General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Great Indian Murder

The Great Indian Murder is a 2022 Indian Hindi-language crime drama and mystery streaming television series directed by Tigmanshu Dhulia, adapted from Vikas Swarup's novel Six Suspects. It premiered on Disney+ Hotstar on 4 February 2022 with all nine episodes released at once.¹^•² The premise follows the killing of the notorious industrialist Vicky Rai at a party, with the main suspects being the guests, both invited and uninvited.¹

Key fact	Detail
Premiere	4 February 2022, Disney+ Hotstar (now JioHotstar); all nine episodes released together²^•³
Format	Hindi-language scripted series, 9 episodes of about 45 minutes; genres crime, drama, mystery²
Source	Adapted from Vikas Swarup's novel Six Suspects⁴
Lead cast	Pratik Gandhi as Suraj Yadav, Richa Chadha as Sudha Bharadwaj, Ashutosh Rana as Jagganath Rai, Raghuvir Yadav as Mohan Kumar, Jatin Goswami as Vicky Rai⁵
Production	Directed by Tigmanshu Dhulia; produced by Ajay Devgn and Priti Vinay Sinha; written by Dhulia, Vijay Maurya, and Puneet Sharma⁶
Reception	IMDb 6.7/10 from about 14,000 votes; Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer 63% from 4 reviews⁷^•¹
Audience reach	Estimated 29.6 million viewers in India for January to June 2022, per Ormax Media⁸

Spoilers

Premise and plot

The series opens with the murder of Vicky Rai (Jatin Goswami), an industrialist with a playboy lifestyle, at a party he hosts to celebrate his acquittal in the rape and murder of two young girls.⁹ His father, Jagannath Rai (Ashutosh Rana), the Home Minister of Chhattisgarh, demands a CBI inquiry, and officers Suraj Yadav (Pratik Gandhi) and Sudha Bharadwaj (Richa Chadha) lead the investigation through six suspects.⁹

The suspects represent a cross-section of Indian society. They include the small-time thief Munna (Shashank Arora), the retired bureaucrat Mohan Kumar (Raghuvir Yadav), who believes himself to be Mahatma Gandhi, the welfare officer Ashok Rajput (Sharib Hashmi), and his protege Eketi (Mani PR), a tribal man from the Andamans searching for a lost statue.¹⁰ Each episode revisits the night of the murder from a different angle, picking up a clue and skipping back and forth in time.¹¹

Adaptation from Six Suspects

The series is adapted from Six Suspects, a novel by Vikas Swarup, the author whose debut Q & A became the film Slumdog Millionaire.⁴ Sources differ on the book's publication date: the New Indian Express reports it as published in 2008, while The Indian Express calls it a 2016 novel.⁴^•¹⁰

The two investigator protagonists, Suraj Yadav and Sudha Bharadwaj, do not appear in the original book; writer-director Tigmanshu Dhulia created them to frame his adaptation.⁴ Dhulia said he took the project because of the scope it offered for an ensemble cast of seven to eight important characters, after earlier shows with only three or four leads, and stressed that the story goes beyond a murder mystery into the country's political condition, taking the action across nine cities including Kolkata, Chennai, the Andamans, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, and Mumbai.¹²

The novel drew on real-life events that had made headlines in India, including the 1999 murder of the model and part-time bartender Jessica Lal by the son of a powerful politician, and the 1998 black buck poaching case involving a film star; these elements carry into the series.¹⁰

Cast and production

Pratik Gandhi plays the CBI investigator Suraj Yadav, a role he described as a flawed, human character with his own complexes and politics, following his breakout in Scam 1992.⁴ Richa Chadha plays the no-nonsense cop Sudha Bharadwaj, who, like her co-investigator, has her own agenda.¹³ The ensemble also includes Paoli Dam as Shabnam Saxena, Shashank Arora as Munna, and Jatin Goswami as Vicky Rai.⁵

The series was produced by Ajay Devgn and Priti Vinay Sinha under an ADF & RLE Media production, with cinematography by Rishi Punjabi, editing by Unnikrishnan P. P. and Prathamesh Chande, and music by Raghu Dixit and Ketan Sodha.⁶^•¹³

Reception

Critical response was divided. The Times of India gave the season 3.5 out of 5, calling it a compelling watch for its suspense, drama, and ensemble performances.¹³ Shubhra Gupta of The Indian Express called it a mixed bag, noting that some episodes work better than others as the show juggles a crowded canvas of characters in a Rashomon-like retelling of the murder.¹⁰ Reviewers at the same paper and at Gadgets360 were far harsher: Rohan Naahar called it an unsalvageable mess that should have been stalled at the script stage, and Akhil Arora called it disjointed and possibly the worst thing Disney+ Hotstar had approved.¹⁴^•¹⁵ The New Indian Express gave it 2 out of 5, judging that its pieces do not fit as a whole.¹¹

Aggregated scores reflect the split: the Tomatometer stood at 63% from four reviews, while the IMDb rating is 6.7/10 from about 14,000 votes, with the season finale scoring 5.7, the lowest of the nine episodes.¹^•¹⁶ JustWatch records a 31% rating from 48 user ratings.³

Viewership

Ormax Media's mid-year review of streaming originals estimated that The Great Indian Murder reached 29.6 million viewers in India between January and June 2022, placing it among the most-watched Hindi streaming shows of the period, behind Rudra: The Edge Of Darkness (35.2 million), Aashram S3 (34.3 million), and Panchayat S2 (29.6 million, tied with it).⁸ Its Ormax Power Rating, a measure of how well the show was liked, was 62, against 75 for Panchayat S2 at the top of that list.⁸ A Disney+ Hotstar publication later listed it among the platform's original shows that reached the top of Indian watchlists in 2022.¹⁷

As of late 2026, the series streams on JioHotstar and VI movies and tv in India.³

References

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