Dhurandhar: A Bollywood thriller gives India a win that eluded it on the battlefield

Just when you think you’ve seen it all, in walks the one who wears a heavy weight or burden, aka Dhurandhar.

The new Hindi blockbuster from director Aditya Dhar is everything you’d want a spy thriller to be: swashbuckling action, intrigue, heart-pounding music, bloodshed, betrayal, and hypersexualised primitive Muslims from Pakistan.

Yes, you read that right. Another Bollywood film festooned with caricatures about its Muslim neighbour.

And it most certainly disappoints. It is terrifying.

The story – if you can call it that – follows the mission of Indian spy Jaskirat Singh Rangi (Ranveer Singh), sent by Indian intelligence chief Ajay Sanyal (meant to be India’s National Security Advisor Ajay Doval; played by R Madhavan) in the early 2000s to infiltrate Pakistan’s underworld.

The goal?

To dismantle the country’s sprawling terror network from within, following the hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight in 1999 and the attack on parliament in 2001, both of which were blamed on Pakistan-based armed groups. The logic, as per Sanyal: the time for talking peace is over. India has to show strength. “To land a punch, one must first make a fist,” Sanyal says in the film.

Jaskirat enters Pakistan through Afghanistan, takes on the moniker Hamza Ali Mazari, and settles in the wild west of Lyari, an overpopulated working-class neighbourhood in Karachi, said to be the powder keg of the city and the country.   

At the time, Lyari was overrun by gangs, extortion rackets, and gun violence, and it is not long before the locality is depicted as a dystopia from hell.

On his first night, Hamza is made to fight off rapists before finding a job at a juice stall the next morning.

Hamza successfully infiltrates Rehman Dakait’s (Akshaye Khanna) gang and rises quickly within the leadership after Rehman’s father, Babu Dakait – also a rival gang leader – orders the murder of Rehman’s son. Hamza’s heroics impress Rehman (though he loses his son), and Hamza becomes close to the Baloch leader.

Rehman – a class act himself, having killed his mother for something or another years prior – has ties with the ISI, Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, and Hamza seeks to derail that relationship for India’s sake.

Lyari, then, becomes a metaphor for Pakistan – deranged and wild, where lives are not valued and where families routinely sell out one another and their own cause (Rehman, of Baloch descent, sells out the Baloch people too) over mere scraps.

It is here in Lyari where Hamza must incubate to halt future attacks back in India. And it’s precisely here that the wheels fall off.

Revenge fantasy 

The film’s skewed grip on reality is a masterclass in manipulation. 

Lyari is a strange backdrop for a film that is supposed to expose what Sanyal calls the “core of terrorism” in Pakistan, given that this neighbourhood has never played a part in Pakistan’s so-called proxy wars in the region.

Lyari’s primary claim to fame in modern-day politics is that the Bhutto political dynasty of Pakistan used the neighbourhood as its base in Karachi, but its main pull over politics has always been in urban turf wars over local power.

The film bizarrely flips the real political equation in Pakistan on its head by supposing that politics and power in Pakistan are controlled through Lyari’s gangsters, whereas in reality Lyari’s underworld is often used as pawns by the city and province’s ruling elite.

It’s unclear why RAW, India’s intelligence agency, would send its spy to Sindh to infiltrate the underground that had little bearing on Pakistan’s foreign policy.

Even so, the film’s self-belief as a work of authentic historical fiction continues; it draws on documentary footage and intercepted audio recordings between attackers and their handlers in Pakistan, while interspersing this material with fictional dialogue and sequences depicting the Mumbai attacks of 2008, which killed 166 people, including several Israelis, in a further distortion of both Lyari and Pakistan. 

“Don’t spare any Jews or foreigners in the rooms. They are all infidels,” one of the fictitious handlers says in the film. 

At one point, the film throws up a red screen with white text while playing real audio recordings between the attackers and hostages in Mumbai.

It becomes impossible to distinguish between what actually happened and the version that authorities or spy agencies want to tell to an Indian audience. The film itself becomes the vehicle for that story.

But for those more attuned to Bollywood’s excesses, the film struggles under the weight of its own ambition – part espionage action thriller, part stylised music video, part documentary, and part video game.

Broken into chapters or small interlinked stories, the film appears to be the ungainly offspring of films one might associate with Quentin Tarantino, recalling Inglourious Basterds, in which European Jews were given a stylised revenge fantasy against Nazis during the Second World War.

Whereas Tarantino used the “Basterds” – a fictitious black-ops commando unit created to murder and humiliate Nazis – Dhar offers, in Dhurandhar, a terminator.

Here, Indian Hindus, too, are given a revenge fantasy they have so craved in asserting power and moral supremacy over Muslim Pakistan.

But whereas Tarantino’s fantasy of revenge was shaped by the Holocaust (and most certainly Zionist world-making ever since), Dhurander is shaped by Hindu nationalists’ delusion of having been historically wronged, genocided and besieged. 

This much is clear.

At the beginning of the film, a hijacker tells Ajay Sanyal, “You Hindus are so cowardly”- a sentiment Sanyal takes to heart as he envisages a more muscular security policy for India, and dreams of a government that would give men of his ilk the space to carry out their plans. 

In between, when the ISI’s Major Iqbal (Arjun Ramphal) organises weapons from Rehman (bought from Balochistan rebels) to carry out the 26/11 attack on Mumbai in 2008, the Pakistanis rationalise using foreign arms that would make an international investigation null and void. 

Though nonsensical – given the flood of arms in Pakistan over several decades – the assertions aren’t incidental. After the attack in Indian-controlled Kashmir in May 2025, which India blamed on Pakistan, Delhi refused to endorse Islamabad’s call for an international investigation. 

India opted to attack Pakistan instead, using Israeli drones and several fighter jets – several of which were eventually shot down by Pakistani fighter pilots. 

Dhurandhar, then, is the blueprint of Narendra Modi’s vision for the state, and part of a belief that New Delhi is entitled to act unilaterally and without constraint. In this way, the film does both the work of deepening disinformation and further the dehumanisation of Pakistanis towards manufacturing consent. 

And if all these assertions are not clear enough to an Indian audience accustomed to having plots explained multiple times, the film leaves nothing to chance. As the credits roll, Ranveer Singh stares at the camera – the audience – and explains what they have watched and what is to be expected.

“This is the new India. We barge into your house, and we terminate you.”

Imperial delusions 

Now, to be completely fair: as far as visual feasts go, Dhurandhar is quite a treat, but there is a missed visual opportunity. 

Lyari is one of the most unique and vibrant neighbourhoods in Pakistan, where cricket is replaced by football or boxing, and its colourful labyrinthine streets – often dotted with Brazilian and Argentine flags or murals of legendary footballers – have been supplanted by a bland sepia throughout the film.

At over three and a half hours, the film feels bloated, even if it is visually striking – if expansive, sepia-tinted imperial delusions are your thing.

Geopolitics are also part of the tale, with the Pakistani military’s serial abuses in Balochistan raised time and again.

But the film has nothing substantive to say about this either.

For India, Balochistan and Balochis are little more than a prop for Dhurandhar to end Pakistan’s export of terror to its territory.

As is predictably the case with all such films, Dhurandhar relies heavily on crude tropes about Pakistan and Muslims, revealing an obsession with Muslim masculinity, violence and sexuality.

While accuracy was never likely to be the film’s raison d’être, Dhurandhar is ultimately pure fantasy about Pakistan.

The film purports to be about Pakistan’s underworld and the alleged ties between it, the ISI, and the Pakistani military. In reality, it is about India’s desire to be seen as righteous, strong, and brave. To do so, it must depict an enemy so vile and cruel that it can both manufacture consent for its actions and continue imagining itself as occupying the moral high ground.

And perhaps this is why it has gone on to become such a hit in India, and among sections of the Indian diaspora in Canada and the United States, where cinemas are reportedly packed with Hindu nationalist uncles and aunties eager to watch Ranveer Singh beat up some very bad Pakistanis.

For the rest of us, the film is yet another dress rehearsal of what is expected to come.