The second season of Paatal Lok, which premiered at the top of the year, builds on its predecessor’s scathing critique of India’s fractured social and political structures. Launched in 2020, the series was a game-changer in the Indian streaming landscape. It was one of the first crime thrillers that tried to humanize the Delhi police and Indian carceral system. 

In the first season, Inspector Hathiram Chaudhary (Jaideep Ahlawat), a disillusioned Delhi cop, finds himself unraveling a high-profile conspiracy that stretches from the corridors of Lutyens Delhi to the forgotten corners of Outer Jamna Paar. The show borrows from Hindu cosmology, mapping India’s socio-political landscape into Swarg Lok/Heaven World (the ruling elite), Dharti Lok/Earth World (the struggling middle class), and Paatal Lok/Netherworld (the criminalized and marginalized). 

Through its spatial layering of New Delhi, Paatal Lok season 1 exposes the machinery of power: who controls it, who enforces it, and who is crushed under its weight. It lays bare a justice system rigged to serve the powerful, where violence is both an instrument of the state and a language of survival for those at the margins. Sanjeev Mehra (Neeraj Kabi), the opportunistic journalist, thrives on manufactured narratives, while the middle-class Hathiram realizes that the system will never reward his loyalty. Imran Ansari (Ishwak Singh), despite his merit, remains an outsider in the police force, facing everyday Islamophobia.

The show’s second season moves away from the ruthless streets of Delhi to the volatile periphery of Nagaland, attempting to unspool the clash of insurgency, corporate interests, sovereignty, and development. 

It is undeniably effective in crafting a tense, slow-burning—but consistently engaging—crime thriller. The investigative format, led by now ACP Ansari (who passes UPSC and gets a promotion) and Inspector Chaudhary, provides a compelling structure to navigate the murky intersections of politics and capital. Based on the first season, one would think that this sophomore season would interrogate the outsider-insider binary of India-Nagaland and India-Northeast. Yet, despite its nuanced social critique, the series reinforces the hierarchies it seeks to dismantle. 

Through characters like Hathiram and Ansari, the narrative positions Indian law enforcement as the primary agents of inquiry, effectively marginalizing local voices. Paatal Lok season 2’s insistence on modernity and development as solutions to Nagaland’s struggles—particularly through the framing of the Nagaland Business Summit—aligns with state and corporate narratives that equate infrastructural growth with progress while ignoring historical and cultural forms of resistance. 

While the show attempts to expose the contradictions of governance and corruption, its own representational strategies flatten the lived realities of Naga communities, turning their histories into consumable spectacles, secondary to the moral dilemmas of its protagonists, rather than sites of genuine engagement. By filtering Nagaland’s struggles through the gaze of Indian officials and corporate interests, Paatal Lok season 2 offers a superficial engagement with insurgency, resource exploitation, and militarization, reducing these issues into mealy-mouthed dialogues—it does not sink its teeth into the bone. 

In its attempt to humanize power structures, the series perpetuates their logic, making Nagaland legible only in relation to India’s anxieties and ambitions rather than as a space of autonomous political and cultural identity. 

Nagaland As A Structured, Hierarchical Space To Be Regulated 

In Paatal Lok season 2, the plot’s nominal center is the beheading of Jonathan Thom (Kaguirong Gonmei)—a businessman, Nagaland politician, and founder of Nagaland Democratic Forum at Nagaland Sadan—and the missing complaint of Raghu Paswan, a daily wage laborer. But this is merely an entry point into a complex field of forces. 

The beheading as the choice of representation is striking. In British Orientalist discourse, the Nagas were often depicted as headhunters. For instance, Major John Butler, Principal Assistant Agent to the Governor-General of Assam, wrote about Angami Naga warfare in his 1855 manuscript, describing headhunting in Naga communities as being “one of their most barbarous customs” and driven “exclusively by revenge.” From the first scene, the makers make it clear that the murder of Thom is Naga animosity, an image reminiscent of the Oriental and colonial gaze. 

Episode 1 opens with a meeting between the members of the Nagaland Democratic Forum (the party Thom founded) and officers from the Delhi Police. The scene unfolds in a meeting room where members sit across from the officers while three men in suits, acting as moderators, occupy the center. ACP Ansari is assigned the task of leading the investigation into the murder of Thom. 

Pravin Sinha (Shubhro Bhattacharya) attempts to calm the agitated members, urging them to “have faith in us” as they work to uncover the truth. “If we didn’t have faith in Delhi, we wouldn’t be here for the talks,” a Naga leader (Changsuba Jamir) pointedly responds. The atmosphere grows tense when some members question why they should even participate in the inquiry, given that one of their own has been murdered.

Rangthong Ken (Jahnu Barua), a senior member of the forum, and Kapil Reddy (Nagesh Kukunoor), a businessman, intervene, emphasizing the importance of projecting unity and sending a “positive message back home.” However, the question of what “faith” truly signifies lingers. Does it refer to trust in the Delhi Police or confidence in broader prospects, such as corporate investments?

As the narrative progresses, ACP Ansari and Inspector Chaudhary decide they must travel to Nagaland to uncover the truth behind Thom’s murder and Paswan’s disappearance, respectively. As they piece together the mystery, four additional murders occur, complicating the case. Struggling to stay ahead of the escalating violence, the officers move in and out of hotels and villages, trying to connect the dots. The tension heightens when they face local resistance, particularly from SP Meghna Barua (Tillotama Shome), who challenges their presence and authority. 

Paatal Lok season 2 is more than a spatial dislocation from New Delhi to Nagaland. It is a cartographic act that transforms Nagaland from the generic “marginalized Northeast” to a territory that must be interpreted, regulated, and controlled. It reduces the region to a puzzle, unraveled through didactic exchanges between Indian and Naga officers. 

In the second episode, a video surfaces showing three masked Naga men confessing to the murder of Thom, whom they accuse of betraying Nagaland’s people for personal gain. “These kids think revolution is a video game,” remarks Rangthong Ken (called Uncle Ken). “They don’t realize we’ve played that game for decades and lost thousands of lives for nothing.” His words encapsulate the cyclical futility of resistance and its toll on the local community. 

This is the first time the series references the insurgency in Nagaland. Yet, insurgent groups like the NSCN(IM) have a history of resisting the Indian state’s control, using resource extraction as both a funding mechanism and a symbol of Naga self-determination. Their involvement in taxing resource operations complicates governance, while internal rivalries among insurgent factions sometimes lead to violence. However, besides Uncle Ken’s brief and vague gesture of “revolution,” the series does not engage with the complexity of insurgency. 

The British administration brought in surveillance and travel restrictions like the Inner Line Permit of 1873 to administer natural resources such as gold, coal, oil, and timber. These forms of surveillance related to the economy of Nagaland—and still in existence today—are obliterated except for the mention of the Inner Line Permit and restrictions that Hathiram and Ansari have to face. 

Paatal Lok season 2 carefully curates discourses on Nagaland, permitting them only insofar as they reinforce the themes of Indian sovereignty and capitalist expansion. This paradox of visibility, which presents itself as liberatory, ultimately repositions the Naga subject within the dominant structures of power and control.

When the businessman Kapil Reddy (present at the Naga Business Summit) becomes entangled in corrupt dealings with Jonathan’s son, Reuben Thom (LC Sekhose), Pravin Sinha reminds him of the importance of the summit—the most critical event entangled with the Ministry of Home Affairs’ interests. The summit and Jonathan Thom’s murder are thus enmeshed in a linear movement as cause-effect: outsider-insider, development-hope, India-Nagaland, and the violence of competing interests. 

Self-Determination and The Absence Of History

In Paatal Lok season 2, the struggle for self-determination is repeatedly subsumed by the intertwined forces of state power and capitalist expansion. In the final episode, Inspector Issac Longkumer (Bendang Walling) shares a poignant moment with Hathiram. Reflecting on the turbulent 1980s and 1990s, he recalls his father, also a police officer during “the worst time for Nagaland,” saying, “If I’m not home and a colleague shows up at our door, know that I will miss you.” 

The scene gestures towards the historical trauma of that period, particularly the rejection of the Shillong Accord of 1975—a peace agreement between the Government of India and certain members of the Naga National Council, who agreed to give up arms and accept the Indian Constitution. However, it overlooks the profound aftermath of the Accord, marked by fratricidal killings, intensified violence between Naga rebels and the Indian Army, and a deepening sense of alienation among the Naga people. 

This scene—and Paatal Lok season 2 more broadly—doesn’t fully engage with the complexities of what transpired during those years, including the displacement and orphaning of children. According to researchers Sanjoy Hazarika and Rupa Chinai, villages were torched, fields and granaries attacked, many people killed or maimed, women molested and raped by the Indian armed forces. Even today, people in the region are fearful of personnel in uniforms. 

The series, instead, engages in what political studies scholar Sanjib Baruah calls a “grief narrative,” an articulation of historical trauma, loss, neglect, and abandonment by the State or society affected by violence and displacement. This “grief narrative”, for Baruah, falls short of explaining the rebellions and diverts attention from the state’s policy agenda of institution-building. 

By centering grief over resistance, such narratives reduce politically oppressed communities to mere victims, stripping them of agency. Framing the Naga struggle through trauma rather than sovereignty allows the Indian state to appear as a benevolent savior, masking its colonial occupation. Relief efforts, ceasefires, and peace talks become tools to sustain structures of violence under the guise of care.

As articulated in Dolly Kikon’s Ceasefire City: Militarism, Capitalism, and Urbanism in Dimapur (2021), the 1997 ceasefire between the Indian state and the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) was characterized by intensified militarization and surveillance, leaving political negotiations demanding sovereignty and self-determination unresolved. Urban centers like Dimapur became spaces for complex power struggles, with insurgent groups, political elites like the rich tribal landlords, and businesses competing for influence, often to the detriment of ordinary Naga people. The ceasefire did not address the fundamental issues of identity and autonomy, Kikon contends, but reconfigured the modalities of control and violence.

Enacted to combat the Naga rebellion, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) permits widespread surveillance, arbitrary detentions, and extrajudicial killings. This transformed the region into a “state of exception” without ordinary legal protections, where the military wielded unchecked authority. This juridical violence is paralleled by economic policies that extract natural resources from the region while marginalizing local communities. These contemporary realities of Nagaland expose the violent underpinnings of ongoing colonization. 

Paatal Lok season 2 advances greed-based theories of insurgency, framing rebels as self-serving actors exploiting sanctuary spaces to recruit young people. According to Baruah, theories of greed overlook the “pleasures of agency”—the autonomy, pride, and self-determination insurgents derive from political assertion. He emphasizes that insurgencies are sustained less by greed and more by structural state failures such as centralized financial control, military laws, and poor road infrastructure—which allow insurgents to establish control. At the same time, the absence of judicial remedies deepens alienation, leaving communities with no formal grievance redressal. 

Paatal Lok’s second season sidesteps the complexities of self-determination, which are crucial to understanding how questions of belonging and exclusion shape resistance movements. As much as asserting sovereignty is a political demand, it is also a negotiation of identity within a framework that continually reinforces insider-outsider binaries. This contested landscape extends beyond state policies to everyday cultural practices and interactions, shaping the narratives of resistance and compliance within the region. 

Meanwhile, Paatal Lok season 2 uncovers how Thom’s personal and professional lives are deeply entangled in corruption and violence. It reveals his strained relationship with his estranged son, Reuben, and the mysterious disappearance of his mistress, Rose Lizo (Merenla Imsong). These events expose complex networks where greed intersects with governance, and sovereignty is depicted as violent. By doing so, the series subtly shifts the focus away from state brutality, emphasizing human suffering instead—ultimately leaving structures of power unchallenged. 

In contrast, writers like Nzanmongi Jasmine Patton and Easterine Kire reclaim sovereignty not through legal-political discourse but through oral traditions and mythic storytelling. They assert a vision of sovereignty rooted in cultural memory, ecological harmony, and indigenous modes of belonging, offering a counterpoint to the statist logic that erases ways of being in favor of modernization. 

In A Girl Swallowed By The Tree: Lotha Naga Tales Retold (2017), a collection of stories passed down by oral narrators, Jasmine Patton documents tales that refuse the rigidity of linear history, offering a world where Nagas belong not through state or academic definitions but through an older, wilder intimacy with the land—where animals speak, magic is real, and language is not bound by human rationality alone. Similarly, Easterine Kire’s works, such as A Naga Village Remembered (2018), When the River Sleeps (2014), or Son of the Thundercloud (2016), foreground oral traditions and piety as alternatives that are hopeful to the cycles of violence and exploitation. 

Insider Outsider Narratives And The Ethics Of Representation

Paatal Lok season 2 frames Nagas either as insurgents or victims, offering neither group any space for self-articulation—where Nagas are refused their own histories, desires, and complex relationship with sovereignty, aligning with the carceral gaze of the Indian state. The insurgency, its suppression, and the exploitation of Nagaland’s resources are portrayed as part of a larger apparatus that reinforces the Indian state’s supremacy.

For instance, only because Uncle Ken is a failed revolutionary who has surrendered does he get to talk to the Indian State at the same table in New Delhi. Not a single scene in the series gives agency to people who pick up arms. The foreclosure of conditions of insurgencies, stripping away its history, is also a way to define how the “other” should talk. Such representations of the Indian Armed Forces’ gaze are seen in episode 4, where ACP Ansari is researching a fictitious Naga massacre in “Langchoma.” 

According to the narrative, a rivalry between rebel factions led to numerous deaths and left many children orphaned. The Naga Baptist Organization adopted these orphaned and destitute children affected by the conflict, but it also steered them toward insurgency, ultimately leading some, like Daniel Acho (Prashant Tamang), to take up arms. While it is true that children join insurgency groups, the carte blanche jettisoning of the role of churches and women in the peace process (such as the Naga Mothers’ Association) becomes crucial for the series’ narrative to justify the presence of Indian Police and Armed Forces in Nagaland.

In episode 6, Hathiram visits Mr. Bajoria, a Marwari businessman. Bajoria confides in Hathiram, sharing his frustrations as a Rajasthani immigrant in Nagaland. Teary-eyed, he recounts how his father moved to Nagaland in 1967 and how he and his brother were born there, implying a claim to nativity. Despite 50 years in Nagaland, Bajoria laments, “we are still considered outsiders.” 

This sentiment is heightened when Bajoria’s son is attacked by local Nagas affiliated with Reuben, who warn him to stop acquiring land in the region. According to Kikon in Living with Oil and Coal – Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India, Marwaris—a trading community in India—hold the biggest economic chain in conflict areas of the Nagaland foothills. They belong mainly to the foothills of Nagaland, call it their home, are seen as reliable citizens by the Indian state, and enjoy the protection of Indian security forces. 

On the other hand, the rest of the people from various communities, such as traders, doctors, and laborers, are pulled into carbon citizenship and seen with suspicion as disloyal. The profiling of people as bhal manu/good citizens is a process that militarization follows to maintain the interests of the “extractive resource regime” and hydrocarbon economy in Nagaland. 

Bajoria’s invocation of the insider-outsider also reveals the anxiety around natural resources, like oil and coal, which has intensified debates over Naga sovereignty and representation. Under Article 371A of the Indian Constitution, Nagas are granted rights over community land and resources. This legal provision is invoked to justify extractive practices like coal mining as cultural traditions, thus intertwining ethnic and cultural sovereignty with resource extraction. 

However, as Kikon shows, conflicts arise over who legitimately represents Naga interests—tribal councils, insurgent groups, or state institutions—since control over a land rich in resources is central to defining Naga political identity and autonomy. 

By forcing the Naga subject into the frames of mainstream Indian media and pop culture, Paatal Lok season 2 shapes and defines the people of Nagaland into subjects, their identities framed as deviant. Consider the sniper, Daniel, who isn’t given any autonomous space to articulate his needs or desires; the subordinate or peripheral presence of people such as the mother of Rose (Lovita Morang) who is only shown to be in the kitchen, or Grace Reddy (Theyie Kedistu), the wife of Kapil Reddy, and Asenla Thom (Rosella Mero), wife of Jonathan Thom. 

The only agency Rose’s mother is given is when she tells Ansari and Hathiram that Jonathan Thom is a “monster”. The characters of Grace Reddy and Asenla Thom are shown to be largely “paying for the sins” of Kapil Reddy and Jonathan Thom rather than having any agency in subverting the power relations of the private or the public. 

In Health and Torture (2010), psychiatrist P. Ngully examines how the militarization in Nagaland has had detrimental effects on its people. From psychological distress and disturbed sleep to severe PTSD and permanent damage to physical health, Ngully brings to light how “manufactured disasters” such as torture by the Armed Forces have put the people of Nagaland outside of the “normal human experience”. Yet, in Paatal Lok season 2, Naga women are depicted primarily as victims of patriarchal oppression by Naga men, denied the agency to articulate their histories, traumas, and engagements with the region’s resistance movements. 

The character of Rose is shown to be a victim of drug abuse but doesn’t explain any further the reasons for the addiction or the deeper reasons why Esther Shipong (Mengu Suokhrie) had a miscarriage. This characterization fails to capture their childhood in a war zone. According to Rupa Chinai, poverty and the violence of militarization and insurgency play a huge role in conditions contributing to the drug economy. Lack of hospitals and infrastructural facilities, fear, stress disorders, and psychosomatic pain add to the compounded nature of women’s health in Nagaland. 

Naga writers like Temsula Ao challenge mainstream narratives by offering counterpoints that refuse erasure. In These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone (2006), Ao captures the collective trauma of the Naga people under state violence and insurgency, foregrounding their agency amidst displacement and loss. Her work resists framing Nagas as passive victims, highlighting how sovereignty remains fraught with contradictions—caught between a desire for freedom and the violence that fragments their identity and land. Ao unsettles the dominant teleological narrative of progress, exposing how state control deepens marginalization and erodes indigenous belonging. 

The Discourse Of “Development” 

When the killer’s identity is finally revealed in Paatal Lok season 2, the motivation for the beheading is closely tied to the business summit. During a tense moment, Hathiram confronts the murderer, asking if he understands how many lives he has destroyed. “Believe me,” the murderer responds, “God reminds me of my sins every time I piss. I have kidney cancer […] But this summit […] could help my people, and I wanted to do one last thing for them.”

Hathiram presses further, questioning whether the murders were intended to make the killer feel immortal, like God. “We already have a God. We just needed to see his miracle,” the killer replies, framing corporate development in Nagaland as a divine force. Hathiram counters, promising to reveal the truth to the public. The murderer, unshaken, responds, “I’m not afraid of the truth coming out, Chaudhary. But after that, Thom’s party and supporters will ensure this agreement never goes through. It will all have been for nothing.” 

The killer is a Naga, depicted as a person who has no remorse for either the headhunt or other killings. The scene doesn’t address the symbolism of headhunting either, making it serve no narrative purpose besides shock value and solidifying the Oriental representation of Nagas as primitive and savage. The killings get subsumed under the grief narrative of cyclical violence. 

The corporate investment in Nagaland hasn’t halted by the end of Paatal Lok season 2. Jonathan Thom was a roadblock, a minor inconvenience in the narrative for capital’s expansion. His murder remains unresolved to the public, and a shot of people in ecstasy, Naga fathers, mothers, and children holding placards talking of “a better tomorrow” leaves Hathiram to not remind the public of the “savagery” by the rule of law but an acquiescence to the idea that the Naga people require modernity and infrastructural projects as a means of hope. 

Hathiram’s realization that modernity represents hope for the Naga people is a strategic overlooking of how such projects often alienate rural communities from their heritage and render them dependent on external systems of governance and capital. An Indian cop like Hathiram is allowed to intervene when necessary, have objective interpretations, and be removed from the people of the region without being a participant in the subjective discourse. Such “neutrality” allows the Indian State to perpetuate its carceral logic and produce knowledge about the Orient. 

This notion of development merely functions as a tool for extending state control, disrupting traditional ways of life, and fostering dependency on external systems. By presenting modernity as a panacea, Paatal Lok season 2 glosses over the social, cultural, and ecological upheavals it causes. 

The timing of the series’ release, coinciding with the Indian government’s proposal for the Frontier Nagaland Territory (FNT), raises questions about its political undercurrents. On January 15, 2025, the Indian government agreed in principle to grant executive, legislative, and financial autonomy to the six eastern districts of Nagaland, following demands from the Eastern Nagaland People’s Organisation (ENPO). This move, apparently aimed at addressing developmental neglect, reflects the state’s strategic interests in maintaining control over a region rich in natural resources.

Oil and Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri has called for an expansion of oil and gas exploration across the country. In the meantime, the AFSPA remains enforced in coal mine extraction areas.

These real-time developments highlight the extractive nature of India’s engagement with Nagaland, where economic policies that seek to “integrate” lead to cultural and environmental destruction. By framing Nagaland as a site of potential investment rather than resistance, Paatal Lok season 2 participates in the erasure of its histories of struggle, reducing it to a convenient backdrop for narratives of greed and crime.

This dynamic is not unique to this series but reflects broader patterns in the representation of marginalized communities in Indian popular culture, as old as movies like Dil Se (1998)—where the character of Amarkant Verma (Shah Rukh Khan) falls in love with a suicide bomber from Assam Meghna (Manisha Koirala)—and Roja (1992), which was one of the earliest films to show an Indian diplomat Rishi Kumar (Arvind Swamy) kidnapped by a group of Kashmiri militants to justify India’s occupation of Kashmir. 

In its failure to engage meaningfully with Nagaland’s history and struggles, Paatal Lok season 2 relegates Nagaland to the cyclical interplay of resistance and expropriation, becoming visible in a space of perpetual marginalization and exploitation, a permanent resident of the netherworld of power. The series fuels fantasies of control by India, attempting to manage the anxieties of a nation grappling with its unresolved histories of violence, unemployment, hunger, and colonization.