The Hunt for Veerappan: A Chilling Tale of a 20 year long Manhunt
There is something about crime documentaries that pulls us in. It is almost like watching a dysfunctional family in a comedy or reality show. Crime documentaries show us the depravity, the disturbing level of human mind’s potential and possibilities, and everything is at our discretion. We feel a sense of thrill, to judge acts as evil or heinous. We want to turn away but we don’t.
THE HUNT FOR VEERAPPAN, the new documentary directed by Selvamani Selvaraj featuring key personalities directly and indirectly involved with the manhunt, released on Netflix on 4th August worldwide is divided into four episodes, that also serve as four chapters- The Jungle King, The Bloodbath, The Revolutionary & The Way Out.
As someone who is versed with Bangalore and Karnataka from couple of decades, I am no stranger to the imagery the name evokes. Veerappan was like Gabbar Singh come to life, minus the dark humour. As someone who discovered violence in cinema through action films of the 90s, and ultraviolent auteur cinema of Tarantino & Kubrick and our own RGV, I was fascinated with the film Jungle, which was modelled after the infamous brigand, the Sandal Smuggler, as we cutely called him back in the day(Santoor Sandal et al). It was only much later that I discovered, to my shock, the scale of brutalities, toil, struggle and sheer bonfire of resources and manpower that this 20 year manhunt came to represent.
The hunt had begun. How a nobody, a villager from the hills took on the might of entire police force of two states.
I happened to meet a fascinating and vibrant personality, Sunaad Raghuram, back in 2021 at Mysore and in his captivating stories of journalism, forests and life in general, came to know about the book he had written on Veerappan back in 2008, and also heard about the inception of this documentary, and have eagerly waited for the release ever since. I had watched RGV’s Killing Veerappan, and recall enjoying it when I saw it in the way he used ShivRajkumar and RGV’s signature cinematic devices. But a story like this can use multiple retellings, from multiple perspectives.
Watching the police force(Special Task Force- STF)and associated team of locals toil in extreme weather without food, shelter or water, we gather investigative journalism and pursuing criminals back in those days isn’t like what we see in the movies, it was certainly not Netflix-True-Crime-glamourous.
Reading Sunaad’s book, VEERAPPAN THE UNTOLD STORY, left me unsettled. For someone who shies away from consuming dark and disturbing material in any art form, while I absorbed the way it depicts the time period and the atmosphere, the accounts of brutal violence left me numb. I then realized it’s not called Investigative Journalism for nothing. It is all based on facts, and facts are sometimes stranger than fiction.
Coming to the documentary, I devoured all of it in one day(helps that the day was a Friday). It is not an easy task to binge watch it essentially as the sound bytes are in multiple languages, and the director uses many devices of storytelling in building something with weight and longevity. Building a well-known story like this yet again anew, requires a lot of courage, craft and technique. And the documentary film displays all of it in bounds.
In all true crime shows, as you get deeper into the psychological reasoning and analysis, you leave a bit of yourself behind, especially the ‘good is good, bad is very bad’ bits. You delve into objective analysis beyond right or wrong and think of it as a game of chess. But then the humanity, the emotional misery, the sheer quandary of balancing what needs to be done vs what one should do makes you miserable as you go along. I have no idea why we choose to delve into true crime because it is not exactly entertainment in most parts. The pay offs sometimes are cracking the case, which 90% of times, does not happen, as we are not in an Agatha Christie novel.
So where is the pay off in the VEERAPPAN story? I would say it is in unraveling the layers, of diplomatic process, of politics, of ideologies, of differences in culture, faith and approaches, and the ultimate pay off in this story is — How can one catch VEERAPPAN?
While the film/documentary is not perfect, there are some bits that lag(for me the humanizing of criminals always gets a bit too ornamental, the politics of it all deviates from the thrill of the hunt, the connecting thread of equating Veerappan’s oft-clueless yet specifically brutal acts of crime with the LTTE movement and revolutionaries that have existed since the beginning of time made me a little miffed, also this is essentially a through and through Tamil narrative for good or bad, so it may ruffle some feathers and irk you if you are not aligned with the Tamil side of the narrative, also the Rajkumar family was conspicuous by their absence despite a great bit of narration on Dr. Rajkumar’s iconic legacy and popular persona), it did make for a wonderful watch, for the technique(editing, camera, refrain from re-enactments), the cinematic touch of craft(the entire sequence with Muthulakshmi riding a bike felt like a beautiful long shot from an indie movie), the delicate treatment of emotions when they are just about to go overboard, and an overall richness of execution that justifies the painstaking months and years of research gone behind it.
Any retelling of VEERAPPAN’s story is a success if it shows you something you didn’t already know, makes you sit up, stirs you up from inside and shocks you even after all these years…and the show did all of that and more. I am pretty sure this documentary should be a worthy successor to last year’s Elephant Whisperers come award season.
And in all honesty, Sunaad is much more than ‘Investigative Journalist’!
Suggested reading:
