Director Ruchir Arun’s 5-part series, Court Kacheri, is the surprise of the season. It is astutely constructed and pleasantly packaged . More especially, almost all the performances have a warm lived-in feeling to them, as if the actors are not keen to ‘act’, just happy to be the characters they have been assigned.
Unlike other legal dramas, the courtroom proceedings in Court Kacheri are constantly interesting. And the judges especially the sarcastic female judge, played by theatre actress Tulika Banerjee, who ticks off a novice lawyer, had me in splits. We don’t get to see much of her. But we get a lot of a brilliant theatre actor from Allahabad S K Batra as the presiding judge in a divorce case which doesn’t quite turn out the way we expect it to.
Patriarchy gets a neat kick in the pants.
That is the beauty of this intelligently scripted series. It leads us gently into a familiar world and then turns the characters in a direction away from what we expect from them. Unlike , say, Mamla Legal Hai which constantly tried to act smart, Court Kacheri’s tongue-in-cheekiness and throwaway quips never seem laboured.
There is a lady lawyer named, believe it or not, Kaghzat(played by Sumali Khaniwale) who keeps throwing substandard shayari at her colleagues over glasses of cold coffee. She initially seems an add-on to the judicial proceedings. But I actually missed Kaghzat when she exited from the plot.
At the core Court Kacheri is a father-son story of a family where the son is expected to follow his father into the legal profession—echoing Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s 1977 film Alaap–told with considerable charm and affection. In Alaap Om Prakash was the disciplinarian lawyer whose son Amitabh Bachchan doesn’t wish to follow in his father’s footsteps.
In Court Kacheri the redoubtable Pawan Malhotra playing a smalltown lawyer Harish Mathur with considerable community clout, is brilliant. Ashish Verma in the plum role of the son fumbles in two key dramatic sequences. Overall, he is adequate, though not as effective as he should be.
It is Puneet Batra (who is also the serial’s primary writer) who is outstanding as Suraj, Harish Mathur’s apprentice and Suraj’s brother-from-another-mother, who brings an added emotional dimension to the narrative. Suraj is utterly devoted to his mentor and father-figure. But he also wants to break away and do something in his own.
Batra confers an immense volume of empathy and worldly wisdom to his role. This could be partly due to the fact that he has written the character and knows it inside-out.
I have very rare come across series where even the smallest character (for example, Satywan played by Bhushan Vikas who is fighting a divorce case) is made memorable. In that sense Court Kacheri is quite the Sholay of the streaming platform. It may not have the courtroom grandeur and reformist vision of Pink . But what the script says about our legal system’s durability and relevance, in spite of the anomalies, is worth paying attention to. You can’t write off an institution just because some of its practice and practitioners suck.
