Shakespeare once quoted, “The nearer in blood, the nearer bloody,” in one of his most iconic plays, “Macbeth.” In the fictional royal family of Bikaner set in contemporary India, the RaiSinggh palace echoes with betrayal, lust for power, and dark family secrets in the new Jio Hotstar show, The Legacy of the RaiSingghs- Kull. The star cast boasts veterans of Indian web shows like Nimrat Kaur, Amol Parashar, and Ridhi Dogra, joined by a few new faces, and everyone delivers in this highly political series.
Spoilers Ahead
What happens in the show?
So The Legacy of the RaiSingghs takes us to Bikaner, Rajasthan, where the royal family of RaiSingghs resides at their massive and opulent palace, which is partly a heritage hotel. The king, Chandra Pratap RaiSinggh, has Alzheimer’s, and he’s constantly worried about his children murdering him. There’s a striking contrast among his four children: his eldest daughter, Indrani, is married to the Chief Minister’s son, Vikram, who’s gay, and Indrani has to bear the brunt of being considered infertile. Indrani is also almost incestuously maternal to the youngest son of the king and the heir to the throne, Abhimanyu. Abhimanyu is a hot-headed druggie who actually treats himself like a monarch with endless power and influence. He justifies his behavior because the king kept reminding him that his mother died birthing him. Indrani took the role of his mother, and it has gotten to a stage where Abhimanyu calls her “Indu Ma” (the Hindi word for mother). Apart from shielding and spoiling Abhimanyu, Indrani also loves an orphan kid named Jaiveer, who lives in the palace. Kavya, the third kid, grew up in her own space, first at a boarding school and then boarded off to Oxford for college. Kavya now manages the palace’s hotel, and she has made a deal with an OTT platform to make a documentary on their family on the occasion of the King’s 60th birthday. Kavya also wants to lease the palace for a while to keep the place running, but Chandra Pratap is against the idea. Chandra Pratap’s eldest and most humble son is Brij, who’s constantly looked down on for being an illegitimate child by Abhimanyu, but he’s loved by his stepsisters. Chandra Pratap starts seeing visions of his dead wife and decides to reveal a new truth as an apology to her. His best friend, the Chief Minister of Rajasthan, Jograaj, isn’t happy with his behavior, but he’s supportive of the king. After having a hysterical meltdown on the evening of his 60th birthday, Chandra Pratap gets into a heated argument with Abhimanyu, which results in Abhimanyu getting slapped. Moments later, we see the king’s dead body floating in the pool in a palace where many people had a motive to take him down.
Who murdered the king?
The obvious suspect is Abhimanyu, who was fighting with the king before he got killed. But the cops don’t uncover much evidence to work with. Abhi wakes up in his room with blood all over his bed and clothes, and it turns out to be from a small scratch on his arm, which seems a little unrealistic. The show never really explains how all that blood was found on his bed. The king was found in the pool with a knife wound and a yellow cloth wrapped around him, which resembles a saree. A daring CBI officer, Bhagwan Ramteke, arrives at the palace to find the killer. Bhagwan takes no prisoners, and he treats the Royals just as he’d treat a commoner. Meanwhile, CM Jograaj gets hold of Abhimanyu and tells him to take control of the throne before he does anything else. He also suggests that the new king shouldn’t let the government conduct a post-mortem on a royal. Abhimanyu is the one who benefits the most from his father’s death, as he pays off a big debt from the hotel’s account as soon as he’s crowned as the new king.
The investigation stirs a lot of nerves in the family, as Bhagwan asks uncomfortable questions of Indrani, the CM, and Brij. Bhagwan straight-up calls Brij a bastard to his face, and he thinks the yellow saree belongs to Indrani. Indrani is in deep trouble, considering she was hooking up with her childhood lover moments before the fight between the King and Abhimanyu, and we see she does come to the room wearing a different saree. When Bhagwan asks Indrani to prove that the saree isn’t hers, she turns the palace upside down trying to look for it. Just when she’s about to be arrested, Brij comes to the rescue and brings the missing saree. Indrani got into a heated argument with her lover, during which her saree was torn on the door. Brij saw everything and kept the saree, which she dumped while leaving. CM Jograaj ignores Bhagwan’s orders and leaves the palace to ‘run his state.’ Before leaving, Jograaj tells Vikram to report every whisper that echoes through the palace. Just when you think that the mystery is not about to be solved anytime soon, Kavya’s middle-class photographer boyfriend, Kabir, finds the footage of the King’s murder, and he brings the footage to the siblings. In the video, we see the King talking to the statue of his wife poolside when CM Jograaj shows up to convince him not to announce anything the next morning. The king wouldn’t shut up about the supposed truth and how he must confess, so Jograaj took matters into his own hands and tried to kill him. The old king showed amazing resilience and fighting skills, and he beat Jograaj left, right, and center. Jograaj, seeing there was no other way, used his knife to stab the king in the neck. The truth is out, and Abhimanyu, Indrani, Kavya, and Vikram now know everything there is to know.
What did the king want to expose before his death?
After watching the video, Abhimanyu feels that he needs to avenge the death of his father. He thinks that draping himself in the hollow rhetoric of “a king’s duty” would mask his incompetence or earn him the crown his father left behind. Abhimanyu grabs a gun and storms out of the palace, even though nobody’s allowed to go out. Vikram follows him, knowing that he’s too impulsive to be trusted with a gun, and what follows is a smooth midnight chase through the desert, with a full moon glowing over the beautiful dunes of Rajasthan. Vikram manages to catch Abhimanyu, and the fight between them ends with Vikram schooling the new king. He takes Abhimanyu to the CM’s residence, where CM Jograaj reveals that he wouldn’t kill his closest friend if he wasn’t helpless. Back when Chandra Pratap was as old as Abhimanyu, he and his wife Madhu had to give their first son, Arjun, away to his elder brother and then King, Inder. Inder and his wife, Devika, couldn’t have a child, and it was royal practice to keep the lineage going. Inder and Devika went on a hunting trip once, when a drunk Chandra Pratap showed up in the hunting lodge demanding his son back. Jograaj was with him as well, and when Inder refused to entertain his younger brother, Jograaj and Chandra Pratap set fire to their cabin, accidentally killing his firstborn, Arjun, too. Madhu got traumatized by this whole incident, and on the same night, she died birthing Abhimanyu. Jograaj couldn’t afford to lose his power and the political career he built all these years, and he took his best friend’s life to protect himself.
Who leaked the footage?
Jograaj spills his wish to become the prime minister and asks Abhimanyu to be on his side rather than exposing him. Abhimanyu already is pretty broke, even as a king, and losing the support of the chief minister wouldn’t make sense. Jograaj implies that if he becomes prime minister with Abhimanyu’s help, the Royals would have the country in their back pocket. Abhimanyu agrees to get rid of the footage and goes back to the palace to convince his siblings to join in on the plan. Kavya is hesitant at first, but she and Indrani agree to protect Jograaj for their own good. Vikram destroys the hard disks, and the RaiSingghs are pretty good as of now. But to spoil the party, Bhagwan gets hold of the video, and it’s game over for the CM. As the family performs the dead King’s final rites, Bhagwan arrests Jograaj, and Abhimanyu is furious over it and throws one of his intolerable tantrums, which doesn’t mean anything. The siblings decide to part ways since Jograaj is out of the picture, and Kavya arranges to lease the hotel for five years, making sure everyone gets a fair amount of money. Seeing the peace restored, Indrani takes the family on a hunting trip one last time. Everything’s good until Abhimanyu overhears Vikram’s phone call with the deputy CM Naval, where he admits to sending his father to jail so he could become the CM. Unfortunately for him, no MLA backs him when he tries to take over. Abhimanyu creates a big ruckus immediately, threatening to kill Vikram for jeopardizing his plan. When Abhimanyu takes a rifle in his hands, Brij intervenes to stop him. A shot is fired anyway, and the orphan kid Jaiveer, who Indu treated as her own, dies in the process. Vikram is hit in the leg too, and Kavya convinces Brij to take the fall.
What happens when the RaiSingghs reunite?
Five years have passed since that tragic night, and the RaiSingghs reunite once again, this time for ‘King’ Abhimanyu’s wedding. Abhimanyu has found himself a rich family to marry into to pull himself out of a 200 crore debt. Indrani used public sympathy over Jaiveer’s death and became the CM, and she is now in the final days of her term as Chief Minister. Kavya has a son with Kabir, but their relationship has gotten as bitter as it can get. With the pressure Indrani is under from the home minister and her own party’s deputy CM, she barely has a chance to get re-elected. To add to all this trouble, she’s pregnant after finally getting Vikram to agree to the idea of a child. So Indrani decides to take a page from Jograaj’s book and tells her assistant, Tanwar Ji, to distribute sweet boxes across the state, each containing hidden cash. Kavya is threatened by Kabir that he’ll take their son away, and the burden of all these problems falls on the elder sister. So to make things worse, the RaiSingghs get hit from all fronts. Abhimanyu gets in trouble when Jess creates a scene at his Sangeet, upsetting Ahana and her parents, and jeopardizing his chances of getting money from them. The sweet boxes containing cash get seized, but mysteriously most of them get missing rather than ending up in the hands of the police. And Kabir takes his son Nirvan and runs away to South Africa, away from the royal madness. This whole crisis drowns Indrani, along with the fact she’s been seeing Jaiveer all over the palace, and she sits in silence knowing how powerless she is.
How does Indrani win the election?
Just when you think it couldn’t get worse for the Royals, Brij comes back to the palace in a whole new avatar. Indrani was supposed to use her power to let him out of jail, but for five years she protected her image rather than saving her brother. The illegitimate child is no longer an altruistic and self-sacrificing fool anymore, and he wants a share of the palace and Indrani’s backing to become the new chief minister. All these years of prison have changed him, and Jograaj got to him just in the nick of time. He has turned the loyal son against the family, and there is perhaps no greater threat than a person who once held love for you. With the looming threat over his head, Abhimanyu folds to Brij and Jograaj. They have an elaborate plan to take control of the situation, sacrificing Vikram for murdering Jaiveer so that it looks like Indrani is still a selfless royal and CM who’s fighting for the law and order of the society. Abhimanyu emotionally manipulates Indrani into making her sacrifice her own husband, and voila, guess who wins the election again.
Who killed Abhimanyu?
After becoming the CM, Indrani handles all the chaos as smoothly as you could imagine. She shows the door to all the MLAs who sided with the Home Minister before the election and arranges for the release of Tanwar Ji, who took the fall for the sweet box scandal earlier. Indrani also crushes the goons who lent money to Abhimanyu and pays them a mere 50 crore when they were to get 200 crores. She’s also got hold of Kavya’s son Nirvan and framed Kabir in a kidnapping case, knowing he can’t possibly keep up his fight with the slow and draining legal system with his middle-class lifestyle. Things seem to be going super well, and then the spoiled prince spoils his own party once again. He accidentally spills his wish to replace Indrani as the Chief Minister, and when Indrani mocks him for dreaming of such a thing, he proudly gloats that without him she couldn’t win the elections as comfortably as she did. But Indrani knows what he’s really done; he’s sold his ‘ma’ out to the vultures waiting to rip the family apart. For the first time in this show, Indrani bashes Abhimanyu for being the prick that he is, and he doesn’t take it well. Indrani apologizes to her baby once again, but he pushes her aside and walks out of the room, which ends up causing her to have a miscarriage. Another life destroyed by Abhimanyu before it could even begin.
Five years later, history repeats itself in the RaiSinggh palace. Abhimanyu is relaxing in the pool after announcing he’d close the hotel and have the palace all to himself. Without a worry in his tiny head, he sits in the pool with a royal knife in his hand. As he puts it to the side to get a drink, the knife disappears. Indrani shoves the knife in his neck, in the same place where Chandra Pratap was stabbed. Abhimanyu struggles a bit, but both of them end up in the pool, and the problematic relationship between them is finally done for good. She sings a lullaby to Abhimanyu while killing him. Kavya witnesses everything, and she helps Indrani out of the pool to draw the curtains on season one.
Is there going to be a second season?
Abhimanyu’s behavior was erratic and problematic from the first minute, and eventually it all fell on Indrani’s shoulders, who had to kill the living, breathing snake. But if we think from a broader perspective, it’s the Chief Minister of the State who’s killed someone, and what happens if the news gets out? Indrani’s DNA must be all over Abhimanyu’s body, so Bhagwan might make a comeback to arrest the killer once again, with the CM being the prime suspect this time. Kavya has her son now, but her son barely knows her since he spent most of his time with his father. The possibilities of a second season aren’t looking too bright, but the open ending leaves us to speculate what happens to the crooked royals of Bikaner.
