December 2025 – Brown Pundits

Khaleda Zia, Bangladesh’s first female prime minister, dies at 80 after prolonged illness (Open Thread)

Kabir · December 31, 2025 · 10 comments

1) Khaleda Zia, Bangladesh’s first female prime minister, dies at 80 after prolonged illness

Begum Zia was Bangladesh’s first female prime minister–and only the second female prime minister of a Muslim majority country (Benazir Bhutto was the first).

Prime Minister Modi has expressed his condolences as has PM Sharif of Pakistan. PM Sharif called Begum Zia “a committed friend of Pakistan”.

She will be given a state funeral on Wednesday (December 31) and then buried alongside her late husband, Ziaur Rahman. Her son, Tarique Rahman, recently returned to Bangladesh after seventeen years in self-exile. He is expected to be prime minister if BNP wins the February elections.

2) Khaleda Zia: How Begum Khaleda influenced Bangladesh, India| Analysis

Join The Hindu’s Suhasini Haidar, Kallol Bhattacherjee and Stanly Johny as they decode the influence of Khaleda Zia, Bangladesh’s first woman prime minister. Zia, along with archrival Sheikh Hasina, defined the country’s politics for a generation.

3) “Inside ‘The Great Shumsuddin Family”: Anusha Rizvi in Conversation|Speak Easy-Episode 4″

In the fourth episode of SpeakEasy, senior journalist Amit Baruah is in conversation with filmmaker Anusha Rizvi, on her latest film “The Great Shamsuddin Family” and the questions it raises about fear, belonging, and everyday life in contemporary India. Rizvi discusses how the film unfolds over the course of a single day, capturing the quiet anxieties of a middle-class Muslim family in Delhi. She emphasises that there is no single, uniform idea of “Muslimness” in the country, a point the film quietly makes through its characters and situations. She reflects on why the film avoids overt drama, instead foregrounding the persistent undercurrent of fear—of being misunderstood, misread, or targeted—that shapes ordinary decisions, conversations, and silences. The conversation also explores Rizvi’s approach to representation, her resistance to stereotypical portrayals of Muslim households in cinema, and her focus on women characters who navigate work, family, and crisis with agency and humour. Rizvi also speaks about how social media, surveillance, and heightened public hostility have altered the emotional landscape in which artists and citizens now operate.

The evolving understanding of varNa in Indian history

GauravL · December 30, 2025 · 41 comments

This post is triggered by some posts from XTM in the past and some discussions on the BP whatsapp group.

This is not a referenced essay but more of a summary of my evolving position on the history jAti and varNa. I am neither a history or genomics scholar and this is an essay of a reasonably well informed layperson who has gone deep in the speculative prehistory of Indian subcontinent.

The first thing to note is the difference between jAti and VarNa.

jAti is a endogamous population – maps on to English word Caste. Identity into a jAti is a lived reality for billion Indians.

varNa is a hierarchical abstraction which is presented in Vaidik texts which does and doesn’t always map neatly on to thousands of jAti groups. I would wager that varNa mattered for the Brahmanas and at times to the Kshatriyas as their jAtis map neatly on respective varNas.

This post will focus on varNa, I will cover jAti in some other post briefly.

For a bit more on jAti: Early Hinduism – the epic stratification – Brown Pundits

on varNa:

During the composition of the ṛgveda the priests and the warriors were the prime movers of the Arya society hence designated Brahmanas and Rajanyas. This bifurcation is common among a lot of society where the physical and spiritual power is owned by different elites who in a sense rule the society. These two communities were to become two Arya varNAs. The third varNa called the Vaishyas were originally the remaining people. The word Vaisya comes from Vish which means people. So all farmers, craftsman, artisans etc would come under the word Vaisya initially. This much can be asserted with certain degree of confidence.

The origin is the fourth varNa – Shudras is not as crystal clear but its safe to bet that initially the outsiders (non Arya) were called Shudras. The word is used to denote someone who doesn’t follow the proper Arya rituals at places or someone who is a defeated enemy or someone who is a labourer. So as Arya communities were forming during the early Vaidik period after the collapse of Harappan civilization, the outsiders who were defeated and assimilated were termed Shudras. This label also applied to populations outside the core Vaidik area who were kings and rulers in their own right in complex pastoral and farming societies. The cultures of Deccan and Peninsular India at this time would also fall in this bracket (precursors to speakers of Dravidian languages of today).

Aryavarta (Land of the Aryas) expanded mimetically through lavish sacrifices and tall poetic tales (later Epics). Instead of building complex structures, the Rajanya class (later Kshatriyas) from the core Indo-Gangetic region (Aryavarta), focussed their wealth on conducting extravagant sacrifices (Yajnas) like Asvamedha and Rajasuya to assert their strength. The template was set by Vaidik Rajanyas and slowly people outside the core Vaidik area began to emulate their peers. Non Arya rulers invited priests to conduct spectacular sacrifices to rival the Rajanyas. These Non Aryas were gradually assigned the Kshatriya varNa along with the original Rajanyas. I would wager that priests from non Arya cultures were assimilated into the Brahmanas. Those from outside who didn’t keep their power became the Shudras. But this designation also was by no means settled.

Every now and then we have Shudra monarchs especially in the Eastern and Southern part of the subcontinent. Its worth noting that even thought a dynasty may be of Shudra origins, they likely re-wrote their histories once they attained power. Some of these rulers claim to have conducted even grander sacrifices than the Kshatriyas 1.0 and 2.0. Conversely, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas who lost their power or wealth might have lost their varNa.

a-varNa

(Co-Pilot wouldn’t help me with a representative image as its termed offensive)

Even now a vast number of people were outside this matrix of abstract varNa and secular Kshatra. As AryaVarta continued to expand it encountered the people on the margins. The template of absorbing the elites into the elite varNas would slow down eventually. Every now and then the outsiders would not be integrated into the varNas but remain outside as a-varNas. When this became happening is debatable but its safe to assume that around the time of Manu smriti, Arya-Varta had a significant proportion of a-Varna population. Over time ritual status was assigned to the outsiders and they became the untouchables.

I think this practice evolved like slavery as suppling an eternal supply of low cost labor (especially for dirty tasks). The a-varNa need to be distinguished from the Shudras who could accumulate wealth and status. So it could be a combination of (a) tribes whose professions were deemed unclean (b) defeated people forced to do unclean professions or probably a combination of both.

Another group of people were to remain outside the Arya social system, the tribals. But it would be unfair to club the tribal communities with a-varNa. Tribal people had wide range of experience of interactions with the mainstream from domination and competition to servitude. Some tribes may have been absorbed into the a-varNa groups but that is not a generic template.

The varNa fluidity:

As Merchant guilds began becoming powerful around the times of Mahajanapadas, the Vaishya Varna began to become more associated with the Merchant class. Artisans, farmers and ordinary soldiers began to be associated with Shudra varNa. Today its quite common to associate the Vaishya varNa with traders and merchants but it wasn’t always so.

Similarly its quite possible that some a-varNa clans could lose their shackles but its fair to assume that this fluidity kept reducing in the common era. Last thousand years the varNas have not been fluid – especially for the a-varNas.

The Ossification:

I have written an entire blogpost on why the jAti-varNa matrix began to ossify and when.

Co-Pilot summary of this post:

The essay explores how early Hinduism’s caste stratification evolved through interactions between Vedic Brahmanical traditions and Sramana schools like Buddhism and Jainism. It argues that concepts of karma, rebirth, and dharma—emphasized by Sramanas—helped justify and ossify the Varna hierarchy, linking birth to karmic retribution. Over time, this moral dimension reinforced endogamy and rigid social divisions, especially during the Gupta era. The author speculates that pre-Aryan tribal endogamy combined with Vedic ritual purity and karmic philosophy created the uniquely enduring Jati-Varna system in India

The Kaliyug cope:

From the turn of the century, the subcontinent was always under attack from North West, Yavanas, Shakas, Kushanas, Hunas and final Arab and Turks. It is my belief (and also of some scholars) that the ideas of Kali-yug were a response to these invasions. A Yug when idealised Vaidik society was destroyed.

Islamic conquests of India began in the 7th century itself but it wasn’t till the 13th century that the entire subcontinent was touched by the crescent scimitar. While the concept of Kali-yug might be older than Islamic incursions into the subcontinent, I think they were imagined sufficiently during the Islamicate age. Some of the Brahamanas who survived (entire Shakhas of Vaidik learnings have been wiped out) saw Kaliyuga as the yuga where only 2 varNas exist – Brahmanas and Shudras. While some Kshatriya clans retained the memory of their ancestry during the Islamic time and reformulated as Rajputs, a lot of Kshatriyas and Vaishya lost the touch with their ancestry. While most of these groups have myths of their descent from Yadus or Ikshvakus, these claims did not get Brahmana (and Kshatriya) stamp of approval in the medieval times.

On psychological level one can understand this statement – Kali-yug contains only Brahmanas and Shudras as a coping mechanism opted under the yoke of Barbarians. Naturally wealthy landed castes who may have descended from Kshatriyas or Vaishyas were seen as Shudras. The Kadambas, Rashtrakutas, Yadavas, Chalukyas, Cholas, Gangas, Pandyas and Cheras all claimed Kshatriya descent. If this is assumed to have some merit, its not logical to assume that all the descendants of these dynasties and their power structures went extinct. Its more likely that the elites from medieval times became the wealthy landed and mercantile elites without some deviation (on the coattails of the brits).

Brits and modernity:

The Europeans began documenting varNa with the arrival of Portuguese (Casta). But the modern understanding began to truly take shape under the British rule. I will only quote the Co-pilot summary of Nicolas Dirk’s fantastic book here.

Nicholas Dirks’ Castes of Mind argues that the modern idea of caste as India’s defining social system was largely shaped by British colonial rule. While caste existed earlier, it was more fluid and intertwined with local, regional, and occupational identities. Colonial administrators, obsessed with classification, codified caste through censuses, ethnographic surveys, and legal frameworks, turning it into a rigid hierarchy. Dirks shows how this “ethnographic state” reified caste as the central lens for understanding Indian society, overshadowing other identities. The book highlights how colonial policies and scholarship created enduring structures that continue to influence politics and social life today.

In essence, varNa and social stratification is surely older than even the Roman colonisation of Britain, what we understand today as Caste is significantly shaped by the British intervention into India. The emerging economies have offered upward mobility for some while relegating others to medieval times. In many cases, artisan communities continue to see their economic status significantly degrade with mechanisation. Present Caste identities and economical realities are much more downstream of the economic exploitation and changing economy due to industrialization than abstractions like of Dharma-Shastras.

In the theatre of Indian democracy, the first-past-the-post script ensures caste takes center stage — louder, sharper, more enduring than ever before. And as present-day passions spill backward into history, they stir the ancient pot with fresh fervor, adding new tadka to a saga already simmering with spice and strife.

Post Script:

I am generally liberal with comments, but i will exercise moderation for repeated stupidity on this post.

What Genetics Can, and Cannot, Explain About Caste

X.T.M · December 29, 2025 · 11 comments

A recent WhatsApp exchange between GL and Sbarr captures a recurring Brown Pundits problem: how genetic data, textual tradition, and social history get collapsed into a single argument and then talk past one another. The immediate trigger was a table circulating online, showing ancestry proportions across South Asian groups; Indus Valley–related, Steppe, AASI, and East Asian components. The numbers vary by region and language group. None support purity. None map cleanly onto caste. That much is uncontroversial. What followed was not a dispute about the data itself, but about what kind of claims the data can bear.

GL’s Position (Summarised)

GL’s argument operates at three levels: historical, linguistic, and genetic.

Caste as fluid history

GL argues that the four-fold varna system hardened late. Terms like Vaishya did not always mean “merchant” but originally derived from viś—“the people.” In this reading, Vaishya once referred broadly to non-priestly, non-warrior populations, including farmers and artisans.
Elite religion thesis

Early Śramaṇa movements, Buddhists, Jains, Ajivikas, are framed as elite projects. Renunciation, non-violence, and philosophical inquiry required surplus. Most people, GL argues, worshipped local deities and lived outside these doctrinal systems.
Genes as complexity, not identity

GL points out that Steppe ancestry and Y-DNA lineages are unevenly distributed. Some peasant groups show higher Steppe ancestry than some Brahmin groups. Maternal lines are largely local. The conclusion is not reclassification, but complication: caste cannot be reverse-engineered from genes. GL’s underlying claim is modest: simple caste narratives do not survive contact with deep history.

Sbarr’s Position (Summarised)

Sbarr’s objections are structural and definitional.

Varna as stable social fact

In lived Hindu society, Vaishya has meant merchant since at least the Dharmashastra period. Etymology does not override usage. Peasants were not Vaishyas. Shudras worked the land. Dalits lay outside the system.
South Indian specificity

Sbarr stresses that the North Indian varna model does not transplant cleanly into the Tamil world, where Brahmins, non-Brahmin literati, Jain monks, and Buddhist authors all contributed to classical literature. Claims of universal Brahmin authorship are rejected.
Genes do not make caste

Even if some peasant or tribal groups show Steppe Y-DNA, this does not make them Brahmins or twice-born. Genetic percentages are low, overlapping, and socially meaningless without institutions.

Sbarr’s core concern is different from GL’s: the danger of dissolving concrete social history into abstract theory.

Where the Debate Breaks Down

The argument falters because the two sides are answering different questions.

GL is asking: How did these categories emerge over millennia?
Sbarr is asking: How did people actually live, identify, and reproduce hierarchy?

Genes describe populations. Texts describe ideals. Caste describes power. None substitute for the others.

The Takeaway (Without a Verdict)

The ancestry table does not refute caste. The Manusmriti does not explain population genetics. Etymology does not override social practice. What the exchange shows, usefully, is the limit of WhatsApp as a medium for longue-durée history. Complex systems resist compression. When they are forced into slogans, everyone ends up defending a position they did not fully intend. That, more than Steppe percentages or varna theory, is the real lesson here.

15 Years of Brown Pundits: A Platform, a Posture, a Proof

X.T.M · December 28, 2025 · 12 comments

On 28 December 2010, the question was not ideology or politics, but naming.

brownpundit(s). brownguru(s). brownsmarts. brownfolks. brownidiots.

The instinct was already there: reclaim brown without asking permission, and refuse the performance of respectability that so often polices minority intellectual spaces. The reply came quickly and decisively.

Brownpundits.

The first post, Hello World, went live on 30 December 2010. Fifteen years later, what matters is not that a blog survived. Many do. What matters is how it survived: without institutional backing, without funding, without ideological capture, and without deference to credentials masquerading as truth. Brown Pundits was never designed as a platform for prestige. It was designed as an intellectual retreat; a place where arguments stand or fall on substance, not accent; where brownness is neither explained nor apologised for; where disagreement is not heresy. That posture, upright, unbought, unafraid, is why Brown Pundits still exists.

A Discipline, Not a Brand

Brown Pundits began with a simple wager: that the English-language internet still had room for a South Asian intellectual space that did not need permission. No institutional sponsor. No ideology police. No professional incentives. Just writers who believed that brown questions, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, diasporic, could be argued in public with rigor and dignity. Fifteen years on, Brown Pundits remains. That endurance is not luck. It is structure. We lasted because we never built this as a brand. We built it as a discipline.

The point has never been agreement. The point has been posture: stand upright, test claims, correct errors, refuse theatre. Independent platforms fail for predictable reasons. They chase virality. They harden into faction. Or they monetize attention until thought becomes marketing. Brown Pundits avoided those traps by being unusually boring in the right ways: we publish, we argue, we edit, we keep the record. Nobody here is paid to write. That is not moral vanity. It is why we remain unpurchasable.

Five Years of Solidarity

Over the last five years, some of the most important work has not been online at all. It has been the steady, unglamorous work of civic seriousness: reading dense documents, tracking deadlines, understanding procedure, and watching institutions scramble when they assume nobody is paying attention. During this period, there has also been sustained dialogue with a small circle of intellectually serious allies; quiet, exacting minds with a gift for clarity under pressure and an instinct for how power hides behind process. Not public figures. Not brands. Just adults: difficult to gaslight, uninterested in theatrics, precise about the record.

That kind of solidarity resets the baseline. You stop mistaking polish for integrity. You stop confusing titles with truth. You learn to clock everything. You learn that the record is not drama; it is protection. That discipline carries back into Brown Pundits. It shows in how disputes are handled, how errors are named, and how authority is tested rather than absorbed.

The SD Episode as Proof

The recent SD exchange was not, in the end, about architecture. It was about authority: who is allowed to explain, who is expected to absorb, and what happens when the subject speaks back. We engaged the way Brown Pundits always has. We read closely. We identified the errors. We insisted on precision. We treated the exchange as part of the record, not as outrage content. What mattered was not that corrections were made; corrections are normal and welcome.

What mattered was the instinct that surfaced at the start: revise quietly, respond pedagogically, assume the critique will not notice the shift. That instinct is older than any one writer. It is a patterned behaviour in how authority manages challenge in brown-facing spaces. And yet, precisely because Brown Pundits exists, the record held. The language moved. The posture changed. This was not a “victory.” It was proof of concept. The platform did what it is meant to do.

“Brown” Is Not an Ethnicity; It Is a Civilizational Composite

The deeper reason Brown Pundits still matters is that brown is not a neat identity. It is not a single bloodline, doctrine, or grievance. It is a civilizational composite with a long memory and a hard geography. The Indian subcontinent is layering, not essence:

ancient coastal and inland populations
Dravidian continuities and transformations
Aryan synthesis and institutionalisation
Islamicate overlays that became native in texture, not merely foreign in rule
British power, whose administrative afterlife still structures class and accent

And beyond this lie the East, the Northeast, the mountain corridors, the sea routes. This is why Brown Pundits resists simplification. The subcontinent is not a monoculture, a single trauma, or a single pride. It cannot be narrated by those who treat it as a site for extraction; political, academic, or aesthetic.

What Fifteen Years Means

Fifteen years is long enough to know what this site is for. Not fame. Not power. Not money. Not outrage. Those are cheap forms of relevance. Brown Pundits exists to keep an alternative alive: an intellectual retreat on the open web where brown life can be examined with seriousness; where hierarchy is not mistaken for truth; where criticism is not treated as insolence; where the record matters. We are not untouchable, and we do not aim to be. But we are not easily compromised, because everyone here has a life outside the internet. That is our freedom. Fifteen years on, the mission remains unchanged:

That is why we are still here.

Sanjeev Sanyal on the generational shift in India

RecoveringNewsJunkie · December 27, 2025 · No comments

Sanjeev Sanyal is somewhat… infamous as one of the flag-bearers of the Indian Right wing. A longform interview where he talks about citation laundering, the misrepresentation of Emperor Ashok, the machinations of ranking Indian democracy and credit sovereign ratings. Its indeed quite laughable if press freedoms in Pakistan and Afghanistan end up being rated higher than India.

The recent Barabar caves kerfluffle on BP came to mind while listening to him.

So it starts ..

X.T.M · December 27, 2025 · No comments

Open Thread

Kabir · December 26, 2025 · 12 comments

1) “How Indian media sold out|The Caravan Long View Ep 5”

In this episode of The Caravan Longview, Hartosh Singh Bal and Sushant Singh provide an analysis of the structural decay within Indian journalism and how its inherent vulnerabilities have been weaponised for political gain. They argue that the “Godi Media” phenomenon was not an overnight accident, but the result of a pre-existing, fragile ecosystem being systematically re-engineered into a disciplined machinery for narrative management.

2) “Osman Hadi is becoming a Malcolm X for Bangladesh, influence multiplied after death”

Bangladesh has been on the boil since the death of a prominent student activist, Osman Hadi and a core component of it has been the anti-India sentiment. But what is driving it? It is just a student leader’s death, Sheikh Hasina’s exile to India post 2024 or more? Bangladeshi political analyst Shaquat Rabbee speaks to Debdutta Chakraborty on this and more in ThePrint #Uninterrupted

3) How Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar shatters the global myth of Buddhism as peaceful

How did a religion symbolised by its guiding tenet of non-ahimsa or non-violence see a shift where the monks ended up picking swords in pursuit of a nationalist identity across South and South East Asia? Author & journalist Sonia Faleiro discusses this and more in ThePrint #SoftCover, where she discusses her newly released book, The Robe and the Sword with Debdutta Chakraborty

4) Aamer Rahman on “Reverse Racism”

Musings on & Answers to “The Partition of Elites: India, Pakistan, and the Unfinished Trauma of 1947” (Part 3)

Arkacandra Jayasimha · December 24, 2025 · 16 comments

Part 2

Continuing on, X.T.M says that “India’s post-Independence settlement created structural ambiguity” and cites four factors in particular:

Upper-caste Hindu political dominance at the center
Muslim demographic concentrations with limited elite integration
A constitutional secularism that promised equality while leaving communal structures intact
No acknowledgment that the Muslim League’s victory posed a legitimacy problem

I think his key insight is this: “The constitution guaranteed rights. It could not guarantee renewed political consent.”

The issue as I see it is that the Indian state took the most half-hearted, wishy-washy approach towards the problem of integration. It allowed Muslims to construct bastions of political power while at the same time dividing Hindus along caste and linguistic lines. It allowed criminal elements, many from a Muslim background, to dominate perhaps its most significant sector — the arts — and spread messages of the innate goodness of Indian Muslims and Pakistanis (which is only being suppressed due to both governments’ actions) and the need for peace between Hindus and Muslims, thereby constructing an illusory palace to beguile secularized urban Hindus, while behind the silver screen they fund terrorist attacks in India. The murder of Gulshan Kumar comes to mind as (seemingly) among the least of these crimes, but that he was killed outside a temple is like having salt poured into the wound and mud slung at one’s face. What to speak of 26/11 which has already been talked about, especially recently.

Again, as I mentioned previously, I don’t think the overwhelming issue is that Muslims were allowed to maintain particular political fiefdoms — it’s that Hindus were stymied from establishing systems of political power based on traditional models. When talking about ‘independence’, Moldbug (2008) in chapter 2 of An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives suggests that:

“One test we can apply for independence, which should be pretty conclusive, is that the structures of government in a genuinely independent country should tend to resemble the structures that existed before it was subjugated—rather than the structures of some other country on which it may happen to be, um, dependent. These structures should be especially unlikely to resemble structures in other newly independent countries, with which it presumably has nothing in common.”

Continue reading Musings on & Answers to “The Partition of Elites: India, Pakistan, and the Unfinished Trauma of 1947” (Part 3)

Why Pakistani Liberals Remain a Colonised Intellectual Class

X.T.M · December 24, 2025 · 34 comments

The exchange (which has now been removed after mutual agreement) that just unfolded was not about architecture. It was about authority.

SD made factual errors, quietly corrected them, and apologised in private. That should have ended the matter. Instead, the loudest resistance came from Kabir: a reflex insistence that disagreement was illegitimate because the author was “credentialed,” “Oxford,” and therefore beyond challenge.

This is the residue of colonisation. Pakistanis were not only carved out of British India; they were produced by the collapse of a Muslim ruling class already broken by the British after the destruction of Mughal power. What followed was not confidence but deference. The habit of looking upward, to Western institutions, American accents, British titles, for permission to speak. That habit persists. Continue reading Why Pakistani Liberals Remain a Colonised Intellectual Class

Dhurandhar Review

Omar Ali · December 22, 2025 · 13 comments

I finally saw the movie in a theater in central California (almost houseful) and here are my thoughts:

4 out of 5 stars.

Genre: Inglorious Basterds. This is a revenge fantasy. The Indian state did not (publicly) take revenge for the Kandahar Hijack, the parliament attack or the Mumbai attack. This bothers “Nationalist Indians” and one of them decided to make a fantasy movie about revenge being taken.. And he did a good job.

Storyline: Fantasy about an Indian super-agent sent to infiltrate Pakistani terrorist networks, ends up in Lyari in the most notorious criminal gangs in Pakistan, who turn out to be tangentially involved in Pakistani-sponsored terrorism (none of this has any connection with reality). Mumbai attacks make an appearance and that is the part of the movie that is closest to reality; the attackers did train in Karachi, the attacks really happened and they really did get massacre instructions over the internet during their “mission”. Whether Khanani was involved or not, I have no clue, but someone like him probably was involved in the overall jihad efforts, so those parts are not just fantasy. The role assigned to the Lyari gangs is pure fantasy though.

The rest is of course ALL fantasy. But as a movie, it works very well, as long as you keep in mind that this is a revenge fantasy on the lines of Inglorious Basterds, not some kind of historical movie or documentary. The love angle is the silliest part of the story, but it IS a fantasy and it’s a bollywood movie, so hardly unexpected.

The movie itself works very well as a movie. The stars all deliver good performances, and Akshay Khanna definitely steals the show. His portrayal of Rahman Dakait will live long and prosper. And Akshay is now a legit superstar in Lyari (you can check out reels from there to confirm this) and will be mobbed and much loved if he shows up there. Sanjay Dutt as SP Choudhry Aslam is outstanding and Ranveer does a good job as the hero.

The music is simply outstanding. The background score worked VERY well in the theater (so see with good speakers if you can) and the songs are all excellent and fit in well with the movie.

It is very much an anti-Pakistan movie, so I dont think patriotic Pakistanis will enjoy it too much, but if you are a normal working class Pakistani you can enjoy it and if you are from Lyari you will likely watch it again. With direct attacks on Pakistan as the world center of terrorism and thinly disguised portrayals of Asif Zardari and Nabil Gabol, it is absolutely no surprise that this was banned in UAE as well. In fact, ISPR will surely make a revenge fantasy of their own now (it will be mostly AI slop, but some actors will get such over the top dialogs that they will be entertaining, and some music may be good, that is my prediction about the revenge movie, and I am very sure it will get funded, but it will not match Bollywood in tech or production; my confidence that it WILL be made comes from the simple fact that the Pakistani deep state is VERY obsessed with making sure we always have a tit for every tat.. in this we are somewhat different from India, but closer to the world average).

Why did Dhar mix Lyari up in this story? And was that a good idea? I think he mixed in lyari because Lyari gang wars are fantastic movie material and even if there was no real connection with the anti-Indian terrorism, for a movie it was a good element to fit into the story. Those gangsters mostly did die horrible deaths in real life and this too fits in well with the fantasy story, but it is worth keeping in mind that this connection is almost certainly fictional (if anything, some of them were working for foreign agencies, for example Uzair Baloch was formally accused of working with Iranian intelligence).

I will make a prediction about Dhurandhar part 2. I think they will get many or most of the figures shown in this movie to be killed in the next one as revenge by “unknown gunmen”, though in real life the unknown gunmen have not struck down any of the big fish till now.

That this revenge fantasy got a LOT Of pushback from Indian reviewers and critics (on the basis that it shows Pakistan too negatively and is too jingoistic) is a tribute to the naivete and innocence of the reviewers and the ecosystem they live in. We Pakistanis had no idea we have so many friends in India 🙂

Overall: well worth a watch. Three hours do fly past. It is very well made and most people will find it enjoyable, but patriotic Pakistanis may want to avoid it if such things raise their BP.

These are a couple of videos about the reality of the Lyari gangs and how this movie is playing there.