Hansal Mehta's Scoop Broadcasts The Cost Of Being A Female Journalist

This is #CriticalMargin where Ishita Sengupta gets contemplative over new Hindi films and shows. Today: Hansal Mehta's Scoop.

Poster for Scoop. Netflix

WHEN a senior male crime reporter is shot dead, a female reporter gets arrested. She is accused by the cops of supplying vital information about her professional rival, the slain journalist, to a wanted criminal. As police investigations continue, a can of worms open up. She was favoured by her ‘sources’, comprising people from both sides of the law. Media reports chronicle more revelations: she had a way with things; her dauntless ambition translated into a prematurely successful career. Her colleagues share that her male boss unfairly indulged her, which reflected in the many front-page bylines she had. On the heels of this, when the same man writes an op-ed expressing solidarity with his protégée, rumours of their intimacy gain steam. What other reason could there be? How else did a woman run in a world largely trodden by men?

In the landscape of Hindi language storytelling, few filmmakers depict journalists as deftly as Hansal Mehta. This is not to say that his portrayals are perfect but that they hew closer to reality than most fictional representations that are mired either in excess or annoyance. Sometimes, both. Mehta has a history of placing them at the centre of narratives — Aligarh (2015) and Scam 1992 (2020) — without undermining the heft of their inclusion. With Scoop his recent long-form outing centered on journalism, the gaze is sharper. The devil is in the details: the source-eating-source world of the profession, the dimly-lit press club filled with competing journalists enjoying single malt, the sense of power they derive from knowing powerful people, the tantrum thrown by an editor on missing an exclusive, the inherent sexism built in the tongue of male reporters, the negotiation of the female reporters, and the slippery slope of morality they have to straddle to find the scoop.

The six-episode show is based on the 2019 book, Behind Bars in Byculla: My Days in Prison by Jigna Vora the former journalist who was co-accused in the murder of senior crime reporter Jyotirmoy Dey (popularly known as J Dey). On 11 June 2011, Dey was shot dead in Powai, a Mumbai suburb. Months of investigation revealed the hit was carried out at the behest of underworld don Chhota Rajan, in retaliation for the reports Dey wrote on him. On 25 November 2011, Vora was arrested under Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA), a stringent law that provides the state government special powers to deal with terrorism and organised crime, for inciting Rajan. She got bail on July 27 the next year, and in 2019, the Bombay High Court upheld a lower court’s acquittal of Vora on grounds of insufficient evidence. The book documents Vora’s harrowing experience in jail.

The challenges of cinematically adapting such a true story are plenty. There is a concern about the scope (how much to delve into?), the fear of fidelity (how much to embellish?). But more crucially, there is a question about the optics: how to establish the person at the fore…as a victim of circumstances or a circumstantial victim? Mehta is excellent even in this regard. He can tell a story about a time while narrating the tale of a person and while doing that — because of doing that — he drapes them in shades of grey, putting the onus on us to make the reading. It served well in Scam arguably one of the more compelling shows of our times, where the biopic of Indian stockbroker and market fraudster Harshad Mehta doubled up as a fascinating character study and a time capsule.

In Scoop he adopts a similar slant wherein he takes a text which is primarily a procedural account and expands it into a riveting drama about the machinations of journalism and the extent to which the fourth pillar of democracy is vulnerable to the weight of external agenda. By doing so, he stitches together a portrait of a time and a nation, both imbued with their common apathy towards a distinct kind: an ambitious woman.

The series, written by Mirat Trivedi and Mrunmayee Lagoo Waikul (also a co-writer of Anubhav Sinha’s Thappad) starts out shakily but gains momentum soon. It opens at a railway station in Mumbai. The year is 2001 and an old man is excitedly flipping through a newspaper. The young girl next to him, his granddaughter, is embarrassed. The man beams on spotting her byline but she knows a trade secret: if your name doesn’t feature on the front page it is as good as non-existent. The story then cuts to 2011 and footage of dreaded terrorist Osama bin Laden being assassinated by the US is playing on the TV. A reporter asks: when will India do the same given that gangsters like Dawood Ibrahim and Chhota Rajan, responsible for wreaking havoc in the country, are still absconding? Is the government protecting them? The Minister sitting with him, a former police official, is enraged. “Are you accusing the government?” he asks the Muslim man. Watching them in a seedy cafe is a female journalist Jagruti Pathak (Karishma Tanna). Sitting opposite her is a ‘source’. He has confirmed a tip but there is no proof. Even then, she gives him a new phone, “the one with the email”. He returns the favour by handing over another tip.

It is a neat establishing shot for a show ostensibly about journalists and journalism in India, packing the many layers of dependence and transaction the profession enfolds. The story then unravels quickly. Pathak is a crime journalist in Mumbai, a minority in any city. In the intervening six years (she was the girl at the station) her byline has moved to the front page and that is where she wants to be. She shares a friendship with her editor Imran Siddique (a terrific Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub modelled on Hussain Zaidi, the then resident editor of Asian Age), who acknowledges her merit but also reigns her in. Like an editor, like any editor. Her contacts run through many rungs of police officials and outlaws. In one scene, when an actor asks her to connect him to an officer for the preparation of a role, she replies: will the police commissioner do? The first episode concludes with Rajan calling her from Dubai and giving an interview.

On paper, this ambition, of starting a familiar story with a person and not an event, is admirable. It makes a person out of a personality. For instance we get a glimpse into her life. Pathak is a single mother and her son studies in a boarding school. Her mother, uncle and grandparents live with her. Their conversations are mostly in Gujarati, lending a sense of intimacy. Mehta’s understanding of such households — extending even to a flashback scene where Pathak’s husband abuses her before his male friends — shows in the lived-in details he includes.

But the merit of Scoop lies in the way the filmmaker uses the familiarity of the story, right from Vora’s arrest for J Dey’s murder (Jaideb Sen in the show) until she gets bail, to reframe the narrative around the arrest of the female journalist. The way he uses his acuity to depict the ways in which female journalists find their footing in a male-dominated world, the sexism they confront. Little inclusions go a long way. When Pathak goes to a police station to get a byte from the officer, an aged journalist with a Hindi newspaper slyly remarks that she will be called first.

She does, but Scoop also takes us behind closed doors, implying — without resorting to a blatant reveal — the price she pays for that access. When she gets a front page byline, her male colleagues (led by an impressive Tanmay Dhanania) discuss the inevitability of it given the way she knows her way around things. Or, when she is imprisoned and her editor stands by her, his support is treated as an unfair bias which is believed to be making the whole newspaper look bad. If this never becomes a narrow defense of one person, it is because the narrative at hand is universal even if the way it culminated for that person might be different. For women, ambition and precarity always go hand in hand.

Having said that, Mehta is always making a broader point even if it might not seem so. Across six episodes, the series highlights the susceptibility of a woman to slander but also builds another narrative outlining the way the media is prone to be spokespersons of the government (tellingly, comedian Danish Sait makes a cameo as a TV journalist) and the ease with which the thin line separating sense and sensationalism gets blurred in the mad rush to report an exclusive (Pathak is portrayed as being complicit in this as much as the rest). That a journalist falls onto the radar of the cops despite being on good terms with them becomes Mehta’s way of underlining that notwithstanding fraternisation, when push comes to shove a journalist will be identified as one and penalised as one. Being one of the sharpest political filmmakers around, his commentary stems from a place of empathy and not rage. He is cognisant of the way things work in journalism — newspapers funded by government advertisements, journalists falling prey to being mouthpieces of their source given the dependence — thus even when his standing is clear, he leaves the judgment to us.

Scoop is an exhaustive, dense show that evokes the time it is set in with memorable clarity. The watercooler conversations about Dawood and Rajan, the Blackberry phones in the hands of the journalists, the early signs of rot in TV journalism. Such inventive precision, however, does not travel to the prison sequences later which unfold as iterations of things we have seen before. Pathak is tortured, tortured, and tortured some more. Even the montage of her family and son being despondent without her feel rehashed for resembling so much of the same. I also have a grouse against Scoop for not exploring more the way Pathak might have weaponised her gender for negotiation. The implications are there but the series never goes ahead and identifies it as her agency. This also might have something to do with Tanna’s performance — which I was not a fan of. The problem, I concur, is the predictability of her portrayal. I understand the reason behind casting her but she emotes in such familiar beats that it takes away a lot of nuance from her character.

Tanna, however, is an exception in a show which has superb performances across the board. Mehta has a knack of making actors act (it sounds silly when written like that but it is a gift) and nowhere is it more evident than in the casting of Harman Baweja as JCP Shroff (based on the late joint commissioner of Mumbai Police Himanshu Roy). The actor, who made his debut in 2008 and was on an unofficial hiatus for close to a decade, makes a comeback of sorts and is a revelation as a dubious cop with a conscience. He looks nothing like he used to, which deserves mention because so much of his inability to be viable as a leading male actor was tied to him being a look-alike of Hrithik Roshan; there is a weariness in his physicality which effortlessly lends itself to the role. Prosenjit Chatterjee as Sen appears briefly but as the outing unfolds, the potency of his performance colours the whole narrative. My favourite though is Jaimini Pathak as Jagruti’s lawyer. The actor arrives in the last episode and in so many ways rescues the series. He looks the part, talks the part, and acts the part. The joy in watching him is akin to witnessing an artist create something in the presence of an audience.

In several interviews post her acquittal, Vora can be heard asking one question: why she was chosen to be the scapegoat and be the one to take the fall for someone else. Mehta uses this as the starting point and designs Scoop as an answer to it. With every episode more and more names are thrown in as possible culprits; these are people who were possibly responsible even though Vora was jailed. This is not random. This becomes the show’s way of mirroring the way things happened. Though there were so many people, a female journalist was imprisoned. Because sometimes the truth is really this simple: a successful woman is perceived as a threat to the world and her story is one heartbeat away from being a scoop.

Watch now.

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