‘Babita Singh Reporting’ interview: Nimisha Sajayan, Sudip Sharma and Ambiecka Pandit on unmaking a cop-drama

Actor Nimisha Sajayan, executive producer Sudip Sharma and director Ambiecka Pandit talk about their upcoming film, ‘Babita Singh Reporting’, the importance of female gaze, how Nimisha chooses her stories and more

Updated - August 24, 2026 06:08 pm IST

Nimisha Sajayan in ‘Babita Singh Reporting’ | Photo Credit: Prime Video

Nimisha Sajayan plays an unusual cop in her upcoming film, Babita Singh Reporting. Joining duty in place of her father after his death, Babita is not taken as seriously by her peers as she is mostly delegated paperwork. Everyone calls her by her nickname, “Baby”, and treat her like one too. Even at home, her husband insists that she leaves her job in order to give more time to family. When she goes to her in-laws place, Baby experiences the brutality of patriarchy in everyday life while she obsessively solves the murder of her childhood friend. There are familiar undertones in these scenes to Nimisha’s earlier film, The Great Indian Kitchen, which portrayed the horrors of being a home maker. The actor says that it was challenging to portray Baby’s emotions authentically.

“I wanted to bring a certain rawness to the performance,” Nimisha tells The Hindu. “I have seen lots of women, who have shades of Babita, including me. I was just exploring her different shades from Day 1. That was an interesting process; to constantly discover her.”

Nimisha instils a vulnerability in her performance that makes the complexity of Baby’s emotions come out meticulously. Baby’s journey with the murder investigation reveals darker truths about the fault lines existing in families. Blending her experience as a women with a story of crime and cops, the film deconstructs power, masculinity and the underlying violence that fractures relationships. It instantly brings to memory the viscerality of Paatal Lok and Kohrra. The mind behind these searing cop-dramas, Sudip Sharma, serves as the executive producer on Babita Singh Reporting.

A still from ‘Babita Singh Reporting’ | Photo Credit: Prime Video

“I saw the role as, I don’t want to say, a mentor-” says Sudip as director Ambiecka Pandit interjects. “No, mentor is accurate. He was really a mentor. He facilitated the production and was always there if I needed anything from him to guide me,” says Ambiecka. However, Sudip prefers calling it a curatorial role. “It was all a hands-off role. Everything seen in the film is due to the efforts of writer Amita Vyas and Ambiecka. I would call myself a cheerleader,” he smiles.

The film is set in the city of Rewa in Madhya Pradesh and the visuals capture the different corners of the place with an atmospheric fluidity that adds mood to the investigation while also serving to deepen the complexity of Babita’s experiences with her family. “Both the narrative threads draw heavily from the setting and it was important for us to let the setting to become a character. We were clear that it shouldn’t feel the film could have been set anywhere; it should feel intrinsically connected to Rewa,” says Ambiecka.

The richness in the visuals only further accentuate the effect of the written word as the screenplay builds the angst of Babita with a slow-burn undercurrent. Sudip says that he was “surprised” when when he read the screenplay that came to him in “very refined form”. “Even though I have explored similar themes through my work, I don’t think I have been able to bring the female perspective. In my stories, the cop was always a cop first and then a man. But here in Babita Singh Reporting, she was a woman first, who happened to be a cop. If she was doing any other job, she would still face the same difficulties. That’s what really drew me to the script,” Sudip explains.

Sudip Sharma | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

The female gaze is apparent in how closely the film looks at Baby’s inner struggles, whether it is forceful smiles to incoming taunts, or expectations to serve the family at the expense of her own individuality. The screenplay avoids making a hero out of Babita; she is just portrayed reacting to situations with her own under-confident, confused self rather than projecting any “strong woman character” traits that populate a lot of female-driven cop-dramas in recent films and shows.

“It is important to put yourselves in the minds of the character for them to ring true. If the script of Babita Singh Reporting was written by me or a man, it wouldn’t have those nuances. Maybe we would write scenes where Baby ends up beating people as there’s that subconscious urge in men to have your hero engage in action. But she is treated with sensitivity by Ambiecka and Amita,” he says.