‘Janaawar: The Beast Within’: When a whodunit hunts itself

A cop chasing shadows, a murder mystery splattered with more expletives than evidence, a narrative drawing from the margins of society — streaming has long leaned on these crutches to prove it is braver than the Bollywood it claims to outgrow. Seeing them all stitched into one story should feel like deja vu.

And yet, ‘Janaawar: The Beast Within’ turns that predictability on its head. Rooted in Scheduled Tribe experience, the plot’s brutality is softened by an eye for beauty — cinematography moving between dread and lyricism with unhurried grace. But as the camera lingers on the forests of Chhand, what also resounds is absence — of marginalised voices, leaving the otherwise sure-footed stride with a telling limp.

The story follows Sub-Inspector Hemant Kumar (Bhuvan Arora), a tribal policeman wrestling both a murder case that begins with a rotting, headless corpse and his own place in the caste-ridden hierarchy of the force.

Senior cops step out to attend puja, seemingly leaving the junior staff to hold the fort. The series wastes no time: at the puja, a dagger-wielding hand inches toward a goat — only for the blade to fall, not on flesh, but in a sly jump-cut to prasad. It is one of several moments where visual wit disarms you just before the ugliness lands.

That ugliness is swift. Conspicuously tilak-ed cop Motilal, finding a drop of lahu (blood) in his food, erupts in casteist rage, slapping the server. A fellow cop’s throwaway quip — “Dharam ke kapde dry-clean kar lenge” — falters the build-up, however.

Hemant is soon pulled between absurd bureaucratic demands — an MLA and a lawyer barging in to solve cases without registering FIRs — and a call that sets the real story in motion.

On a mysterious caller’s curt tip-off, Hemant rides through the night with a fellow cop into the jungle — protocol be damned — and discovers a decomposing body. Motilal, assigned to guard the corpse, flees the stench, only to return moments later and find the head missing.

These macabre beats keep the thriller taut even as the show sometimes slips into caricature: the upper-caste Motilal, played as the village dunce, devours screentime that could have deepened the marginalised voice the show claims to centre.

At home, Hemant tends to his pregnant upper-caste wife Garima (Deeksha Sonalkar), with saintly devotion, the script laying on the “kind cop, good husband” trope a little thick. Sonalkar glimmers despite a character too familiar, while Arora shoulders Hemant with a slow-burn intensity.

For seasoned viewers, the terrain is recognisable: “Sahabs” and “Jai Hind, sirs” aplenty, obscenities crass enough to remind you of a drunk uncle, and cops walking into stench-laden crime scenes with handkerchiefs over noses. Yet it is more than that: ‘Janaawar’ keeps you engaged — not just for what happens next, but for how it is shown.

The series cannot outrun its contradiction though. It promises a narrative from the margins but also resorts to extorting shock value. Hemant’s personal negotiation with caste sometimes feels like an afterthought, as if two parallel shows have been spliced into one.

Episodes close on clever cliffhangers; but credits laugh in ironic disappointment, testament to a harder truth: representation on screen is hollow if it does not enable representation off it. To lift only the trauma of a people while their voices remain absent risks turning narrative into appropriation.