Lathis in Delhi, heroes on screen: As Singham turns 15, Bollywood’s supercop myth shattered

It is a troubling question to ask at a moment when Singham completes 15 years. A generation has grown up on Rohit Shetty’s vision of the righteous cop: the incorruptible man in uniform who bends the law only to uphold justice, whose violence arrives dressed in morality, whose rage is always redemptive. But when reality unfolds in broad daylight, the distance between narrative fiction and lived fact narrows down. Perhaps this is not a moment of disillusionment.

Disillusionment suggests something has been lost. This feels closer to an awakening to the widening gulf between the stories we have chosen to believe and the truths that unfold in front of our eyes.

But, for a moment, suspend the present. Forget the clips and the images that have come to define our own time. Forget because that is what every regime ultimately asks of its citizens, to remember selectively. Return instead to fifteen years ago. Singham arrived at a moment when the single-screen action hero was finding his voice again. While Ajay Devgn’s Bajirao Singham became its most prominent face, the revival had begun earlier with Salman Khan’s Radhe in Wanted and Chulbul Pandey in Dabangg. After years of uneven fortunes, both the films did more than restore Khan’s superstardom. It resurrected a particular idea of the Hindi film hero: the larger-than-life saviour who could cut through institutional decay with the certainty of his fists, at a time when the rise of multiplex cinema had begun to challenge the supremacy of the traditional mass entertainer.

The irony of Singham is that it began as a rebellion against power, only to become one of its most fervent celebrations.

It is potent to remember, too, that neither Wanted nor Singham were born out of originality. Both are remakes of successful South Indian potboilers, both centred on policemen who step outside the law to cleanse a system portrayed as irredeemably corrupt. Their moral universe is uncomplicated: when institutions fail, the hero must become the institution. The achievement of these films, then, lied less in invention than in execution. Khan and Devgn understood the grammar of the gallery. They fashioned righteous anger into mass entertainment, and gave audiences the exhilarating certainty that justice, however delayed, could still arrive with a punchline, a flying jeep, and a man in uniform.

Also Read | In Diljit Dosanjh’s Satluj, the state writes the obituary but the river remembers the truth

If one were to speak of Singham in isolation, it is, at its best, a straightforward, almost archetypal entertainer. An upright countryside cop is transferred to a city where he finds himself trapped within an indifferent and corrupt machinery. He is forced to confront the widening gulf between what he believes policing ought to be and what the system demands of him. As convention dictates, his transformation arrives when he decides that justice matters more than procedure, when he decides not to serve his masters, but book them, by hook or crook. To call Singham a film of great cinematic ambition would be a gross overstatement. Hindi cinema had produced richer, more layered police dramas before it, and continued to do so after. Its significance lies elsewhere as it inherited the moral architecture of Zanjeer and recast it for a new generation, with Devgn being the new Bachchan.

That is perhaps why even Singham Returns, a sequel more mechanical and far less inspired, retained a measure of its appeal. At least it still had the image of a policeman leading an uprising against the powers that be. It was less about subtlety than about catharsis. Because that has always been the central paradox, and the DNA, of the cop actioner. The righteous policeman is, by design, a creature of an unrighteous order. His heroism is not bestowed by the uniform, but earned in the moment he turns against the very machinery that legitimises it.

With Singham Again, the devolution reached its logical conclusion: the uniform ceased to serve authority and instead became its very embodiment.

But with 2014, everything changed. The political imagination was devolving, and with it, the stories Hindi cinema chose to tell. The corrupt state, the failing institution, the machinery that once stood as the hero’s greatest adversary disappeared from the mainstream narrative. The enemy was no longer the system. The system itself had become sacred. Shetty’s idea of the policeman changed with it. What began as the story of a cop resisting institutional decay slowly deteriorated into a cinematic universe where the institution could no longer be wrong. With the expansion of his cop universe, and its culmination in Singham Again, where Devgn’s Singham joined forces with Akshay Kumar’s Sooryavanshi and Ranveer Singh’s Simmba, the moral centre of these films underwent a profound transformation.

Violence was no longer an act of resistance against power. In fact, it became an expression of power itself. It was no longer interrogated, restrained or burdened by moral consequence. Worse, the system was no longer something to be challenged. It had become something to be defended. And perhaps that is the most revealing shift of all. The earlier films asked whether justice could survive a corrupt institution. The newer ones assume that authority itself is justice, as though power, once draped in a uniform, no longer needs to answer for itself. But the greater, darker devolution over these fifteen years has not been Singham’s. It has been that of the star who gave the myth its face.

Devgn recently unveiled the first look of his next cop drama, Chauhan, set against the fraught landscape of Kashmir. The image is familiar: a cop defined by excess, introduced as “The OG Action Star,” poised to unleash force upon a crowd. In the promotional asset, he casually remarks that tear gas does not do much damage to protesters. Perhaps it doesn’t, in the grammar of contemporary commercial cinema, where violence passes for virtue. Reality, however, has no background score to soften its blows. Tear gas does not dissipate with a cut to the next scene. It scorches the lungs, burns through eyes, scatters families and leaves children crying in streets that will never make it into the final edit.