Before Dhurandhar and Uri, Aditya Dhar’s National Award-winning film Boond gave a peek into his raging revenge streak

The 26-minute short starts with a man from the minority getting shot by a privileged kid. Lallan (Rajesh Bagotra), a mute guy, desperately claws his way into a rickety, makeshift framework protecting something precious in the middle of nowhere. A gun enters the frame, taking its aim at the parched intruder. A shot is fired, its sound made more deafening by the emptiness of a scorched desert.

Jeevni (Tillotama Shome), a widow dressed in all-black, walks out of a shack and smacks her son Manka (Hiren Maru) for boasting about how he’s keeping intruders at bay. “Why did you have to shoot? You could’ve just shooed him away,” she chides him. “Had I not shot him, he’d have come back to f*ck my happiness the next morning. If he shows up again, I’d shove this gun up his ass,” shoots back her roughly 10-year-old son. That’s when he gets smacked, only for him to return the favour with a death stare to his mother.

This brash entitlement and violent streak are like a dark cloud cast over both of Dhar’s films. These aren’t qualities being brandished by the protagonists, who are rather quiet executioners with only occasional outbursts, but the overall mood of the film. If there’s Paresh Rawal’s National Security Advisor Govind Bhardwaj in Uri, there’s R Madhavan’s Intelligence Bureau chief Ajay Sanyal in Dhurandhar, channeling the nation’s might. They’re just personifications, it’s the new India aka Naya Bharat who’s as merciless and provocative as Manka in Boond.

The village Thakur (Shubhrajyoti Barat) calls for a panchayat to seek justice for Lallan, alleging that Manka launched targeted a voiceless man. That’s when the mother, Jeevni, objects and reminds him of how he publicly shot down her husband in a failed quest to take over the village well. She adds that she’s raised a warrior in Manka who’d protect her from the threats that took his father’s life. She’s the motherland raising a new Bharat so that he doesn’t die the same death as his weaker old man.

As it turns out, Thakur and his men gang up on Jeevni when Manka is away taking a dump. They blame her for the drought in the village, for hoarding all the water with herself, which is in fact her inheritance. She convinces her little son to admit defeat and surrender the well, but not before they empty it out into vessels which they carry along on their way out of the village. Call it a surgical strike, but sans any bloodshed. Once the Thakur realizes he’s been robbed, it’s his own people — the villagers — who mob him to death and dump him into the very same well.

If you hear close enough, Sukhwinder Singh’s rustic drone music is almost whispering into your ears, “Nazar aur sabr” or “hosla eendhan badla“, weapons of the Aditya Dhar arsenal. It’s fascinating to see how a hapless widow figure trumps her clan leader without raising either her hand or her voice, and while asking her violent son to hold his horses. But being a Kashmiri Pandit, Dhar knows displacement from one’s own land is never the panacea that it may initially seem to be.

“Far away when the sun rises, there’s always water to be found.” Swearing by these words of hope uttered by his mother, Manka and Jeevni set out on an endless journey to find a new home, a new land next to water. He’s not convinced by her argument, and insists on killing the Thakur. But his mother gets him to evade war and find peace elsewhere. The road to that peace, that abundant source of water, is arduous, infinite, and charred with despondency.

Was killing the easier option than the road taken? The thought must have crossed Manka’s mind as he throws himself ahead step by step into the unforgiving ravine-like maze. It’s after they somehow trek an uphill climb that they finally sense that first gust of humidity against their chapped lips. A still water body against a rising sun invites them like an oasis of peace in a war-torn land. As they dip their toes with more abandon than caution, a gun enters the frame yet again. This time, Manka is on the receiving end. He’s not the protector of peace, but its intruder. He’s not the rightful owner of that water, but its doomed usurper.

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That striking climax reassures us that Dhar knows the nature of war — it’s cyclic and pervasive. One’s indulgence would come back to bite one sooner or later. But does that also imply war is futile? While his short acknowledged that war begets war, his feature films celebrate the same. If his later filmography is anything to go by, Dhar is a subscriber to war, to conflict, to revenge. The acknowledgement of its recurrence isn’t daunting enough for him to put an end to it at once, at least on screen. In fact, it’s a tempting invitation to make one’s presence felt in history, irrespective of which side — right or wrong — you’re on. Unlike how it’s for the US, war is not even projected as a clarion call for peace. For Dhar, peace is only a means to the ceaseless end that’s war.