Tag: Bollywood

Footnotes|Bollywood, Hindu Nationalism & the Erasure of Muslims in India (Kabir’s Open Thread)

Kabir · May 11, 2026 · No comments

When does cinema stop being entertainment and become propaganda? Hindi film has long romanticised the nation, but what’s happening now is something else entirely. In the latest Himal Footnotes, associate editor Nayantara Narayanan sits down with film critic Anna MM Vetticad and journalist Raza Rumi to talk about how Bollywood has become a vehicle for Hindutva ideology by manufacturing mythic pasts, normalising anti-Muslim violence and lending cinematic glamour to the BJP’s political project. Using the Dhurandhar franchise as a case study, they ask harder questions about the industry: How does propaganda disguise itself as entertainment? What happens when the line between fiction and political fact-making is deliberately blurred? And what has been lost from the Hindi cinema that once held space for a more plural, secular India?

Disclosure: I know Raza Rumi and have worked with him when he was at “The Friday Times”. I was mostly doing editorial work during what was essentially a summer internship.  He has written a book about his experiences traveling in Delhi (where I believe his family was from).  The book is called Delhi By Heart: Impressions of a Pakistani Traveller.

I will add more interesting links to this thread later.

 

 

 

India and Pakistan Are Playing Chicken; simply to hurt themselves

X.T.M · April 27, 2026 · 96 comments

Two comments are worth picking up on, and one claim worth interrogating.

N disagrees that contact ameliorates ties. EK suggests the only Islamicate voices the Indian RW respects are those who have “debased their own civilizational integrity.” We do not know who he is shadow-tweeting. It could be us, the Founders of this blog, who are Islamicate by heritage and recognisably friendly to Hindu right-wing readings. Either way, the framing is off. And then there is Q, on the thread as we write, claiming Pakistanis “will eventually take over the Islamicate world.“

The cost of distance

The dominant idea of the last decade is that less contact means more security. Fewer visas. Less trade. No cricket. No artistic exchange. Reduced diplomatic warmth. This is sold as realism. It is, in large part, self-harm.

Distance does not produce clarity. It produces mythology. When people stop meeting one another, they begin imagining one another. The imagined neighbour is always simpler, darker, and easier to hate than the real one.

He is also, as Dhurandhar showed, sexier. Hatred and desire run on the same current. The more villainous the Pakistani on screen, the more the Indian audience leans in.

Civility is built by proximity. Not sainthood. Habituation. When people share space, study, trade, marriage, and culture, the room for fantasy narrows. One can still dislike the other side. But one dislikes actual people, not cartoons.

N’s response to this is that contact theory is “akin to blaming a victim for not engaging with the perpetrator.” That feels like the Israeli security story applied to the Indian Sub-continent. It assumes Pakistanis are a permanent terror-source requiring permanent counter-violence.

Pakistan obliges the narrative by behaving badly enough often enough to keep it alive. India obliges the frame by treating every bad actor as the median Pakistani. Both governments are now invested in the loop.

Pakistanis no longer defend hybrid Islamicate culture Continue reading India and Pakistan Are Playing Chicken; simply to hurt themselves

Brown Pundits: Traffic Report, March 2026

X.T.M · April 13, 2026 · 2 comments

The Dhurandhar effect

Omar Ali’s Dhurandhar review is our highest-traffic page by a distance followed by BB’s Kohrra season 2 review. It ranks 20th on a keyword with 87,000 monthly searches in India alone. A single film review, by one writer, on one streaming title, is pulling 37% of our traffic. Continue reading Brown Pundits: Traffic Report, March 2026

The Game We Can Smell

X.T.M · April 13, 2026 · 137 comments

Asha Bhosle Deserved the Lead

Asha Bhosle passed away this week.

She was one of the most recorded artists in human history. She worked with Ustad Ali Akbar Khan on Hindustani classical music late in her career. She was, by any measure, a civilisational figure. She deserved the lead.

The Disguise

The language of the liberal left has become the preferred disguise for Hinduphobia and Indophobia. This is not a new observation, but it bears repeating because it keeps working. You dress the hostility in the vocabulary of literacy rates, developmental failure, civilisational backwardness. It sounds like concern. It is not concern. If it were concern, one would ask the same questions about Pakistan. One would not, because the point was never the question. The point was the target.

The Playbook

This is what a significant segment of Muslim liberal discourse does. It has learned the language. The vocabulary is progressive. The instinct beneath it is not. It hides deeply illiberal commitments behind the cover of global left credentials. The irony is that this playbook, run long enough, galvanises exactly the forces it claims to oppose. Jews, Hindus, and other minorities watch institutional Islam operate under liberal cover and draw their own conclusions. They are not wrong to do so.

The Mughal Test

In the discourse of the Western, Muslim & Indian liberal left, a Hindu is only a good human being if they love the Mughals, especially Aurangzeb. Not merely acknowledge them, love them. Never mind that the Mughal period was, for large parts of the subcontinent, a period of genuine civilisational injury. You are not permitted to say that. You are not permitted to have a complex relationship with your own history. You must perform gratitude or be dismissed as a chauvinist.

We say this as people who have integrated Zoroastrian and Islamic history into our own civilisational understanding, not because we were required to, but because our tradition demands synthesis. That is our path. It is not everyone’s path, and Hindus are not obligated to take it. Partition, on QeA & Allama Iqbal’s insistence, largely ended the experiment in synthesised civilisation on the subcontinent anyway. That wound is real and it is not healed by demanding that Hindus perform affection for the dynasty that inflicted much of it.

What Is Changing

Hindus before were easy-going. The hardcore commitment to civilisational identity belonged elsewhere. That is changing, and the people somewhat responsible for that change are the ones who spent two decades weaponising liberal language against a civilisation that mostly wanted to be left alone.

We can smell the game.

We do not like it.

Ranbir as Lord Ram: The Indus Paradox

X.T.M · April 4, 2026 · 19 comments

The riveting Ramayana teaser dropped today, and Ranbir Kapoor looks the part. Imperial, restrained, emotionally loaded. But the casting raises a question Bollywood won’t ask aloud.

The male axis of Hindi cinema runs through the Indus, not the Gangetic plain. The Khans, Aamir (Afghan UP-origin), Salman (Hindu, Pathan), Shah Rukh (Delhi, Hindko-Deccani stock), are Musulman. Their anointed successors, Ranbir (Kapoor lineage from Peshawar) and Ranveer (Bhavnani, Sindhi), are Hindu but Indus-blooded all the same (Hindus of the Indus are 99.9% genetically identical to Pakistanis apparently). The geography of stardom in Bollywood is the geography of Partition.

A Kashmiri nationalist once told me, Srinagar-bred, Ivy-educated, who sang Pakistani ghazals with more feeling than most Lahoris, that Ranbir and Ranveer were being aggressively promoted to eclipse the Khans.

Of course the connective tissue of the Ranbir-Ranveer rivalry is Sonam Kapoor. She is third cousin to Ranbir through the Punjabi mafia, and second cousin to Ranveer through their Sindhi mothers. The Sindhi presence in Bollywood runs deeper than most realise; Karan Johar, Kareena Kapoor, Kiara Advani all carry it. The two men being positioned as Bollywood’s future are bound into a single pre-Partition Hindu kinship network. The contestation isn’t just cultural. It’s familial.

The man cast as Maryada Purushottam, the ideal Hindu man, the conscience-keeper of a civilisation, descends from Prithviraj Kapoor of Peshawar; a Hindu Pathan (his kinsman Anil Kapoor states on record that he is the son and grandson of a Pathan). Bollywood’s Ram comes from the other side of the Wagah.

Ranbir versus Ranveer is the wrong frame. The real question is what it means that Hindu epic cinema, ₹4,000 crore, Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman, DNEG VFX, global IMAX release, chose a Kapoor. The answer is that Bollywood has always understood something the BJP perhaps never quite has: the cultural power of the Subcontinent flows from its Mleccha western rivers, not its sacred eastern ones.

Continue reading Ranbir as Lord Ram: The Indus Paradox

Dhurandhar, Politics of Bollywood & India Pakistan

GauravL · March 30, 2026 · 43 comments

I had avoided the Dhurandhar hype for the last four months. I finally watched the first movie on Netflix and then read XTM’s review and watched the 2nd part in theatre. I profoundly disagreed with it—especially the line:

“By routing this grief through an anti-Pakistan narrative, the film asks Hamza to deny his Sikhness in order to become fully Indian, and frames that erasure as redemption.”

I’m not writing a formal review of the movie, but I will try to respond to a few generic questions raised on this forum and across social media regarding Dhurandhar.

Is the villain missing?

I agree with XTM that a central villain is missing in Part 1, but perhaps we should see Dhurandhar as a 7‑hour film split into two parts, rather than a standalone first installment.

Part 1 vs Part 2

Personally, I felt Part 1 was more tightly written and better dramatized. While some reviewers saw the love story as a needless distraction, I viewed it as a way to explore Hamza’s humanity despite his profession.

Is Dhurandhar Anti‑Islam?

On the contrary, I felt the filmmakers went out of their way to separate the issue of anti‑India terrorism from Islam—despite the fact that some terror groups do draw on fundamentalist interpretations of religion.
The villains are not portrayed as devout Muslims; they are not shown praying before missions. Rehman Dakait’s wife lighting his cigarette as a good‑luck gesture is a good example.

One could even argue that Dhurandhar focuses almost entirely on political motivations within Pakistan, while ignoring any potential religious motivations behind the Indo‑Pak conflict. I don’t know exactly how the ISI thinks, but I would wager that at least some religious motivations do exist—it cannot be purely political.

Is Dhurandhar Anti‑Pakistan?

Obviously, it is—but I disagree with XTM’s assertion that it dehumanizes Pakistani Muslims.
I didn’t enjoy the montage of political killings by “unknown gunmen”; it felt shallow. But it wasn’t the sort of random, gleeful violence we saw with Gaitonde in Sacred Games during the 1993 riots.

The film definitely leans dark, but I would still call it shades of grey, especially because of Hamza’s conversations with his wife.

I also believe that Major Iqbal’s character is humanized. He carries the burden of his father’s sins, and the mental torture he undergoes—while still maintaining a link to his wife and child—would break almost anyone. We can see why Major Iqbal becomes who he is. Ironically, this humanization also makes him a less effective villain than Rehman Dakait, as many reviewers have noted.

Is Dhurandhar pro‑Modi propaganda?

I may be wrong, but I felt the film used real politics—like demonetization—to weave its plot. Using real events increases impact, and I think that’s what the filmmakers were aiming for.

Does this mean it has no propaganda effect? Of course not. But compared to the list of A‑list Bollywood movies I’ve seen over the years, this is nothing unusual. We will probably see Hollywood films justifying the Iran war in a decade or so—that has always been the pattern.

If you pay attention, the film also touches upon how previous governments—Indira Gandhi’s as well as Manmohan Singh’s—played roles in shaping certain outcomes. It is not a “Modi or bust” narrative.
However, it would be blind to deny that the film does portray the Modi government’s actions toward Pakistan and terrorism in a positive light.

Jaskirat’s Arc

While I found certain aspects of the film underwhelming, I thoroughly enjoyed Jaskirat’s arc. Here, I completely disagree with XTM. The movie does not celebrate Jaskirat’s transformation into a killer—it shows the cost he pays at every step. It also explicitly shows how he is used by the establishment.

Jaskirat doesn’t become an intelligence operative because Pakistan “earned his hatred.” He becomes one because it was the best choice available to him. The film wants viewers to see the price soldiers pay for their “jobs.”

Also i absolutely do not understand why XTM thinks Jaskirat’s Sikhness is erased in the movie. Rather Jaskirat choses to travel back to Pathankot as a tired  Sikh in full Pagdi not macho silky muscly Hamza. I think going beyond this straightforward narrative into the alleged drugs, land dispute, Khalistan angle while thinking erasure of Sikhness or History is something i absolutely do not get.

 

On Hatred Being ‘Installed’

XTM claims:

“The hatred is not earned. It is installed.”

I disagree. You do see Hamza’s transformation through Lyari’s horrific violence, the betrayal of the Baloch by Rehman, and 26/11. You can see a monster being born in Lyari, but even then he retains his humanity—which becomes evident again when he reacts to killing his friend.

The movie does not end with a “happily ever after” for either Hamza or Jaskirat. It wants you to examine that, not ignore it.

My Take

I enjoyed both movies. Like XTM and many others, I agree that Part 2 has more flaws while Part 1 is far more seamless. Still, Jaskirat Singh Rangi’s arc in Part 2 is the highlight of the entire seven hours.

On India–Pakistan

Contrary to what social media suggests, India as a whole has moved on from Pakistan. You can see this from the declining obsession with India–Pakistan cricket matches compared to the 1990s and 2000s.

Yet, a significant number of Indians derive a kind of sadistic pleasure from Pakistan’s struggles. You see this reflected in reactions to news, such as Pakistan mediating in the Iran crisis—where both the Hindu right wing and the opposition twist the narrative for political ends.

If you once hated your neighbour in the slum you grew up in, would you still mock his poverty after moving into a middle‑class apartment? Or should you aspire to grow on your own terms?

This attitude towards Pakistan is self‑defeating. I honestly pity it.
My message to fellow Indians: Grow up and move on. Look East.

What if Pakistan successfully mediates in the Iran crisis? What if Pakistan continues to punch above its weight diplomatically?

If their mediation helps solve an energy crisis—unlikely, but possible—shouldn’t I, as an energy‑deficient Indian, be happy? If Pakistan’s rise ever poses a genuine risk to India, I will worry about it then. Until that point, I prefer to leave it to the agencies and the government. If Pakistan becomes richer and doesn’t support terrorism against India why would that be a bad thing ? I am not being naive but i think there is a marginal chance of Ind- Bangladesh level relations with Pakistan in 20 years if not 10. Inshallah

On Dhurandhar, Decorum, and Where BP Draws the Line

X.T.M · March 29, 2026 · 126 comments

The review of Dhurandhar 2 has now been posted. Read it if you haven’t. The comment thread on the Ikkis post, which ran in parallel, illustrated the review’s central argument more vividly than any film still could.

A film that educates audiences to hate will eventually produce hateful audiences.

We have been moderating this site long enough to know that comment threads are a pressure gauge, not a debating society. What happened over the last 48 hours was not debate. It was escalation; predictable, cyclical, and ultimately ending where it always ends when people get sufficiently worked up: in the language of violence.

BB was on a Dhurandhar high. We understand this. There is something in the film’s rhythm, the josh of it, as he put it himself, that makes a certain kind of Punjabi Muslim-hating Bollywood patriot feel ten feet tall. We are not without understanding. He had just watched a four-hour film designed specifically to produce this effect. But understanding the cause does not excuse the consequence.

The line was crossed when he repeated, almost verbatim, dialogue from the film, the “ghar mein ghusega bhi, marega bhi” register, and directed it as a personal threat at Kair. Saying one will infiltrate Pakistan and hold a gun to someone’s head to make them chant a slogan is not josh. It is a threat. That it is practically unenforceable is beside the point. The language normalises exactly what we argued Dhurandhar 2 normalises: the idea that the other must be humiliated into submission, not merely defeated.

BB’s commentating rights are suspended until Thursday, 2nd April. Every comment he attempts in that period will be deleted. When the suspension ends, reinstatement of authorship will depend on whether the Saffroniate faction of our commentariat, can reason with him collectively that certain red lines exist even in the heat of subcontinental rivalry. Those lines are not about Pakistan. They are about the difference between argument and menace.

Kabir and Sbarrkum retain their authorship. Kabir was asked to stop and did not, and we say so plainly. But nothing in his conduct approached the violent register BB eventually reached. We are also honest about the asymmetry here: Brown Pundits tilts toward Bharat, that is India; everyone who reads this site regularly knows this. That soft tilt means Kabir, Sbarrkum and Qureshi operate in a forum that is structurally not neutral. The least we owe them is consistent application of the rules.

We want to say something about the Punjabi dimension behind all of this, because it is analytically interesting and not merely polemical.

Continue reading On Dhurandhar, Decorum, and Where BP Draws the Line

Dhurandhar 2: When the Villain Disappears, So Does the Film

X.T.M · March 29, 2026 · 7 comments

We wrote in December that Dhurandhar perfected Bollywood’s new formula: the fetishisation of Pakistan as the subcontinent’s most glamorous disaster. Dangerous, broken, desirable, and always in reach. Three months later, the world has changed more than the franchise has. Iran has seized the Strait of Hormuz. Pakistan is psychologically vacating South Asia. And Dhurandhar 2 arrives as a cinematic relic of a paradigm already dissolving.

It is not good.

The first film worked because the villain was the gravitational centre. Akshaye Khanna’s Rehman Dakait, Baloch, charismatic, smouldering, made Ranveer Singh’s Hamza credible by giving him something worth the deception. A spy story lives or dies by its antagonist. Remove the antagonist, and you don’t get a hero. You get a man punching air for four hours. That is Dhurandhar 2. Angrier, louder, emptier; and at 3 hours 55 minutes, a film that confuses scale with depth.

The structural collapse is ideological as much as narrative. Dhurandhar 1 had grey. Hamza was a man genuinely lost between two worlds; the film understood that proximity to Pakistan produces desire, not only contempt. That complexity, that slippage between intimacy and danger, was what made it aesthetically serious. Dhurandhar 2 closes that gap entirely. The Pakistani Muslim is now simply a target, and the film is at pains to multiply them faster than they can be eliminated. This is the Hydra error; the same mistake Mossad has made in Gaza. Cut off the head and ten more appear, until the only logical conclusion the audience is being nudged toward is collective punishment. You cannot make a film that glorifies this logic and then claim it is merely entertainment.

The Hindutva-Zionism convergence is now visible at the level of cinematic grammar. Both traditions have arrived at the same endpoint: the innocents cannot be separated from the combatants, therefore the innocents must go too. It is a short distance from that premise to a football scene with a severed head, which Dhurandhar 2 includes without irony. This is not complexity. This is an audience being educated to hate, and that is far more dangerous than any amount of bad plotting.

Bollywood has always used Pakistan as its erotic shadow; familiar enough to feel intimate, foreign enough to feel forbidden. That formula depended on the Pakistani figure retaining some glamour, some interiority, some capacity to make the Indian hero sweat. Dhurandhar 2 strips all of that away. What remains is a shooting gallery. The irony is that by dehumanising its villains, the film also destroys its hero. Hamza becomes less interesting the more Pakistan becomes merely a backdrop for his competence.

The music, which in the first film gave us a Persian Gulf aesthetic that became genuinely anthemic, is a significant step down. The background score intrudes rather than elevates. And Ranveer Singh, who is a serious actor, is given a character arc built almost entirely around rage; which is a waste of an instrument that can do much more.

There is a deeper geopolitical irony the filmmakers did not intend. Dhurandhar 2 is a film about Indian dominance of the AfPak axis at precisely the moment that axis is reorienting toward Iran. Pakistan is stepping into its role as a Muslim power, mediating with Tehran, psychologically decoupling from the subcontinent. The Baloch and Pashtuns are the eastern Iranians; Punjab’s future is as a lowland frontier of a broader Persianate world, not as the last redoubt of a subcontinent fixation. Dhurandhar 2 is the cinematic expression of an India that has not yet noticed.

What Dhurandhar 1 understood, and Dhurandhar 2 has forgotten, is that the most dangerous person in any room is the one you cannot stop watching. Rehman Dakait was that person. His absence is not a plot problem. It is the film’s entire problem.

The sequels that matter are the ones that deepen what came before. Dhurandhar 2 only amplifies it, and amplification without depth is just noise.

⚠️ SPOILERS BELOW – Read only if you have seen the film Continue reading Dhurandhar 2: When the Villain Disappears, So Does the Film

Ikkis: Thoughts on another Propaganda Movie

Maneesh Taneja · March 29, 2026 · 143 comments

Second Lieutenant Arun Khetarpal is an Indian Army legend. A National Defense Academy (NDA) and Indian Military Academy (IMA) alum, Khetarpal was commissioned into Indian Army’s armoured regiment, Poona Horse and won India’s highest gallantry award the Paramvir Chakra, posthumously, for his heroism in the 1971 India-Pakistan war. Sriram Raghavan’s Ikkis is an autobiographical account of Arun’s life and the Battle of Basantar. A battle where Khetarpal’s Centurion tank took on the Pakistan army’s Patton tanks and fought valiantly before he succumbed to injuries on the battlefield. The movie stars Agastya Nanda, grandson of Amitabh Bachchan, as Arun Khetarpal with Dharmendra and Jaideep Ahlawat. The former plays the role of Brigadier Madan Lal Khetarpal, Arun’s father and the latter plays the role of Brigadier Nisar of the Pakistan army.

The movie recounts the visit of Brigadier Khetarpal, in 2001, to Lahore where he is hosted by Brigadier Nisar of the Pakistan Army. The senior Khetarpal is visiting Lahore for his college reunion and to visit Sargodha from where his family had to migrate in the aftermath of India’s partition in 1947. This story track runs in parallel to the story of Arun’s days at the NDA, IMA, days leading up to the battle and the battle itself. The senior Khetarpal, now in his eighties is all dewy eyed for his roots and the younger one, who has turned 21 (Ikkis is the word for the number 21 in Hindi) is eager and keen to prove his mantle on the battlefield. The retired Brigadier is serenaded by everyone, by his hosts, his former classmates and the family that now lives in his ancestral house. The young second lieutenant is learning the brutal nature of combat and the human cost of war as he rolls on towards Basantar. The dramatic arc of the movie ends with Brigadier Nisar telling the elder Khetarpal that he was the commanding officer of the Patton that shot the lieutenant’s tank and it was his assault that proved fatal.

I am a big Sriram Raghavan fan. His Johnny Gaddar makes it to every list of top 10 Hindi movies that I have ever made. Raghavan has the knack of writing stories and characters that are unconventional for commercial Hindi cinema, his plot twists don’t disappoint and nobody uses songs from Hindi movies of the 1950s, ’60s & ’70s like Raghavan. He eschews over the top dramatics and gets his actors to deliver pitch perfect performances.

Ikkis is handicapped by the fact that it is autobiographical. Raghavan has limited scope for crafting a story that surprises. This is his attempt at making a war movie and the stories of the two Khetarpals is a prop. He wants us to see that Indians and Pakistanis are the same people, there are no winners in a war, soldiers are common folk who pay with their lives for the idea of nationhood, there is common humanity that binds us all and the Pakistan army, just like the Indian army, is a professional force doing what is necessary. He uses all the tropes to make these points. Scenes of the elder Khetarpal with Brigadier Nisar’s family, his former classmates, the joyous outdoor dinner organized by the occupants of his ancestral home, the bullets ridden, lacerated bodies of soldiers and the depiction of Brigadier Nisar as an honorable gentleman who represents the best of Pakistan army. Continue reading Ikkis: Thoughts on another Propaganda Movie

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