The Indrani Mukerjea Story: Buried Truth | Netflix Docu's Quest Is Skin Deep At Best

THE FALLACY OF The Indrani Mukerjea Story: Buried Truth, the documentary on the former media tycoon accused of allegedly killing her daughter Sheena Bora, is pretty straightforward. Directed by Uraaz Bahl and Shaana Levy, the outing is too preoccupied with regurgitating facts that already exist in the public domain to inhabit a distinct perspective. The non-fiction work is too concerned with mining the sensationalism of the case and blindly featuring the media circus around it, to take a moment and reflect on it with the viewpoint afforded by hindsight.

This is a common problem. Take for instance Untouchable, the visceral 2019 documentary on the sexual abuse perpetrated by media mogul Harvey Weinstein. The nonfiction closely assembled and narrativised the sequential events of Weinstein’s misdeeds across decades, for easy understanding. The journalists from The New York Times who had broken the story featured in the documentary and so did the survivors. Through their presence and recreation, it verbalised written words and gave faces to the names we had read in the report. At its heart, however, Untouchable was a reiteration of something we were already familiar with, strung together by personal details and reconstruction of history. Frequent collaborators, Bahl and Levy attempt something similar with The Indrani Mukerjea Story: Buried Truth. The result is a much lesser work that possesses little bite. But more worryingly, it ends up platforming one of the co-accused in a case which is still under trial.

The reason for this is the absence of other key figures in the complicated and unresolved case. For instance, Peter Mukerjea — the former television executive and Indrani’s husband during the period of time in question — is nowhere to be seen. Neither is his son from a previous marriage, Rahul Mukerjea, who was engaged to Sheena. With the omission of their perspectives (the filmmakers frequently use voice recordings of Rahul’s conversation with Peter and Indrani, which he recorded shortly after Sheena’s disappearance), The Indrani Mukerjea Story: Buried Truth upholds Indrani’s version with fervent urgency.

Across four episodes, the filmmakers spend considerable time rehashing what happened: Sheena Bora, who was publicly known as Indrani’s sister but was later revealed to be her daughter in further investigations, went missing on April 24, 2012.

Three years later in 2015, Indrani was arrested for allegedly murdering Sheena, with the help of her former husband Sanjeev Khanna and driver Shyamvar Pinturam Rai. Both Khanna and Rai had confessed to the crime. This part of the ordeal is stitched together with old media tapes and several journalists’ recollections of the case.

The portrait that emerges from here is of a media witch hunt for Indrani, and a nation reeling from the prospect of a mother having killed her daughter. The Indrani Mukerjea Story: Buried Truth features her old acquaintances who state that she always liked privilege. Her daughter from the second marriage, Vidhie Mukerjea, speaks extensively (a lot of which sounds rehearsed) stressing that her mother can be violent at times. Indrani’s son Mikhail Bora, echoes how she has been a terrible mother, insecure of the world knowing that he and Sheena were her children from her first marriage. He further states that she had admitted him in a mental hospital and tried drugging him the same night Sheena went missing after allegedly meeting her.

For a while, this build-up mimics the public reportage of the case. The fact that Indrani’s account does not always add up and she is frequently chided by her lawyer (Ranjeet Sangle — it is hilarious how self-serious he wants to sound), make the case appear like a grim reenactment of crazy rich Indians. But the filmmakers milk their access to Indrani to design the documentary as a lopsided debate. Mikhail’s claims are followed by Indrani squashing them. Old news reports deeming Indrani guilty are juxtaposed with her offering a counter narrative (she keeps referring to Sheena in present tense, terms Mikhail a liar, and maintains that Peter knew Sheena is her daughter). She further reveals that as a teenager she was raped and impregnated by her father. That is how Sheena was born. The outing also features several moments where she pores over old photographs, mainly comprising Mikhail and Sheena, and expresses that unlike the popular notion, her children were happy.

The oddity of this design is that her version — the good, the bad, the ugly and even the incredulous — stands uncontested. The filmmakers intervene to include their questions twice, once to Mikhail and the other time to Indrani but the difference in tonality is hard to miss. They interject Mikhail to puncture holes in his remembrance while to Indrani they furnish the pressing question: did she kill Sheena? She nips the query in the bud by clarifying that she cannot answer that as the case is still sub-judice. They refrain from probing further.

Even the visual design of the outing supports this. In the recreations, we see a desperate Rahul Banerjea making frantic calls to Peter. His room is filled with alcohol bottles and ashtrays are overflowing with cigarettes. Unsurprisingly, Indrani keeps stressing that he is a slacker. There is also the fact that The Indrani Mukerjea Story: Buried Truth opens with an upturned image of Mumbai. That only she appears among the rest to foreground her truth inadvertently implies that if anyone’s world was turned upside down, it was hers.

Granted, the documentary stresses in conclusion that several people (like Peter and Rahul Mukerjea, and anyone from their family) refused to be part of it, but the way it eventually unravels begs the reason for its existence. If the idea was to highlight Indrani’s version in a case that is still under trial, does it not undermine the potential of the genre and inch closer to being a PR exercise? It is perhaps not wholly incidental that since her bail, Indrani has carefully crafted a narrative for herself where she might not be the victim but was victimised all the same. In 2023 she penned her memoir, Unbroken, which made a protagonist of her. By mining only her truth, The Indrani Mukerjea Story: Buried Truth furthers that lineage. The grit is admirable but not above scrutiny. 

Stream The Indrani Mukerjea Story: Buried Truth here.