Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar reminded me of Anurag Kashyap’s 2012 classic gangster thriller, Gangs of Wasseypur. Dhar picks up the pace, the grit, the squalor, the expletives, and the masculine overdrive of Kashyap’s two-part film. Not just that. The nostalgic interruption of old melodies is also a page out of Kashyap. Except that in Gangs, Sneha Khanwalkar produced some original subaltern music in the background score. In Dhurandhar, we have the filmmaker doing a retro rerun of peppy songs from the 1970s and ’80s against key action sequences. It works well as a combination of musical tribute and popular nostalgia.
There is also a political context that connects Dhurandhar with Gangs.
Kashyap depicted a story of the Muslim underclass in Bihar, criminalised by political and social circumstances. Capitalist nationalism played a foundational part in corrupting the social system where clan pride and economic survival worked hand-in-hand. In Dhurandhar, Dhar focuses on the underbelly in Karachi, where the labour of the Muslim underclass is exploited to produce guns and the juvenile section is recruited for religious brainwashing and cross-border terrorism. If Kashyap’s setting was the coal mine, Dhar’s is the weapons factory. Dhurandhar is Dhar’s Gangs of Pakistan.
If we grant fictional liberties, Dhurandhar maps Lyari, a dense locality within the city of Karachi, with some degree of realistic portrayal. The film is enriched by believable performances by actors like Akshaye Khanna and Rakesh Bedi. The Karachi accent and mannerisms are well improvised.
The ordinary and the criminal in Lyari live side-by-side as part of the everyday, and its crevices allow the IB to plant its informers. It is by playing a juice-shop owner and a waiter that two Indians manage to infiltrate the criminal nexus in Karachi. A restrained Ranveer Singh, as part of Operation Dhurandhar, goes undercover as Hamza Ali Mazari. As he works his way up the trust ladder, he discovers that beyond the political enmities and aspirations that separate the Balochi from the mainstream Pathan, is the army cum Intelligence playing its own macabre game. The ISI encourages fake truces between Balochi and mainstream politicians, even as it inflicts atrocities against the Balochi community using the Pakistani army. The logic behind this managerial duplicity is to keep the sham of national unity alive.
Dhurandhar gives the impression that the overriding need to “bleed” India does not come primarily from Pakistan’s politics, but from the ISI. Pakistani politicians are more involved in local rivalries and power, occasionally made to toast on a successful terror attack against India. The short-term ambition of these attacks seems to be a perverse sense of spectral achievement.
Even as a spy thriller meant for entertainment, Dhurandhar warrants introspection. Whether supported by directorial sensibility or not, the film bares the sickness of neighbourly hate by any nation that may leave the economy in tatters and damage social and intellectual progress.
The 13/12 attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001 and the 26/11 Mumbai Attack in 2008 were acts of proxy war, and attempts to destabilise India’s social fabric. The legitimate national concerns behind these shocking events can’t overlook India’s political responsibility towards its minorities. The example of Pakistan shows that a nation that does not enjoy the confidence of its minorities lives in perpetual internal conflict and bleeds itself more than it seeks to bleed others.
Dhurandhar does not vilify Muslims. The gangs of Pakistan are into the business of crime not for the sake of religion. They are clearly serving mammon, not God. The religious slogans ring hollow.Though the film’s lens casts light on the sordid side of Pakistan’s social class, there are interesting shades of grey within the script.
The Balochi gangster, Rehman Dakait, gets the audience’s sympathies for being the mercurial underdog in the story. Even if Dakait helps the rogue Major Iqbal of the ISI to procure arms to use against India, there is a poignant ring to Mazari’s betrayal of him. Mazari’s patriotic mission is meant to justify his instrumental behavior towards Dakait. Yet, the human element of betrayal trembles beneath the intrigue. The economy of trust works under the shadow of moral deception. Dakait’s vulnerability before the Pathans once Mazari betrays him has the ring of a Shakespearean tragedy. That particular section is titled, “Et Tu, Brute?”.
The other instance is Mazari’s romance with the feudal politician Jameel Jamali’s daughter, Yalina. She betrays her misogynist father for the man she loves. Her vulnerability is real, and her ignorance about her lover’s identity intensifies that vulnerability. Yalina alone disturbs the hyper-masculinist atmosphere by her presence. She holds a fragile light against the futile saga of blood, sound and fury, signifying nothing.
The film, wittingly or not, offers another important lesson. The instrumental use of religion to create national selfhood and character is born of a political and moral crisis. That crisis comes from the failure to invent a social ethic where politics and religion count as modes of collective dignity and individual love, rather than empty rhetoric of masculinist violence. The barrage of sexist swearing reflects the soul of that emptiness. The overdose of negative representation however has a touch of cinematic caricature. There is directorial conceit in the name of realism.
Portraying the dark corner of a society you don’t belong to demands restraint. Popular cinema reflects the repressed zones of the psyche. The ability to distill the genuine, existential side of that psyche from its indulgent, sentimental side is the creative task of a good and responsible filmmaker.
The author’s latest book is Gandhi: The End of Nonviolence
Though the film’s lens casts light on the sordid side of Pakistan’s social class, there are interesting shades of grey within the script. 
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