the writers' room of the seven-episode series, Indian Police Force (IPF), set to hit Prime Video on January 19. They met at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute while they were studying writing, and love blossomed, leading to marriage. Today, the couple has a string of achievements to their name, and they are just getting started.

"My maternal grandfather was a filmmaker," says Nandakumar, who was born and brought up in Pune, "and I grew up listening to stories of what would happen on the set. But it was only when I got involved with the cultural committee at Fergusson College that the film bug truly bit me."

If you thought the name sounded familiar, you wouldn't be wrong. Nandkumar is one of the three co-founders of the online comedy content platform Bharatiya Digital Party, responsible for many a chuckle among the Marathi audience. "We were creating content every day and I grew to love writing. I applied for a direction and film writing course at Satyajit Ray, and down the line, also found that I loved writing fiction more than non-fiction," she says.

The soon-to-release web series has several new additions to the already expanding ‘cop universe', including Siddharth Malhotra and Sharad Kelkar. File pic

Saket, too, had his own journey of self-discovery. "I met a lot of people from the film and theatre space while pursuing my Bachelor's in History at the Hindu College in Delhi, which set me on my chosen path. I chose screenwriting as a course at Satyajit Ray, but in reality, screenwriting chose me. It is a relationship; we are still discovering each other," he says, and it takes us a minute to realise he's not referring to Nandakumar. Writers!

IPF, though grand and much-awaited, is hardly their first rodeo. They were also part of the writers' room for Kala Paani, which recently released on Netflix and is receiving critical acclaim. Before that, in 2021, they also published their first book, The War That Made R&AW, which focuses on the formation of India's counter-terrorism agency under spymaster RN Kao and its work during the 1971 liberation of Bangladesh from Pakistan.

"We approached writing the book the way we would write a screenplay," recalls Nandakumar. "We did need some handholding through the process but we were doing what we love doing best: telling a story."

With Shetty's cop universe, they say, the challenge lies in taking real-life heroes and writing their stories for the reel, which is easier said than done. The couple says that most of the characters and incidents in IPF are all based on real life.

"There are umpteen number of films, both in India and in global cinema, about cops and the work they do. Storytelling itself as an art is not a new one, it is as old as humanity. What we are doing today is based on templates established in the past. The trick is identifying that one unique aspect in every story and making that your strongest point. A cop that we talk to may only cursorily describe a chase sequence, because that's all it was to him. Drawing out the drama becomes our job," says Saket.

"In other cases," says Nandakumar, "the cop is already a massive hero in real life, and the challenge is to find the right story from their already dramatic life. So, instead of pulsating action sequences, we find that emotional connect that pushed them to do their job."

They are already working on the next instalment of the Singham franchise, as well as several other projects that have them all charged up with excitement. With the mention of the next Singham film, we can't help but ask them about their take on accusations of "copaganda" or the attempts at shaping the opinion of the police in the people's minds using popular culture. A recently released poster for Singham 3 showed Deepika Padukone shoving a handgun in a criminal's mouth, while smiling gleefully. The poster sparked off a heated debate about encounter culture and its cinematic depiction.

"Are encounters a more effective way of policing? I am not very sure but my job is to tell the story," says a pensive Saket. "We live in the age of social media, where everything is the subject of intense debate. This, too, requires a debate on a larger and public forum so that we can all learn from it. Thanks to social media, people will not make statements today that they would casually make ten years ago. Why? Because they know it is wrong, that it bothers people. Likewise, if we learn something about our own subject from a wider discussion, we can take cues from the present instead of relying on templates made in the past."

Nandakumar chips in with her own take. "If you're writing for a Rohit Shetty, you have to understand that his vision is pure entertainment. There is another project we are working on, where the protagonist is an imperfect policeman, and gets a lot of flak for it too. A third one in the offing looks at policing in yet another completely different way. There are different cops and hence, there have to be different conversations. But yes, there really needs to be a larger conversation and debate," she says.