Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s crime drama series, ‘Kohrra,’ follows the murder investigation of an NRI found dead days before his wedding. Two police officers are put in charge of solving the case, but the more they dive into the details, the more convoluted everything becomes. With every layer peeled out of the crime and the secrets surrounding it, the police officers are forced to reflect on their life and ways.
Created by Sudip Sharma, Gunjit Chopra, and Diggi Sisodia, the story is a taut thriller that maintains the mystery till the end. The hook, however, is the characters and how real they feel in a fraught world that seems to have been pulled out of the real world. If you are wondering whether the show is based on a true story, here’s what you need to know.
Kohrra is a Fictional Story
‘Kohrra’ is not based on a true story. The story was brought to Sudip Sharma by Gunjit Chopra and Diggi Sisodia, who had an initial idea about an investigative police procedural set in Punjab. However, as he gave it more thought, he saw that the story transcended its genre and had a lot of potential for exploring human relationships.
“I realized that the investigation of the crime needn’t necessarily be the focal point of the show. That’s a device for you to begin the story and for people to keep watching it, but it can be a lot more than that. There was an opportunity to talk about family as the unit of politics and relationships as the focal point of the story. It all began with a line from Charles Bukowski that says, ‘Love is a dog from hell.’ That was our starting point,” said Sharma in an interview. He revealed that the writers “added a lot of lived experiences” in the show, which makes the story so authentic.
“Gunjan has spent a lot of time in Punjab; he loves the place. He has drawn a lot from his experiences over there. Crime is also a phenomenon that personally interests me. The crossroads of crime and society and the social implications it throws up have always excited me as a storyteller. We mined our personal experiences. We have traveled extensively across Punjab and met a lot of police officers. All of it comes out in the show,” the creator added.
For the research, the filmmakers traveled around Punjab, “trying to see Punjab from the eyes of the local population,” and shot on location in and around Ludhiana. During the show’s making, several crimes in the state came to light. One of the cases was about the killing of a sportsperson in a nearby village, while another was the infamous murder of rapper Sidhu Moose Wala. The show’s creators reflected on such incidents and saw certain similarities develop in the story they wanted to tell the audience.
Apart from the crime, the story also looks into other social and cultural issues of the land, which include but is not limited to land inheritance. Reflecting on how that, along with the NRI angle, plays into the story, Sharma stated, “Although Punjabis have the biggest NRI population in the country, I think the population in Punjab is more modern than a lot of the NRIs because the NRIs are holding on much more strongly to their roots and traditional values. It’s almost like India is still stuck in the 80s and 90s for them.”
While the crime puts the plot in motion, the story develops from the relationships between the characters and the secrets they keep from each other. This was the story’s core for Sharma, and he realized that the show was more about love than crime. “In the disguise of a procedural drama, we have been able to explore relationships with some amount of depth. It comes from this curiosity and also this exhaustion because you look at the world a certain way, and it doesn’t go that way. With Kohrra, it was an attempt to understand why families behave how they behave, how something looks approachable from a distance, but you don’t have the choice or objectivity when you are in it,” added Sharma.
Considering all this, we can say that while ‘Kohrra’ is a fictional story, the show’s creators have grounded it into reality, making it feel as realistic as possible. The plot and the characters might be made up, but the writers have drawn them in the image of real people and real struggles, focusing on the issues that plague and concern contemporary society, making the show such an impactful watch.
Read More: Kohrra Ending, Explained: Who is the Killer?
