Dancing On The Grave review: Unsettling true-crime docuseries loses steam too soon

In 1991, Shakereh Khaleeli, granddaughter of Sir Mirza Ismail, the Diwan of Mysore, Jaipur and Hyderabad- went missing. Three years later, the police discovered her skeleton buried in a wooden casket, at 81, Richmond House, Bangalore, where she lived with her second husband Murli Manohar Mishra, aka Swami Shraddhananda. Shakereh was drugged and thrown in the wooden casket; it was revealed that she was buried alive. This sensational case is re-examined in Dancing On The Grave, the unsettling new four-part docuseries under India Today Originals, now streaming on Prime Video. (Also read: Patrick Graham says Dancing On The Grave is different because it tries to understand Shakereh Namazi, what motivated her)

Even if the details of the story and how it spans out are in public domain, Dancing On The Grave is interested in digging into the many sides to this ‘rarest of rare’ case, that hasn’t been heard (and reported) before. Through interviews, archival footage, and recreation of scenes, director Patrick Graham tells the story- richly aided by the editing team of Jahaan Noble and Kartik Bansal- with a certain sense of watchfulness- the first two episodes are fixed particularly through the eyes of the family of Shakereh. How she was so full of life; how she had an unmissable aura in any room she entered; and how, even after having four beautiful daughters with her first husband Akbar Khaleeli, she divorced him and got married to a man much below her social status- the self-proclaimed godman Swami Shraddhananda.

As the world building occurs, the sense of curiosity to understand Shakereh never really takes shape. The anecdotes flash in-between, and are interrupted by the shocking recreation(s) of how a drugged Shakereh was shoved into the casket by Shraddhananda. Important details are also provided by the people who were in charge of the case, wherein the police tells that Shraddhananda chose to confess because he was tired of the constant drudgery and harassment with the case for years and wanted it to end. Was he made to succumb? Was he tortured? The exercise in constructing that space takes us to the third episode, where Swami Shraddhananda appears front and centre- like a reminder that he has his own story to tell. From hereon, Dancing on the Grave pivots to a dangerously tricky ground. Here is a man who still continues to deny his crime. His lawyer tells that there are no clear evidence to prove he has murdered Shakereh. In one particularly haunting scene, the camera stays tightly focused on him as he hears Shakereh’s only recorded voice. He doesn’t refrain from revealing that he had been threatened and tortured by the police to come to a confession.

Even though Dancing on the Grave is interested in uncovering the details and perspectives from both ends, the overarching framework feels stretched and predictable. Not because of the details we already know, but for the ones the series chooses to move away from. No context is build around the investigation, apart from some of the initial notes around how it started, and most of all, the series evades details about the court proceedings. It is told that Shakereh had been embroiled into a lot of other legal notices that were labelled by her own family, after she chose to marry Shraddhananda. Why are no questions asked to the family members around that? Apart from Sabah, none of the other daughters are also taken into consideration. More alarmingly, the positioning of certain scenes that are focused on Swami Shraddhananda- the use of a lush background score, the camera slowly moving close to his cell as he looks on, feel increasingly designed to elicit some kind of vitality for this man. For a case that revolves around such a gruesome murder and whose factual evidences- how the wooden box (with wheels) was ordered from before; the marks of Shakereh’s nails on the sides- stand firmly against him, this structure feels increasingly forced after a while. Even the servants, who reportedly helped Shraddhananda push the wooden box into the pit, are forgotten.

Dancing on the Grave could have benefitted with a much lesser interest in recreating the scenes with Shakereh and Shraddhananda, as well as cutting down on envisioning so much of her exuberance through a fictionalized standpoint. By dramatizing the events, Dancing on the Grave not only loses it steam and focus, but also the inherent faith in its audience. The show has hunger for underlining details, and a curiosity for what lies and grows on the other side of the wall, but steadily gives its way to a certain degree of deliberate action. When the subject itself is so haunting and perplexing, what the show needed was perhaps a little reserve before circling around it. It needed, in the wake of this cruel and terrifyingly unjust world, a little more grace.