The recent Aditya Dhar directed film, Dhurandhar, released last week. Since then, it has created a great stir in public sentiments. I too watched the film. And here, I speak to you as a cultural historian, and obviously not as a film critic or a political theorist. My interest in Dhurandhar lies in what the film indexes about India’s ethnographic gaze on Pakistan. The thesis I want to lay out is rather straightforward. Dhurandhar is remarkable measure of India’s ethnographic familiarity with Pakistan. It signals that Pakistan’s internal splintering is visible to the Indian state, to Indians and, through them, even to the Pakistani awam. The film actually stages not a battle between India and Pakistan but between the elite Pakistani mainstream and the otherwise large Western province of Balochistan, which feels disempowered and is in a political minority.
On the surface, Dhurandhar’s aesthetic inspirations seem obvious. I see traces of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Trilogy, of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, of Ram Gopal Verma’s cinema on the Bombay underworld, and of Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur duology. Dhurandhar could very well be titled Gangs of Lyari, as a commemorative trope to signpost the Lyari encounter of 2009 as part of the larger Operation Lyari that continued practically for ten years or more. In this incident, one of the antiheroes of the film, Rehman Baloch—also known as Sher-e-Baloch—played by Akshaye Khanna in the film, was killed in real life by SSP Chaudhry Aslam Khan. Rehman Baloch was a hero for the Baloch people residing in Karachi and beyond. He was turned into a scapegoat for the sins of the political class of Pakistan. Later, Chaudhry Aslam Khan, too, met with a tragic bomb explosion that took his life. Dhurandhar borrows the standard gangster epic’s language and then turns that language to an ethnographic end. No doubt, it has recreated pride in Pakistan for Baloch heritage and history, and Balochistan’s eight-decade-long struggle for self-determination.
Lyari Town, as represented in Dhurandhar, is a very striking case, indeed. Lyari is one of the most populous, oldest, and least developed localities of Karachi, with the majority of the population being of Baloch origin (others include Kutchi Gujaratis, Sindhis, Urdu-speaking Muhajirs, and religious minorities, including Hindus). A Lyari set reportedly created in Bangkok by five thousand Indian workers looks deeply authentic in the film. Lyari is the heart of Karachi and Karachi the political heartland of Pakistan. The production detail matters because it shows the lengths to which Indian filmmakers can go henceforward to render Pakistani urban physicality credibly before their audiences. The film’s Lyari is not a postcard of malaise. It is a densely inhabited place. Dhurandhar probably banked on the fact that Lyari—and the Sindh province in general—is still home to a significant Hindu population, besides other minorities like Christians and Sikhs. Lyari also lies only about two hundred kilometres from the Shaktipeeth Hinglaj Mata Mandir in Balochistan, a shrine historically aided by Baloch people. These geographic notes matter to a historicist view of the film because they speak to cross-border and cross-communal entanglements that simplistic binary narratives can conceal.
Dhurandhar’s politics are in some ways complicated and in other ways extremely brave. It creates a genuine space for collaboration of compassionate politics and curiosity between Indians and Pakistanis. The film shows the Baloch people and a consortium of separatist groups like the Baloch Liberation Army and the Baloch Liberation Front in a much more positive light than conventional Pakistani political melodrama permits. Unlike critics of the film, I did not find Dhurandhar Islamophobic. That is because it does not trade in crude civilizational binaries. What it does offer are horrifying representations of misanthropy and unmitigated blood-curdling violence. But such violence is also a fact in reality. The violence it shows is not an instrument of cultural contempt for any religion but what has been carried out already in the name of politically motivated religious identities. It is the spectacle of political brutality and of internalized cruelty. In this, the film makes no secret of its debt to violent gangster epics, precisely so that it can moralize by humanizing its subjects.
Central to this humanizing project is Akshaye Khanna’s Rehman Dakait. The film’s ideology is to humanize Rehman Dakait. Akshaye Khanna does this splendidly, outshining almost every other actor in the film. The performance asks us to look at a figure usually presented as a one-dimensional villain and to see instead a product of local histories, of marginality, and of contested sovereignties. The humanization is the film’s most audacious move because it transforms a news headline into a lived biography and thereby forces viewers to confront the social and political conditions that produce such figures.
If Dhurandhar achieves something significant, it is not merely in the humanization of an antihero. It is in the acute ethnographic familiarity with Pakistani urban territory, especially Karachi. The film’s mise-en-scène suggests that India’s cinematic soft power has penetrated into zones that its neighbours usually consider off-limits. Reports suggest over two million illegal downloads of the film have occurred in Pakistan, despite the film being banned there. Pakistanis seem to be obsessing over Dhurandhar. That obsession is not simply about sensational violence. It is about seeing, from without and within, the state of Pakistan being watched and dramatized. There have been numerous instances of Pakistani citizens, especially of Baloch origins, expressing that Dhurandhar has reinstated their cultural pride and means of political recognition.
The film’s portrayal of Pakistan as internally fragmented and vulnerable underscores the fragility of the Pakistani state and embeds that in popular Indo-Pakistani imagination. This is not a middle-class liberal stance. Rather, it is in line with what the psychoanalyst Ashis Nandy once called, in a different context, the slum’s eye view of politics, of Indian cinema. Dhurandhar too offers a Pakistani slum’s eye view of India-Pakistan bilateral relations and intra-Pakistani political fragmentations. In doing so, it reemphasizes the sheer vulnerability of Pakistani state ideology. Furthermore, it bifurcates the people from the state. Pakistanis are shown as redeemable, honorable, and even heroic. But the Pakistani state is shown as deeply Machiavellian, corrupt, resentful, and cruel. Dhurandhar taps into lowbrow spaces of urban marginality to make a demonstration about national disintegration, through a psychological operation on the mindset of Pakistani political elites. In the process, the film enfolds the Indian government’s political interests into its filmmaking’s canvas.
I want to be clear about what I think Dhurandhar is clearly not. To me, it does not seem like a crude exercise in Islamophobia. Rather, at various instances, the film shows Muslims and Islamic identities as brave and highly principled. Also, I do not see the film as a jingoistic, India-first polemic, that simplifies complex histories into moral binaries. Rather, it uses its soft power to make India’s ethnographic familiarity with Pakistani territory a form of cultural reach and penetration.
When a film made in India renders Pakistan’s internal disputes with such intimacy and then circulates back into Pakistan through secret channels, it is only natural that the status quo feels unsettled. The film’s merit must be highlighted without taking sides for or against its politics. Good historical work involves imaginative empathy. If the film invites Indian viewers to understand that Pakistan’s splintering is visible to India, it also invites Pakistani viewers to see themselves as being seen by the world at large. The film’s ethical claim is to convert spectacles of violence into dialogue, even an internal dialogue within Pakistan. That is a very challenging, yet necessary ambition.
As a cultural, historian, I must end with a note of caution and one of curiosity. The caution is about how we interpret fascination. Millions of illegal downloads of the film do not yet settle a debate about cultural autonomy. The curiosity is about what other ethnographic films can achieve if they follow Dhurandhar’s example, while committing to deeper reciprocity with the societies they portray.
But, for now, Dhurandhar stands as a remarkable index of India’s gaze upon Pakistan. It shows how cinema can map political fractures. The film forces us to ask the question: is seeing another’s rupture a mode of solidarity with the other? Or is it a new instrument of influencing or even hastening the other’s self-destruction?
Arup K. Chatterjee 