Veerappan is an eerily familiar name to those of us who grew up in the 1990s. He was a contemporary legend, presented to us as the proverbial Big Bad hiding out deep in the forests. The stories of his do-gooding also came to be reported, amusing the public imagination. After his eventual capture and killing by the police, the question remained: who was he after all? The reality of who he was, the grey areas of state excesses, and the mystery that continues to shroud him, are what Netflix’s new documentary drama, The Hunt for Veerappan, attempts to take on.
The four-episode series, directed by Selvamani Selvaraj, opens strangely not with the many headlines Veerappan made over the years, but with romance. From the real-life Muthulakshmi Veerappan, we hear first the story of how she chose to marry a man branded a dreaded and elusive bandit. Yet, the scene also leaves you uneasy. Veerappan was in his late thirties when he asked her to marry him, Muthulakshmi says. She was fourteen or fifteen years old at the time, she also recalls.
The series rests heavily on a sense of high drama. Talking heads like Mahalingam, KM Govindan, and Anburaj from Veerappan’s gang, journalists Sivasubramanian and Sunaad, various police officials, BK Singh (the then District Forest Officer), and many others come and go after making revelatory statements about Veerappan. Blood splatters on maps mark out the geography of Veerappan’s activities as he moves on from elephant poaching to sandalwood smuggling. By the end of episode one, your sense of unease is amplified.
There is an attempt to tell several sides of the Veerappan story – the focus ranging from Muthulakshmi who is still staunchly loyal twenty years after her husband's death; to the aging villagers of Gopinantham, Veerappan’s birthplace in the Karnataka-Tamil Nadu border; and the police and forest officials such as the now retired Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) BB Ashok ‘Tiger’ Kumar who had then been part of the Special Task Force meant to capture or kill Veerappan.
As the serpentine history of Veerappan spanning two decades unravels, the series certainly keeps you on the edge of your seat. The episodes titled ‘The Forest King’, ‘The Bloodbath’, ‘The Revolutionary’, and ‘The Way Out’, set up the telling of Veerappan’s story in four acts. Each episode focuses on a set of key events, fluidly setting the stage for the next act. As a series, The Hunt for Veerappan retains a simmering urgency throughout. Retellings of various escapes and murders by him are supported with one dizzying shot after another of the vast forest lands he held sway over.
The series also takes care to mention at least some of the police excesses against entire communities such as the brutal treatment of villagers by Superintendent ‘Rambo’ Gopalakrishnan, the burning down of the Nallur village by the Karnataka Special Task Force, and the custodial tortures done by Shankar Mahadev Bidari. It also tells you what Veerappan’s retaliation was each time. It mentions the sexual and physical violence meted out to Muthulakshmi by the police when she was captured. “We became mercenaries at that time. Mercenaries with no court of law or human rights or anybody,” a high-ranking cop tells the camera with disturbing calm.
But life rarely fits into neat theatrical acts. How much of a person’s life story can a four-episode series tell you? How much truth and storytelling will make its way in, when the show is about a figure as controversial as Veerappan? These are questions that the ever-expanding genre of true crime leaves you asking, and The Hunt for Veerappan is no exception. The reported facts, myths, and police records on the ‘King of the Forest’ as he came to be called, are vast. How much of that has made it into the show, what has been left out, and what sort of story that serves to tell, will possibly come to light in the days to come.
There have been several previous attempts in Tamil and Kannada to tell this story, though The Hunt for Veerappan might be the most of the lot so far. Veerappan shook up an entire generation, from the general public to journalists to high-ranking politicians, and the police force of not one but two states. How they will each view this series, remains to be seen.
Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. TNM Editorial is independent of any business relationship the organisation may have with producers or any other members of its cast or crew.