While best known as the producer for Merchant Ivory Films, Ismail Merchant was also an accomplished director, and In Custody is one of his best-received films. An ode to the great tradition of Urdu poetry, In Custody marks a return to the screen for Shashi Kapoor, paired with another great Indian actor, Om Puri. Puri plays Deven, a linguistics professor hired to interview the reclusive poet Nur. Deven is disheartened to find the great man a huge, shambling wreck, surrounded by sycophants who care only for Nur's fame and money, not his poetry. No longer the dashing young man of the earlier Merchant Ivory films, Kapoor gives a fearless performance as the corpulent, dissolute poet.