We watched Dhurandhar last night at Apple Cinemas (the last time we went to see Ishaan Khatter’s Homebound). It is the best mass-market Bollywood film I’ve seen since Animal, and far more immersive. What struck me most was not the action, nor the plot, but Bollywood’s new formula: a full-scale fetishisation of Pakistan.
Kabir keeps claiming that Bollywood casts Pakistanis as villains. This misses the point. The villain is always the sexiest figure in any film. Bollywood has finally realised this. Raazi hinted at it. Animal stumbled on it with Bobby Deol’s star stealing turn. Dhurandhar perfects it.
For the first time, Hindu actors are not performing cartoon versions of Pakistan. They are cosplaying Pakistanis with forensic precision; the clothes, the diction, the swagger, the social codes. In earlier decades the attempt was clumsy. Now the calibration is exact. Pakistan, in these films, becomes the Wild West of the subcontinent: familiar enough to feel intimate, distant enough to feel dangerous.
The logic is simple. India’s ascent turns Pakistan into its shadow: recognisable, intimate, and yet visibly unsteady. The language is the same, the gestures familiar, but the world feels misaligned. Desire lives in that slippage. Afghanistan is too foreign, Iran too remote. Only Pakistan combines proximity with decay and decadence.
Dhurandhar leans into that space. Ranbir Kapoor is very good; Akshaye Khanna is extraordinary. His Baloch arrival scene, scored with a track styled for the Gulf, has already gone viral. This is no accident. After Animal made a Persian song an anthem, Bollywood has learned that Pakistan is a portal through which it can sample the entire Middle East: rhythm, costume, masculinity, and myth.
The film also treats 26/11 with the requisite respect but still reserves a lot of respect for its villains. It understands that the India–Pakistan conflict is no longer a question of borders but of psychology. The two male Hindu juggernauts (Ranbir versus Ranvir) are both children of Partition, playing out an argument their grandparents never resolved. What Bollywood has built, deliberately or not, is a new aesthetic: Pakistan as the subcontinent’s most glamorous disaster.
Dangerous, broken, desirable, and always in reach. It is a remarkable shift. India may be producing patriotic cinema, but the country that now occupies its erotic imagination is the one it claims to oppose.
Not sure I’d characterize this as glamourizing the “evil Pakistanis”. That was the modus operandi of Bollywood’s other mainstream spy films – primarily by YRF that lived in their own delusional reality where RAW and ISI agents come together in sexy locales to save India and peace between the neighbors by taking down the villain (hitherto an Indian agent or Army officer gone rogue). That genre has outlived its usefulness not least because it is so far from the truth but also because mass access to internet is bringing about a mass awareness (riddled with misinfo, obviously) about India’s relationship with Pakistan. The non-mainstream view had so far been represented by puerile rubbish from the likes of Vivek Agnihotri who actually did a disservice to the Hindus who’ve suffered at the hands of Islamist violence in India. Even the average Indian is too smart to pay for that. This new found slick aesthetic is precisely what has the incumbents in Bollywood rattled. That, and of course, the existential threat movies like Dhurandhar pose to the “YRF Spy Universe”.
on a side note, this movie is directed by a kashmiri pandit.
kashmiri pandits who were famous as back room boys in power politics of yester years have come back in media big time.
one can imagine their power in their heydays!!
https://nonsensicalnemo.substack.com/p/why-critics-werent-ready-for-dhurandhar
“Ranveer Singh’s Dhuranadar Reportedly Faces Middle East Ban over ‘Anti-Pakistan Messaging'”
https://images.dawn.com/news/1194568/ranveer-singhs-dhurandhar-reportedly-faces-middle-east-ban-over-anti-pakistan-messaging
Also, the filmmakers are apparently getting sued in a Karachi court for defaming the PPP.
how is that going to be enforced?
https://images.dawn.com/news/1194573/application-filed-against-indian-film-dhurandhar-in-karachi-court-for-defaming-ppp
Yes but how are they going to enforce?
Just more Pakistani impotence.
Pakistan’s movie industry is smaller than many Indian states.
“How India became Hindutva”
By Rafia Zakaria
https://www.dawn.com/news/1960820/how-india-became-hindutva
Is it a bad thing that India is asserting her atavistic Hindu self
If you believe in an India of all its citizens then the answer is yes.
“The Inheritance of Violence: From Mother India to Dhurandhar”
By Dr. Arun Patel
https://margininmotion.substack.com/p/the-inheritance-of-violence-from?
I don’t know about this.. it’s such a complex story
There is a …lag in the OTT woko haraam style hit-pieces being churned out in ‘progressive left-leaning’ media – one that hasn’t kept up with the shifting overton window.
Just like we are starting to question how the Olympics ever allowed men to compete in boxing against women, and the DEI overreach in the US ever reached its peak (nadir) , a few years down the road such shrill cacophony will die out as the incentives shift.