Midway through 2018, a sensational incident rocked India.

It involved the 11-member

Bhatia family, who lived in Burari, on the fringes of Delhi, and involved a terrible tragedy that
was sensationalized by the media to the point where most thinking classes stopped taking it
seriously. As a result, people decided not to talk about the incident as they typically do with
other topics that contain elements of the weird and the surreal as soon as the incident was
labeled a mass suicide — following an investigation.
Together with Anubhav Chopra, director Leena Yadav revisits Burari, the “home of secrets,”
where 11 members of the Bhatia family resided while being financially comfortable in a lower
middle-class neighborhood. They included three generations living under one roof, from an
80-year-old to a 15-year-old child, and they seemed close-knit, content, and normal. It was
therefore puzzling why, one day, 10 bodies were discovered hanging nearby, all with their
hands and legs tied similarly, as though it had been a well-planned, elaborate scheme; the 11 th
body, the grandmother’s, was also discovered nearby, having been strangled to death.
However, it turns out that all of them (including the elderly woman who had been strangled)
had been willing participants in a ritual.
What exactly happens? Murder was not suspected. Suicide seemed the obvious course of
action, but the series shows that this was not self-harm that any of them understood they
were committing—rather, it was a ritual in a trance that held out hope for a better life.
Instead of reenacting the characters, the filmmakers used actual case footage, interviews
with police officers, investigators, friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers, as well as
opinions from professionals like clinical scientists, doctors, journalists, social anthropologists,
and others.
There are a few things that come to light without the show really taking a position, and I
must say that not taking a position has made House of Secrets even more potent: information
is presented clinically and forensically so that viewers can learn more about the case and come
to their own conclusions.
The investigation is not flawed, which is the first point. The Delhi Police take a somewhat
ham-handed approach, but they manage to get to the core of the problem in collaboration
with higher levels. Because death was not to be the result, it is not a murder and it is not even
a suicide. A group of believers from different generations were killed during a rite.
Second, it concerns the role of patriarchy in a family when young members are employed
by multinational corporations. Nobody raises a doubt, not even the obviously woke members.
No one objects when Lalit claims that he is guiding them along the path of righteousness for
their own good because he is the “father figure,” the person who was selected by the
departed father figure to be the messenger.
Thirdly, it concerns the delusion bubble. What transpired in the Bhatia family may be
indicative of what takes place in cults. You visualize. Voices are audible. Since you are
encouraged to believe. Because no one suspects there is a medical issue, the cult leader may
be the only one who has mental health concerns that are ignored. He imparts the
contagiousness of it all to his followers, and they build on that to construct a covert agreement
from which the rest of the sensible world is cut off.