There is a delightful murkiness in not providing neat answers. In 1994, in the heart of Bangalore, Shakeereh Khaleeli, the granddaughter of the former Diwan of Mysore, one of the oldest aristocratic families of Karnataka, was found murdered. The suspect is her second husband Swami Shraddhananda or Murli Manohar Mishra. She had been boycotted by her family after divorcing her first husband, a respectable officer of the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) and almost immediately marrying “a fellow way below her status”.
Here is the murkiness in Dancing On The Grave, a four-part true crime docu-series directed by Patrick Graham that re-examines Khaleeli's case. The police, while narrating their side of the story, say they arrested Shraddhananda and kept questioning him vigorously overnight. In the morning, when another officer asked him calmly what he knew, he got on his knees, wept, and out came the truth. Just like that. In a context where custodial violence is less an exception than rule, something feels suspicious about this chain of events. Later, when Shraddhananda is asked about this moment of confession, he speaks about torture, like being left on a slab of ice for example. Anything — even a false confession of murder — would be better than torture. He succumbed. He was made to succumb. He murdered. He confessed murder. What is the difference, the show asks? A powerful tailspin to round-off a limp retelling.
The first two episodes of Dancing On the Grave circle around Khaleeli's birth family, and how they grappled with the whole situation. All of them, including her second of four daughters, are unequivocal in their belief that she was murdered by Shraddhananda. They are all suspicious of him. That Khaleeli was “enticed” away. There is an aristocratic malice in the way they speak of Shraddhananda. The question lurks but is not stated clearly — when does caution express itself as prejudice?
It is in the third episode, once it feels clear that Shraddhananda must be the guilty one, that we actually speak to him, seeing him weakly counter the claims, blaring his innocence. His lawyer believes a man is being wronged. That Namazie’s family were upset with the way she married hastily to “a man like him”, that the property which was in her name was being sold in ways that worried them.
Many of them did not speak to Namazie for years. Her mother even wrote to her saying that they should cut off ties. For context, she went missing in 1991. It was only in the following year that Namazie’s daughter filed for a habeas corpus and it was in 1994 that her skeletal remains were uncovered.
The central question is, who is Shraddhananda? What were the exact circumstances in which he entered Namazie’s life? Yet, Dancing on the Grave brushes past these doubts almost as if it considers them immaterial, inhabiting the prejudicial blindness of Namazie’s family towards Shraddhananda. It isn’t interested in layering, just complicating. There is a photo of Namazie and Shraddhananda in front of the Taj Mahal. When it is first shown, there is an ominous context set up to it. We see that photo of the couple with suspicion, sympathy even for the lost life, malice towards the accused. Later, when Shraddhananda describes his love, the same photo shows up, this time with a lush score of longing. The show is extremely proud of this twist, hinging its structure around it.
However the predictive dullness of Dancing on the Grave pales against its incompetence. We hear the interviewer asking Shraddhananda, “If Shakeereh were alive, would you still be together?” He answers in the affirmative, understandably and predictably. To ask a speculative question set in a counterfactual world — what a stupid thing to do. And for what? An emotional grunt from the accused protagonist? This curdles, especially when the show refuses to ask Shraddhananda the imperative questions about his claims of innocence. He says he found Namazie murdered, and in a panic just put her in a box and buried her. He was worried that if news of her murder got out, he would be the first person to be accused. But if the claim of finding her murdered is true, where did the wooden box with wheels (in which she was found) come from? Where did the marks on the inner walls of the box come from, which suggest she was still alive when she was shoved into it. The box is evidence that this murder was planned and grotesque. The show isn’t interested in procedurals either. How did they find the carpenter through whom they found out about the box? They say God is in the details. This show could benefit from some belief.
There’s a hunger for true crime, which has quickly established itself as a new audience favourite, and the genre intrinsically smacks of a certain kind of voyeurism. When, after a celebrity dies, a news channel recreates their death on live television — remember the coverage of untimely deaths like Sridevi and Sushant Singh Rajput? — we consider it grotesque, taking human curiosity to an ugly extreme. How different is the true crime documentary. The director makes a deliberate choice to re-enact the moment of Namazie’s murder in Dancing on the Grave, dramatizing it with silhouettes, harsh lights, and a more horizontally rectangular aspect ratio. Likewise, for Netflix’s brigade of true-crime films — House Of Secrets: Burari Deaths, Indian Predator: The Butcher of Delhi, Indian Predator: Diary Of A Serial Killer and Indian Predator: Murder In A Courtroom. Is it merely the distance of time from the event — distance giving perspective, but also allowing for sensationalising? Does time mean the grieving can be dimmed out? Or is it the sharp production value, the impressionistic, haunting stylization, the gorgeous lighting that makes us take it seriously instead of critiquing it?
There is something expressly, inherently exploitative about the true crime genre. The only reason we don’t balk at it as much, I think, is because its thrills are blinding, its cinematic manipulation so perfect, you shudder out of it, like you would out of a horror film. Who can think of the moral problems of a show while quaking, thinking of locking doors and latching windows? Unfortunately when the craft is as weak and the tricks so obvious as they are in Dancing on the Grave, you only have the moral grayness of the genre staring back at you.