‘Akka’ review: An engrossing bejewelled catfight
Keerthy Suresh and Radhika Apte lead Dharmaraj Shetty’s Netflix series.
Black News 
The Netflix series Akka is set in the fictitious kingdom Pernuru somewhere in the Deccan swathe. Women have ruled Pernuru for generations. A matriarchy has dealt patriarchy a body blow by dispensing with marriage altogether.
The very notion of family is fluid here. The warrior queens take partners and casual lovers without bothering to add mangalsutras to their sizeable jewellery collections. The line of succession is female. Women hold the purse strings and wield the guns. If the men feel like pieces of furniture and therefore emasculated, that is too bad.
Even after Independence in 1947, Pernuru has held on to its privileges. The word of Muthakka (Monika Panwar and later Tanvi Azmi), one of the three rulers of Pernuru, controls the main industry, liquor brewing. By 1985, Bhavani (Keerthy Suresh) is in charge.
The party-pooper is another woman. Rudra (Radhika Apte) is dispatched to Pernuru by the Mumbai gangster Shankar (Mahesh Manjrekar) to wrest control of the liquor trade from the fearsome Bhavani. A fierce contest breaks out between the ruthless outsider and the duty-bound legatee.
Dharmaraj Shetty’s Akka adds to the conventional gangster drama a keen reading of matriarchal forms of governance. The Hindi series dips into history, sociology and feminist studies before reaching for the crime...
