As a woman at a male-dominated police station rife with corruption and misogyny, Brinda finds that her diffidence, honesty and singular focus on her job offend and irritate her toxic colleagues. At first, SI N Sarathi (Ravindra Vijay) does not particularly stand out from the pack. Gradually though, he is put off by his colleagues’ sexism and meanness. He also grows to respect Brinda’s astuteness and diligence as an investigator.
Vangala and Malladi write almost imperceptible shifts in Sarathi’s attitude to Brinda, until he is the male ally every woman should have at the workplace. In a scenario where most writers would have eventually turned them into lovers or hinted at an attraction between them, this team abjures that stereotypical path. The two simply become friends who are committed to their duty.
In a somewhat similar context, in the Hindi series Dahaad last year, a dalit policewoman played by Sonakshi Sinha finds a staunch ally in her boss (Gulshan Devaiah). The creators of Dahaad, however, disrupted this equation by showing him briefly make a physical overture towards her without even adequately building up to it. In doing so, they unwittingly played into the regressive assumption usually made about male allies of women in deeply patriarchal settings: that their support never comes without an underlying motivation.
Brinda is an antidote to one of my long-running grouses against screenwriters: the scarcity of strong man-woman friendships on TV and film. It is a truth universally acknowledged – said not Jane Austen – that a charismatic woman and a charismatic man whose friendship, or close professional association, is pivotal to a serial or feature, must become a couple at some point, or give it a shot, or at the very least, one of them will develop an unrequited attachment to the other, if one of the parties is not married or committed in any way to a third person, and often even if they are. This truth is so firmly entrenched in the minds of architects of mass-targeted entertainment, that in the otherwise lovely American comedy drama The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, they ruined the arc of the protagonist’s bond with her Sarathi. Late in the show, which ran from 2017 to 2023, Maisel sleeps with her fellow comedian Lenny Bruce, in what must rank as one of the most incongruous interludes ever to be thrust on to on-screen buddies. It rivals the ill-conceived hook-up between Rachel Green and Joey Tribbiani in the iconic Friends two decades back. Writers of these momentous disasters are clearly still grappling with a cliched, and to my mind, conservative, question that should have been buried long ago: can a man and woman ever just be friends? – a question that has been revised in American shows of the past couple of decades and slapped on to the LGBT-plus community with equally exasperating results.
In an India where man-woman friendships are not often explored on screen anyway, the platonic friendship between Brinda and Sarathi is a refreshing sign of maturity. In an India where male bonding has been a recurrent theme for decades, the mixed-gender lead trio of the 2023 Hindi coming-of-age flick Kho Gaye Hum Kahan (played by Ananya Panday, Siddhant Chaturvedi and Adarsh Gourav) was also a pleasant surprise.
Not that there’s anything wrong with sexual attraction. But it’s just as possible for man-woman friendships to exist without it. C’mon, it’s 2024! You can’t not believe that.