From No One Killed Jessica to Pink and Delhi Crime, the capital’s crime tales are no longer just about powerful men and helpless women. In Delhi’s reel underbelly, women now show up as the cop, the criminal and the victim – sometimes all three rolled into one messy, grey character.
Delhi has always been an easy backdrop for crime stories: power corridors, rich brats, dark highways, and a reputation for being unsafe for women. For a long time, Hindi films used that image in a very simple way – the city was dangerous, and women were either scared, silenced or dead.
But over the last decade, something has shifted. The capital’s crime narrative on screen is now crowded with women who investigate, retaliate, leak, expose, and sometimes even cross over to the wrong side of the law.
The Victim: From “dead body in the plot” to voice of the city
Take No One Killed Jessica. Jessica Lal may not be alive in the film, but the entire story refuses to let her become just another headline. The murder at a high-end Delhi bar turns into a battle led by two women – her sister Sabrina and a fiery journalist, Meera. The capital’s parties, courtrooms, and TV studios become extensions of their anger and grief.
In Pink, Delhi is practically a character. Three young women, one late-night outing, and suddenly they are treated as criminals instead of survivors. The film never lets you forget where it’s set – a city where powerful boys with political surnames expect to get away with everything, and where women’s characters are “investigated” before any FIR.
Even Delhi Crime – which revisits the 2012 gang-rape case – makes a crucial choice. It doesn’t sensationalise the assault or use the survivor’s body as a shock device. Instead, the victim is present through the urgency of the investigation, the protests on the streets, and the quiet moments of horror in the police control room.
Across these stories, women are still victims of crime, but they’re not props. They’re workers, students, models, and friends – real people whose pain forces Delhi to ask uncomfortable questions about safety, privilege and power.
The Cop: Lady Singham, minus the slow-motion swagger
For years, the standard “Delhi cop” on screen was a man: rugged, angry, occasionally corrupt, and often heroic. Women in uniform, if they appeared at all, were pushed to the background. That’s changing.
Shefali Shah’s Vartika Chaturvedi in Delhi Crime is the opposite of a cartoonish action hero. She’s tired, overworked, and constantly negotiating with ministers, subordinates, media and her own family. Yet she is also the moral centre of the show – a woman who refuses to look away, even when the job eats into every part of her life.
Elsewhere in Hindi cinema, this cop figure pops up in different avatars. Mardaani gives us Rani Mukerji’s Shivani Shivaji Roy – all grit, zero nonsense, bulldozing through trafficking networks and boys’ clubs in the system. Recent festival favourite Santosh goes even further, placing a young woman constable into a police station where caste and gender biases are baked into every “casual” remark.
This new crop of women cops in and around Delhi does two important things for our screens:
- It puts women inside the system, not just outside banging on its gates.
- It shows that wearing the uniform doesn’t magically erase patriarchy – women officers face harassment, condescension, and emotional burnout, even as they chase justice.
For the entertainment page, that’s a deliciously layered character: part authority figure, part rebel, and part everyday working woman replying to her mother’s calls between raids.
The Criminal: When the “good girl” picks up the gun
If victim and cop are easiest to digest, the female criminal is where things get really interesting.
In a lot of Indian storytelling, a woman turns to crime only after she’s been wronged – assaulted, cheated, or crushed by the system. She isn’t allowed to be casually evil; she has to be pushed into picking up the gun or running the racket. That’s where the capital’s crime narrative taps into a darker fantasy: what happens when a woman who’s been ignored by the police and courts decides she’s done playing by the rules?
Whether it’s a small-time hustler, a gang leader’s partner, or a mastermind laundering money from a cozy Delhi living room, the “lady criminal” is usually written as a mix of victim and avenger. Her crimes are framed not as stylish villainy but as twisted payback.
On screen, the distinction between the victim and the cop is blurred:
- The victim, suffering injustice
- The cop, trying to uphold the law
- The criminal, tearing up the rulebook
In many Delhi-set or Delhi-flavoured crime stories, you can easily imagine one character sliding from one box to another as the system fails her.
Why these three roles matter for Delhi’s story
So why does it matter how films cast women in the capital’s crime tales? Because each role – cop, criminal, victim – is also a way of answering a bigger question: Who really has power in Delhi?
- When women are only victims, the city looks hopeless and cruel.
- When women appear as cops, Delhi suddenly has female authority, even if it’s constantly tested.
- When women become criminals, the narrative starts to admit that sometimes the system is so rigged, the only way to be heard is to break it.
Put together, recent films and shows are slowly nudging us away from the lazy “Delhi is unsafe, full stop” cliché. The city is still dangerous, yes. But it is also full of women who investigate, resist, expose and, at times, retaliate.
They are the cop, the criminal and the victim – often in the same two-hour film or limited series – and they’re quietly rewriting the capital’s crime narrative from the inside.
WATCHLIST: Women in the Capital’s Crime Stories
No One Killed Jessica (2011)
Delhi’s party circuit turns into a crime scene as Sabrina Lal and a feisty TV reporter take on power, privilege and a broken justice system.
Pink (2016)
Three young women in Delhi fight a brutal character assassination and a rigged system to assert one simple truth: “No means no.”
Delhi Crime – Season 1 & 2
Shefali Shah leads from the front as a senior Delhi cop, juggling politics, patriarchy and public rage while chasing some of the capital’s most disturbing crimes.
Mardaani / Mardaani 2
Rani Mukerji’s Shivani Shivaji Roy is the hard-hitting cop taking on trafficking and predators who believe the system will protect them.
Santosh
A young widow who inherits her husband’s police job enters a world of caste prejudice, misogyny, and fake encounters while investigating the murder of a Dalit girl.
NH10 (Bonus pick)
A night drive just outside Delhi turns into a nightmare, as a young couple confronts honor killings, apathy and the thin line between city comfort and rural lawlessness.
As Delhi keeps rewriting its crime stories, one thing is clear: the capital’s most compelling characters are no longer the men in power, but the women who refuse to stay in their place.
By – Juhi