The Best Indian Spy Thrillers to Stream, From Ek Tha Tiger to The Family Man

Salman Khan plays Tiger, a RAW agent sent to Dublin to watch a scientist, who falls for Zoya, played by Katrina Kaif, and discovers she works for the ISI. It is a romance in spy clothing, and it became the first film of what Yash Raj Films later built into its spy universe, alongside Tiger Zinda Hai, War and Pathaan.

Kamal Haasan wrote, directed and stars as a mild-mannered Kathak teacher in New York whose wife hires a detective because she suspects him of an affair. He turns out to be an Indian agent who once infiltrated al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The film's first-act reveal is one of the best scenes in Tamil cinema, and a sequel followed in 2018.

Four Indian agents are sent to Karachi to capture Goldman, a fugitive gangster living under protection, and bring him back across the border. Rishi Kapoor plays Goldman, an obvious stand-in for Dawood Ibrahim, and Irrfan Khan plays an agent who has lived undercover in Karachi for years and has a family there. The operation goes wrong almost immediately.

John Abraham plays an Indian Army officer sent to Jaffna as a covert operative during the Sri Lankan civil war in the late 1980s, as India's peacekeeping intervention collapses. The story leads, with the names changed, to the assassination of a former Indian prime minister. It is a cold, procedural film that keeps its music in the background, which was rare for a Hindi film at the time.

Baby is the code name of a secret counter-terror unit, and Akshay Kumar plays one of its field officers, Ajay Singh Rajput, hunting a terror network from Mumbai to Nepal to Saudi Arabia. Neeraj Pandey directs it as a procedural, with Danny Denzongpa as the unit's chief and a long final extraction. It led to a spin-off, Naam Shabana.

After the 2008 Mumbai attacks, Indian intelligence plans a deniable operation to kill the men responsible, abroad. Saif Ali Khan plays a disgraced former soldier chosen to carry it out, and Katrina Kaif plays the former agent who goes with him. It is based on S. Hussain Zaidi's novel Mumbai Avengers.

A prequel to Baby, about how Shabana Khan, the agent Taapsee Pannu played in a small role there, was recruited. A college student and martial artist, she is approached by a secret unit after her boyfriend is murdered, and offered help with revenge in exchange for her service. Manoj Bajpayee plays her handler and Akshay Kumar returns as Ajay.

Adivi Sesh co-wrote and stars as Gopi, the son of a murdered intelligence officer, who trains for a secret agency called Trinetra and is framed for an attack on his own team on his first assignment. A tightly plotted Telugu spy thriller made on a modest budget, it was a sleeper hit, and Sesh later played Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan in Major.

Alia Bhatt plays Sehmat, a young Kashmiri woman who is married into a Pakistani military family in 1971 so that she can pass secrets to India from inside the household. Based on Harinder Sikka's novel Calling Sehmat, Meghna Gulzar's film is quiet and tense, and it never lets Sehmat forget that the family she spies on has been kind to her. Vicky Kaushal plays her husband.

Manoj Bajpayee plays Srikant Tiwari, a senior analyst in a fictional counter-terror cell who lies to his wife and children about what he does all day. Raj and DK's series is a spy thriller and a middle-class comedy at the same time, and the two halves feed each other. Sharib Hashmi as his partner JK is the show's other great asset.

Kay Kay Menon plays Himmat Singh, an intelligence officer convinced that the 2001 attack on Parliament had a sixth man behind it, who has spent almost two decades and a great deal of government money running agents abroad to find him. Neeraj Pandey, who made Baby, tells it largely through an inquiry into Himmat's spending.

Set in the years before the 1965 war, Mukhbir follows a young man who is recruited by Indian intelligence, given a new identity and sent to Lahore to work his way into Pakistani military circles. Zain Khan Durrani leads with Prakash Raj and Adil Hussain as his handlers. It is a slower, period-detailed series for viewers who liked Raazi.

Shah Rukh Khan plays Pathaan, a sidelined RAW agent running a covert unit, against John Abraham as Jim, a former Indian agent turned mercenary with a biological weapon. Deepika Padukone plays an ISI agent whose loyalties shift. It is the biggest, loudest film on this list, connects the Tiger films and War into one universe, and was a huge box-office hit.

In the 1970s, after India's nuclear test, a RAW agent posing as a tailor in Pakistan is tasked with finding out whether Pakistan is building a bomb, and where. Sidharth Malhotra plays the agent and Rashmika Mandanna his blind wife who does not know who he is. It released directly on Netflix.

Tabu plays Krishna Mehra, a RAW officer in Delhi tracking a colleague, played by Ali Fazal, who she believes is selling secrets, while his wife, played by Wamiqa Gabbi, is drawn into the case. Based on former intelligence officer Amar Bhushan's novel Escape to Nowhere, it is the most realist film on this list, more interested in surveillance and paperwork than gunfights.