Much praise has been heaped on Mumbai Confidential: Good Cop, Bad Cop; a graphic novel from Indian writer Saurav Mohapatra and illustrator Vivek Laxman Shinde. The cover is emblazoned with laurels from Anurag Kashyap — the king of Bollywood pulp fiction, and Samit Basu, the acclaimed fantasy writer. This, snowballed with my personal love for old-school Bollywood noir, made the idea of a pulp fiction graphic novel set in present-day Mumbai sound absolutely delicious.

If you are shaking your head, literally or mentally now, know that graphic novels are the new frontier in literature.

Maus by Art Spiegelman came out in 1991 and forever overthrew the derogatory association with ‘comics’. It also won the Pulitzer Prize. Graphic novels have been grappling with universally significant subjects like political belief systems (V for Vendetta); feminism and coming of age (Persepolis); the complex web of morality in a world gearing towards dystopia (Watchmen); as well as presenting mind-boggling potential of the form owing to its potent visual and verbal literacy.

Graphic novels have always packed a solid punch. Where literary fiction meanders on, graphic novels bring the party to the reader, with illustrations that serve both to help the story along as well as throw the reader down unexpected rabbit holes made up of equal parts thrilling discovery and tantalising puzzles. The best graphic novels are crisply written with illustrations that, at the risk of sounding clichéd, transcend the writing — creating a world in both visual and verbal description that the reader (albeit for a shorter time than with literary fiction) can plunge into headfirst. And like all good literature, a graphic novel only succeeds if it truly engrosses your imagination: allowing all your senses to experience the world it presents; engage with the characters that it creates; and makes a constructive and profound difference in your life.

Mumbai Confidential, unfortunately, does not do any of the above. It is at best a hard-boiled, trying-too-hard noir. A story of a good cop forced to do awful things by a corrupt world, but all leading to naught as he loses the woman he loves, his work and his life. I didn’t give it away by the way: the novel starts at the climax and works its way backward (and forward).

The novel starts with Inspector Arjun Kadam embroiled in a point-blank shooting duel with Senior Inspector Sunil Sawant, all the while clutching his gunshot wound, listening to Sawant “monologuing” in what feels like a self-conscious pastiche of Bollywood baddies getting what they mistakenly think is the last laugh, before the hero and all the goodness he represents is suddenly vindicated. This pastiche of Bollywood is in fact the recurring theme in the novel, but that is less of a criticism and more of an observation, given that a lot of what Bollywood churns out is a pastiche of real crime in Mumbai. What this twice-removed recreation does do though is empty the novel of all emotional depth. In the dark, gritty world of the Mumbai underworld, there are a million stories that strike the most human chord, and even within the dog-eats-dog world of guns, child prostitution, black money, and powerful and ruthless accomplices, there are stories that are touching and universal. Unfortunately, Mohapatra ignores those nuances, and goes straight to the hard-boiled cynicism that rings false simply because there is nothing else but that.

Inspector Arjun Kadam is part of a no-paper-trails police squad which kills criminals point blank and files them as encounters. This is to do away with the trials and tribulations of police reports, witness acquiring and retaining, and ultimate court acquittals for those criminals. It’s a no-frills, gritty job but Arjun does it anyway; feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the ruthless and increasingly arbitrary nature of his work.

He does, however, have something to live for — his wife and unborn child. Subsequently, his wife is diagnosed with a fatal tumor which threatens both her and the child. Arjun is unable to make the payment for the operation that could save them, until it’s too late. Thereafter starts his downward spiral into drugs, proverbial self-flagellation, and the loss of his livelihood. One night, while wandering Mumbai’s squalid darkness, Arjun meets a little girl on the street selling roses, and within her sad eyes he glimpses sorrow that mirrors his own. This brief moment of soulful stirring is marred by a hit-and-run which kills the girl and brutally injures Arjun. The rest of the story is a predictable pursuit, in which Arjun vows to bring to justice the murderer of the girl, and in doing so find his own redemption.

The illustrations are, like the content, quite grainy, done in shades of charcoal with a complete lack of sentiment except in the scene where Arjun meets the little girl. The drawing of her vulnerable, sad face is arresting and it resembles the touching clarity of a photograph, unlike the rest of the novel which seems purposefully sketchy. Dark shadows are overcast and faces become undistinguishable, while other times all that’s discernable is an ominous marker — much like the Joker in the Batman Series — a teeth-baring grin.

Like I said in the beginning, there was a lot of potential in a graphic novel of this kind — it draws widely on a rich supply of sources ranging from crime noir to pulp fiction in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, as well as pulp fiction Bollywood of the 60s and 70s where the angry young man motif encompassed not just heroism but darker shades of moral ambiguity as well. Despite this, the story itself falls flat because of the overcast cynicism which empties it of all emotion. There is no real back story — a blank refusal from the writer to furnish us with any emotional connection whatsoever, and forcing the reader to rush into the present-day doom-and-gloom scenario of the Mumbai underworld and its menacing implosion without any real association to it. Mumbai Confidential is, unfortunately, a case of hollow writing.

In the dark, gritty world of the Mumbai underworld, there are a million stories that strike the most human chord, and even within the dog-eats-dog world of guns, child prostitution, black money, and powerful and ruthless accomplices, there are stories that are touching and universal. Unfortunately, Mohapatra ignores those nuances.

Mumbai Confidential: Good Cop, Bad Cop
(GRAPHIC NOVEL)
By Saurav Mohapatra
Archaia, USA
ISBN 978-1936393657
156pp.