General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Aranyak

Aranyak is a 2021 Hindi-language crime thriller streaming television series of eight episodes, released on Netflix on 10 December 2021, in which two mismatched hill-station police officers investigate a murder that revives a local myth of a murderous forest creature.¹ The title refers to a forest or a forest dweller, and translates as "of the forest".²^•³ It stars Raveena Tandon, in her streaming debut, as the local police officer Kasturi Dogra, alongside Parambrata Chatterjee and Ashutosh Rana.²

Key fact	Detail
Format	Hindi crime thriller, 1 season of 8 episodes, released on Netflix on 10 December 2021¹
Setting	The fictional hill town of Sironah, in Himachal Pradesh; filmed in Manali²^•³
Lead cast	Raveena Tandon (Kasturi Dogra), Parambrata Chatterjee (Angad Malik), Ashutosh Rana (Mahadev Dogra), Zakir Hussain (Kuber Manhas), Meghna Malik (Jagdamba Dhumal)⁴
Key crew	Director Vinay Waikul; writer Charudutt Acharya; showrunner Rohan Sippy; producers Roy Kapur Films and Ramesh Sippy Entertainment²
Festival premiere	First episode screened at IFFI 52 on 26 November 2021, the first time a Netflix series premiered at an Indian film festival⁵
Reception	IMDb 7.7/10 from about 12,000 users; Rotten Tomatoes 57% Tomatometer (7 critics) and 80% Popcornmeter⁶^•⁷
Continuation	A written second season was shelved; Raveena Tandon confirmed in July 2025 that it is not happening⁸

Spoilers

Premise

The story is set in Sironah, a cold and misty hill station (small mountain resort town, often in the Himalayan foothills) somewhere in North India. When a foreign teenage tourist disappears, and is later found murdered, the local Station House Officer Kasturi Dogra, who is about to begin a year-long sabbatical to spend time with her family, must join forces with her city-bred replacement, Angad Malik. The investigation digs up local secrets and revives a forgotten Himalayan myth of a bloodthirsty, serial-killing entity in the forest, known as the nar tendua, a creature said to be neither human nor animal.⁹^•¹⁰ Political ploys and personal agendas entangle the case, and, as Netflix's promotional material put it, everyone in the town is a suspect.¹

Kasturi is written as a working woman in small-town India balancing duty, a troubled marriage with Hari, and a teenage daughter, Nutan, who is preparing for the IIT entrance examination.¹¹ Angad arrives as an outsider who suspects everyone and treats the legend as superstition, and the two officers move from sparring over the case to collaboration.¹²

Season 2

A second season was anticipated, and the first season left clues intended to prepare audiences for it, according to the screenwriter.²⁰ In July 2025 Raveena Tandon confirmed that Season 2 is not happening. She said a script had been written but that the makers could not crack one that matched the expectations set by the first season, and that the platform chose not to risk spoiling the show's reception.⁸

Production

The series was created by Charudutt Acharya and Rohan Sippy, directed by Vinay Waikul, and produced by Roy Kapur Films and Ramesh Sippy Entertainment.² Acharya, who had co-written the docu-fiction crime show Crime Patrol for about ten years, said that experience let him detail police procedure without further research. The core idea came from a meeting with a woman police officer in Himachal Pradesh during a family vacation, who was doing her teenage daughter's school work at the station while handling his family's complaint; the nar tendua legend came from a driver who tried to scare his children with a tale of a creature in the mountains that is neither human nor animal. The criminal case drew on a real-life incident in India, fictionalized.¹⁰ The victim, Aimee, and her mother Julie were drawn from a real case of a British mother whose daughter went missing and was later found raped and killed at an Indian tourist destination.¹³

The makers have stated that the show is not based on a true story and that Sironah is fictional, modeled on towns in the Himalayan foothills; filming took place in Himachal Pradesh, with Manali as a principal location.¹⁴^•³ The trailer launch in Lonavala used projection mapping on surrounding forest cover to evoke the show's setting.²

The first episode premiered at the 52nd International Film Festival of India in Goa on 26 November 2021, which the Press Information Bureau described as the first time a Netflix series premiered at a film festival in India.⁵

Reception

Critical response was mixed. Rotten Tomatoes recorded a 57% Tomatometer from seven critics and an 80% Popcornmeter audience score.⁷ The Times of India gave the season 3.0 out of 5, crediting the nuanced chemistry between Tandon and Chattopadhyay while judging that the plot could have been compressed into a feature film.¹⁵ Scroll.in called it a gripping tale whose dense plotting makes nearly everybody a suspect, praising Tandon and Chattopadhyay as equal matches.¹⁶ The Indian Express found the series inconsistent but placed Tandon at its center, noting that she plays a hard-nosed small-town cop in a show that channels the hilly-terrain myth of a half-human, half-animal creature.¹⁷ Reviewers repeatedly compared the show's local-cop-pairs-with-outsider structure to Mare of Easttown and Broadchurch, while judging it distinct in its themes and characters.¹²^•¹⁸

On IMDb the series holds a 7.7/10 rating from about 12,000 users, with episode ratings rising from 7.2 to 7.4 across the season.⁶ India Today reported that the series was among Netflix's most-watched titles in India immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic.⁸

Title and the novel

The title is shared with Aranyak, a noted Bengali novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, whose title also translates as "of the forest".³^•¹⁹ The series is not an adaptation of that novel; its story of a 1930s Kolkata man who becomes an estate manager on the Chhota Nagpur Plateau is the subject of a separate planned series by writer Bhaskar Chattopadhyay.¹⁹ India Today has described the Netflix show as inspired by the Bengali novel of the same name.⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › Indian and South Asian web series › Premiered 2021 to 2025

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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