Madam Sir: How Babita Singh Reporting shows the balancing act of women cops

A growing cohort of India’s policewomen on screen, addressed as ‘Madam Sir’, fight crime but must still keep patriarchy comfortable

Published - September 04, 2026 06:08 am IST

‘Babita Singh Reporting’ (right) is the latest show on female police officers and their conundrum.

Nimisha Sajayan has just delivered the performance of the year in Amazon Prime Video’s new slow-burn crime drama Babita Singh Reporting.

As the titular police officer investigating the murder of her childhood friend Bansi (Barun Sobti), Sajayan conveys a quiet, long-suffering intelligence with her wounded eyes. She is frequently better than the film’s screenplay. The pacing is uneven, and when it finally comes, the big reveal doesn’t really land the way the makers would have hoped.

One thing the screenplay does get right though, in conveying the sheer scale of Babita’s balancing act.

At work she takes the blame for a media leak she wasn’t involved with — just to get the leave required to attend a family wedding with her demanding in-laws (who make snide comments about her weight). At home, her holier-than-thou husband boasts about being a progressive champion because Babita belongs to a different (implying ‘lower’) caste. Besides, people within the police system are always reminding Babita that the powers-that-be only made her an ASI (Assistant Sub-Inspector) because her policeman-father died in the line of duty.

Nimisha Sajayan in a still from ‘Babita Singh Reporting’.

Babita Singh Reporting is part of a growing cohort of recent Indian films and TV shows where a female police officer is tasked with similar balancing acts — Geetika Vidya Ohlyan and Saloni Batra in Soni (2018), Shefali Shah and Rasika Dugal in Delhi Crime (2019-present), Raveena Tandon in Aranyak (2021), Sanya Malhotra in Kathal (2023), Sonakshi Sinha in Dahaad (2023), Shahana Goswami in the Indo-British film Santosh (2024), and Bhumi Pednekar in Daldal (2026).

Shefali Shah in a still from ‘Delhi Crime’.

Sonakshi Sinha in a still from ‘Dahaad’.

Sanya Malhotra in a still from ‘Kathal’.

Saloni Batra (left) and Geetika Vidya Ohlyan in a still from ‘Soni’.

Bhumi Pednekar in a still from ‘Daldal’.

Even if they aren’t naive enough to believe in highfalutin notions of justice, these women are trying to do the right thing in their own ways. This new wave of female cops is a definite upgrade on previous Bollywood iterations, most of whom swung between Lara Croft-like unidimensional ‘sexy cops’ (Priyanka Chopra in Don and Don 2) or female officers who’re just as ‘macho’ as their male counterparts (Tabu in Drishyam). However, all of them come up against the same narrative tension — that they are representatives of a patriarchal, heteronormative state. Footsoldiers of a system that privileges maleness, wealth, social standing and influence.

This narrative tension manifests itself most commonly along the axes of caste and gender. The setup of both Santosh and Dahaad reinforces this idea. In the film Santosh, Shahana Goswami’s protagonist Santosh Saini gets her job through “compassionate recruitment” following the death of her policeman husband. Eventually, when Santosh tries her best to bring the killers of a Dalit girl to justice, she is royally sabotaged by her superiors. The real perpetrators were powerful, upper-caste local leaders, and so her superior officers find a way to scapegoat an innocent Muslim man for the crime instead. In Dahaad, Sonakshi’s character Anjali Meghwal changes her last name to “Bhaati” to avoid the judgments that come with a discernibly SC (scheduled caste) surname.

Nimisha Sajayan in a still from ‘Babita Singh Reporting’.

The other plank of this narrative tension lies in the personal. Delhi Crime demonstrates this via both of its major characters, DCP Vartika Chaturvedi (Shefali Shah) and ACP Neeti Singh (Rasika Dugal). Vartika’s daughter Chandni wants to move to Toronto for higher studies and leave Delhi, which she associates with objectively terrible statistics on rape and sexual assault. And she sees her mother as a major part of the system that has failed the city’s women.

Meanwhile, Neeti’s policeman-husband doesn’t understand why she has to pull 48-hour shifts at times. Blinded by his male ego, he ironically expects her to be a fierce policewoman and a super-submissive wife at once. In Kathal, Sanya Malhotra’s character Inspector Mahima Basore also has to ego-massage her insecure constable-husband, vastly outranked by his wife. She even turns down a promotion, insisting her husband be promoted instead.