Bollywood calling Pakistan. Again.

So a new trailer for a hindi acshun phillum dropped recently, and its another one of those that throws around the ‘based on true events’ tag for additional street cred. This time around though, there’s a bit of a twist. The plot apparently centers around the Lyari Gang wars in Karachi, with some additional fictional tempering of course.

Unsurprisingly, this will elicit a whole gamut of reactions from either side of the Radcliffe line, especially due west. The preview is unusually long, and somewhat unsurprisingly filled with shocking violence – the recent success of movies like Kill and Animal were bound to result in a race to ever-increasingly levels of ‘ketchup’ and fireworks. But apart from that, at least to me, didn’t seem very novel or interesting. I am mildly curious about the world building that the movie manages to pull off.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Netflix series Heeramandi is another example of this phenomenon. Where the Indian movie industry is accused of ‘cultural appropriation’ and telling a story that is “Pakistani, and not Indian”. With that one, as much as I am… unimpressed with Bhansali’s output – I view him more as a choreographer, less of a filmmaker, one who is far more successful at spectacle, not so much with cinema – I still think that the stories of the subcontinent should be accessible to all. Lahore after all, especially pre-partition Lahore is as much a legacy of Ganga Ram as it is of the Mughal Empire, or the Sikh, for that matter.

This time around however, the setting isn’t historical or pre-partition. Is there an argument to be made that this is “cultural appropriation”?

For me, more than anything, its yet another missed opportunity. In an alternate timeline, a movie like this would have been a golden opportunity for Pakistani actors to get visibility on a much larger Indian stage, and the quality of the output could have been immeasurably raised with behind-the-scenes contributions – production design, location and language expertise, to name a few.

Somewhere down the line, if things finally start reverting to ‘normal’, perhaps future projects like these will incorporate Pakistani participation and be better for it.