Aahana Swrup
‘Glory’ is a Hindi show in which the revered world of boxing in a small town in Haryana, India, becomes the backdrop for the unraveling of a grueling murder mystery. Ravi and Dev are two brothers who each have a complicated relationship with their father and their hometown. Yet, when they learn about the attack on their sister, Gudiya’s life, the duo inevitably end up stepping foot back in Shaktigarh. The young girl’s entanglement with Nihal, the boxer, whom their father, Raghubir Singh, was training for the Olympics, turn the circumstances around the couple’s deaths all the more menacing.
After all, Raghbir Singh’s rivalry with another local coach and his pack of aspiring world champion boxers is common knowledge around town. As a result, with corruption and criminality running rampant, the two brothers have no choice but to take the investigation into their own hands and step back into an old life that they had long left behind. However, in the process of avenging Gudiya, Ravi and Dev run the risk of damning their own lives. SPOILERS AHEAD!
Glory Recap
Nihal Singh, a young boxer training under the respected tutelage of Coach Raghubir Singh, is expected to become India’s next star Olympian. Nonetheless, weeks before the Olympic selections, the young athlete meets a brutal end as some masked hitmen attack him and his girlfriend at a football stadium. Although the latter, who was pregnant with the boxer’s child and was planning on running away with him, survives, her condition remains severe. Shortly after the attack, Ravi and Dev Singh, the coach’s estranged sons and Gudiya’s older brothers, receive news of the devastating attack. The two have their own reasons to stay away from their hometown, but still find themselves making a homecoming. Once the family reunites, tensions remain high between the father and his two sons.
Meanwhile, Arvind, an honest police man, tries to investigate the case, lining up his suspects with Viju Sawang, Raghubir’s rival boxing instructor, at the top of his list. Back in the hospital, Gudiya awakes momentarily and shares some information about her attack with her brothers. Tragically, shortly after this interaction, someone sneaks into the young girl’s room and stabs her to death. Things further deteriorate when village politics force Arvind off the case, limiting his ability to investigate the deaths. Thus, once the brothers realize they can expect little help from legal channels, they take matters into their own hands and begin looking for one of the attackers. Luckily, they know that Gudiya stabbed one of the men’s eyes out, giving them a clear profile for the suspect. After reluctantly going to Raghubir for some help, the brothers eventually unmask the perpetrator as Sunny, the nephew of local gangster Kuki.
Still, before they can get any answers out of him, Sunny gets killed by Nihal’s vengeful brother. Afterward, Arvind finds call records linking Kuki’s nephew to a landline at an NSI campus. In order to infiltrate the premises, Ravi has to step back into the role of his father’s boxing champion and a contender for the Olympic selection. This creates significant friction between the brothers since Dev believes his father would inevitably manipulate his brother back into being his pupil and carrying the weight of the family name. During this time, the older brother gets close to Joyna, a journalist, who is also eager to uncover the truth behind Nihal’s murder. Simultaneously, Ravi gets closer to Bharti, Arvind’s wife. Furthermore, he also discovers the name of another man involved in Nihal’s attack.
This time, the brothers and the father get to interrogate the young man, but Dev ends up going too far in his aggressive violence. Eventually, this leads to his and Raghubir’s arrest and eventual imprisonment. However, before Kuki’s incarcerated men could kill them inside their cell, the coach manages to pull some strings to get their charges lifted. Influenced by the sacrifice his father makes and motivated by the joy he himself rediscovers in boxing, Ravi decides to reprise his Olympic ambitions. Naturally, this strikes the wrong chord for Dev, who accuses his family of losing sight of their true motives. Thus, a crack soon forms in the family, with the coach and his reinstated student returning to their training while the eldest son continues his investigation with Joyna. In the end, the answers that Dev discovers lead him to a showdown, holding his own father at gunpoint.
Glory Ending: Does Dev Kill His Father? Who Gets Shot?
The climax of ‘Glory’ finds the Singh family at an unexpected crossroad where one decision promises to determine the rest of their futures. During his investigation, Dev uncovers a jarring truth about Gudiya’s death. It was his own father, Coach Raghubir, who had murdered his daughter in the hospital. All this time, he had been the mastermind behind the attack that got Gudiya and Nihal killed. However, the unexpected nature of the truth has kept him safely sheltered in the dark so far. Therefore, once Dev learns about his father’s monstrous actions, it immediately leads to a showdown between the two. The confrontation happens during Ravi’s high-stakes Olympic selection match against Raka, when the older brother sequesters the boxing coach in the dressing room to get some answers out of him.
Raghubir has always been abusive towards his children. However, to some extent, his behavior has always been excused away as a general “tough love” approach to coaching. Yet, Dev, who lost his leg as a direct result of this abuse, has been more critical of his father’s aggressive ways. Therefore, he isn’t as blindsided by the truth as his brother might have been. Instead, he’s ready for a confrontation and, if need be, punishment. It makes it evident early on that the father isn’t regretful of his actions. He excuses his behavior as a mistake, even insisting that he had no other choice to make. All the while, he remains more engrossed in Ravi’s boxing match. Thus, one thing becomes clear: for Raghubir, there is nothing more important than emblazing his family’s name in history through boxing.
For the same reason, Gudiya paid the price for her father’s hubris and ambition with her life. Yet, while everyone else, even Ravi, respects Raghubir for these ambitions on some level, Dev has always seen it for the poison that it is. Therefore, he has no reservations about doling out punishment to his father. His belief in the justice system has long been dissolved. As such, he knows that the only way to ensure his father gets his just desserts is to bring them out himself. Yet, the police’s fateful intervention backs him into a difficult corner. As Dev holds Raghubir at gunpoint, DSP Phogat and his men have their own guns trained on him. Consequently, while the son certainly has the conviction required to kill his father, it all comes down to a matter of who has the quickest draw. As the show ends, the audience hears the sound of a gunshot accompanied by the thud of a body hitting the floor. Yet, the show intentionally leaves out who is on the other side of the bullet: the son or the father.
Why Did Coach Raghubir Kill Gudiya?
The revelation of Coach Raghubir’s involvement in the death of his own daughter comes as a startling twist. Even so, once the truth is out in the open, the motivations and circumstances that led up to it become more and more clear. Throughout his life, the coach has always had a laser focus on one thing and one thing only: boxing. His father was an INternational champion who won the Olympic silver for India, cementing a daunting legacy for the family. Raghubir himself never quite managed to bring the same glory to the family name. Therefore, he became a coach with dreams of bringing India its first gold medal champion at the Olympics. After Ravi’s exit from the boxing world, his dreams were momentarily halted.
That is, until he shaped another pupil, Nihal Singh, into an emerging champion. Now, the young boxer becomes the center of Raghubir’s hopes and dreams. For the same reason, when he discovers that the athlete is planning on throwing his boxing career away because of his relationship with Gudiya, he concludes that there’s only one solution to the problem: his own daughter’s elimination. Raghubir has always viewed his children as an extension of the family name, who can be abused and exploited in pursuit of eternal glory. As such, his love and care towards them have always been a conditional transaction. The minute they stop aligning with his ambitions, they fall out of his favor.
By this logic, Gudiya has committed the worst sin by directly endangering the fulfillment of his dreams through Nihal. Raghubir can’t hurt the athlete himself, given that he still needs him to have any chance of going to the Olympics. Thus, he goes after his own daughter instead. Nonetheless, the attack backfires when it leads to Nihal’s unintentional death and Gudiya’s survival. Worse yet, while in the hospital, the young girl figures out that it was her own father who sent out the hitmen after her. This is what ultimately leads the father to stab Gudiya himself in an attempt to keep his own monstrous actions a secret.
Who Attacked Gudiya and Nihal? Why?
Although Raghubir wanted Gudiya dead, he wasn’t the one who organized the details of the attack. For this part of the plan, he had an unexpected partner-in-crime: Bharti. The latter’s presence in Shaktigarh remains a complicated affair. Originally from Jharkhand, Bharti was given away by her family as a bride-for-hire. This is how she ended up as Arvind’s second wife after his first one abandoned him and ran away from home. As such, the woman has been forced into a life that she never wanted. In light of the same, she decided to use the same tools used to hurt her to secure her own funds and future. Behind her husband’s back, Bharti works as an agent to the same system.
She frequently travels back to her hometown, where she scouts and recruits women whose families are willing ot give their hands away in blind marriages in exchange for some money. Yet, instead of actually marrying these girls off, Bharti sells them to brothels where they are trafficked and forced into sex work. Before Gudiya’s death, she had a fortuitous encounter with one such victim, Nishi, who managed to run away from the brothel. After providing the woman shelter in her own house, Gudiya goes to her father for help. However, by then Raghubir had already made the decision to wipe his daughter off the board. Thus, instead of bringing Bharti to justice, the coach teams up with her to ensure Gudiya’s demise.
Does Ravi make it to the Olympics?
Ravi’s journey as an athlete proves to be one of the more complicated aspects of his narrative. Years ago, he used to be one of the best boxers in the country, steadily on his way to becoming an Olympic candidate. That is, until everything changed during one fateful match. In his fight against Viju’s champion and his friend, Arjun, he and Raghubir quickly realized the fight was rigged in their opponent’s favor. Therefore, the coach instructed the boxer to knock out his rival and secure an indisputable win.
However, as Ravi followed his father’s instructions, he ended up causing Arjun’s death instead. Since then, he has vowed never to raise his hand again in violence. Nonetheless, Ravi and Dev’s return to Shaktigarh and ensuing investigation into Gudiya’s death, inevitably digs this violence back up. Worse yet, it also momentarily pushes the boxer back into his old life as an aspiring athlete with hopes and dreams. During this process, Ravi realizes that despite everything, he has missed the light and purpose that boxing brings into his life.
Furthermore, as he allows Raghubir to take up an influential role in his life again, he eventually gets manipulated into the same mindset as his old self. Soon enough, the Olympics once again became the most important thing in Ravi’s peripheral vision. Thus, even though his opponent pulls a dirty move and orchestrates an attack on Ravi the night before the fight, the boxer ultimately still decides to step back in the ring. There’s little doubt that his actions are motivated by the pressure that Raghubir puts on him. Yet, despite putting his life on the risk, Ravi also manages to win the final match, proving his boxing might once again. In the end, the victory ensures his place in the Olympics. Yet, given the family drama that unfolds behind the scenes, the boxer’s future remains clouded with ambiguity.
Read More: Is Netflix’s Glory Based on a True Story?
