Sikh identity – Brown Pundits

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

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