Dhurandhar is an unintentional cultural phenomenon that has exposed India's fair-weather allies abroad, rattled Pakistan, and dealt a blow to India's domestic leftist ecosystem.
I AM REMINDED of Narendra Modi’s speech in Parliament two years ago when he thundered, “ek akela kitnon ko bhaari pad raha hai” — “how just one man has proven to be so expensive for so many people.”
That line is an apt description of Dhurandhar, which released last week and became an instant blockbuster. It not only continues to overwhelm the box office but has scorched an entrenched ecosystem that battles haplessly to douse this fire.
Dhurandhar’s success transcends both money and cinema. It is an unwitting, unintentional phenomenon unfolding before us in the present continuous tense.
Six Gulf countries have unanimously banned it: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Baharain, Kuwait, Oman and the UAE. This is perhaps the most unambiguous admission that their true loyalty lies with the Ummah, and that they’ve always been a fairweather friend to India. That a mere film truthfully depicting a slice of the nightmare called Pakistan should rattle them so much makes this admission starker.
Meanwhile, Pakistan has expectedly filed a defamation suit against the makers of Dhurandhar in the International Court of Justice. This is a classic case of bad news and worse luck to hit the world’s Jihadi HQ.
If this is the global scenario, the screenplay at home is macabre, shameful and shameless.
Barely minutes after Dhurandar’s trailer went viral, the familiar cabal of “movie reviewers,” “influencers” and “opinion-makers” descended on it like a dusty swarm of locusts. They correctly assessed that the trailer was the glimpse of an ensuing tsunami and when the tsunami came, it consumed their fondest fantasies of Aman ki Asha, the benevolence of Pakistan’s ISI and the perfidy that Bajrang Bali was actually Bhaijaan in a different avatar.
Their “reviews” of Dhurandhar are beneath contempt and reminds me of Leon Uris’ memorable quote describing this tribe:
There is a whole school of American Jewish writers who spend their time damning their fathers, hating their mothers, wringing their hands and wondering why they were born. This isn't art or literature. It's psychiatry. These writers are professional apologists…Their work is obnoxious and makes me sick to my stomach. I wrote Exodus because I was just sick of apologizing — or feeling that it was necessary to apologize.
Replace “American Jewish writers” with “Indian reviewers with Hindu names,” and see how accurately it fits.
But to add specific context, this tribe of “reviewers” is an amorphous and distributed network comprising Communist relics, members of the outdated Bollywood sorority of sisters and recently, woke zombies. A majority of them have Hindu names.
For decades, this crew was not used to having its script snatched away from it by “outsiders.” It got its first shock with Uri: The Surgical Strike. Six years later, the same filmmaker amped up the voltage with Dhurandhar. This partially explains their unhinged tantrums online, in TV studios and elsewhere.
The word Dhurandhar is derived from the Sanskrit Sutra, dhurāṃ dhārayati, meaning “one who bears a heavy weight or burden.” Other meanings include, “a person laden with good qualities, heavy duties,” “a man of weighty responsibility,” “a clever and able man,” and “a brave man.”
The protagonist in the movie played by Ranveer Singh fits these connotations. His responsibility is indeed weighty — to look out for India’s security by infiltrating the very core of Pakistan’s Jihadi terror machinery. And he performs this job with quiet but deadly efficiency. Through his character, director Aditya Dhar convincingly shows that there is no love in war on Pakistani soil. Thus, Ranveer Singh ensnares the young daughter of a powerful Pakistani politician not out of love but as part of his mission.
From one perspective, Pakistan is itself the central character of Dhurandhar. It is a character, motif and metaphor rolled into one. The whole movie is a disturbing showcase of its politics, society and religion. Aditya Dhar makes no judgements about Pakistan; he simply unravels its practical realities through characters who decide its destiny primarily through treachery, bloodshed, bigotry and fanaticism.
Dhurandhar is also the first Indian movie that shows Pakistan as an Islamic theocratic state masquerading as a democracy. I’m reminded of V.S. Naipaul’s memorable evaluation of Pakistan.
So at the very beginning the new religious state was touched by the old idea of plunder... Public faith and private plunder made a circle…the state, which at the beginning had been to some like God, had become a criminal enterprise…Everything was expected to flow from the triumph of the faith… It was the other side of the life of faith. The faith was full of rules. In politics there were none. There were no political rules because the faith was meant to create only believers…For everyone in open political life Islam was cause, tool, and absolution. It could lead to worldly virulence.
In Dhurandhar, the chief of the ISI watching and relishing the 26/11 war against India on live TV in his cabin is the most unsettling scene. He is joined in this depraved celebration by a bunch of Maulvis and Mullahs and businessmen shouting Jihadi slogans. The scene is interspersed with real footage and call recordings in which the then ISI head is issuing clear instructions to Ajmal Kasab & gang on how to shoot Jews and Hindus trapped in the Taj hotel.
Even more disturbing are the revelations about the Indian enablers of Pakistani terror. For years, I’ve maintained that India is the only country that has the maximum number of traitors per square feet. A character in Dhurandhar says as much when he declares that India’s Enemy No. 1 are inside; Pakistan is Enemy No. 2. While no names are taken, grim facts are exposed — for example, how a former Central minister and his son barter away our currency printing templates to the same company that also printed Pakistani currency notes. Likewise, in several scenes, R. Madhavan who plays the role of the Director of IB, tangentially speaks of how sitting ministers nonchalantly compromise India’s security.
Dhurandhar is thus a powerful indictment of the two-term UPA regime. Pakistan could succeed for so long not because it is strong but because India under successive Congress-led Governments had hollowed out the nation’s vitals.
And so, when we connect all these threads, we get a clear explanation for the fury of the film reviewers clique against Dhurandhar. They were the direct beneficiaries of the UPA ecosystem. In the 2004 movie Lakshya, the epitome of honest journalism is a lady who in real life was chastised by the court for her role in live-telecasting the 26/11 attacks. Needless, the film is still hailed as some sort of masterpiece by the selfsame lobby of cinema reviewers.
However, this goes beyond mere film reviewers.
From the 1960s up till now, Pakistan's biggest strength is not its army or the ISI. It is Leftists with Hindu names living in India. For nearly seven decades, they had monopolised all avenues of disseminating information and opinion. They were also the arbiters of art, literature and cinema and had the power to suppress not just dissent but divergence and they deployed this power ruthlessly.
The Internet was the initial force that destroyed their hegemony, and what remained of it has almost vanished after 2014. But because they’ve built and sustained an incestuous and self-serving ecosystem for so long, they still wield clout enough to create nuisance. The latest proof is the mobbish assault against Dhurandhar by "film reviewers" belonging to this discarded and irrelevant fraternity.
In the classical tradition of both India and the West, what is today known as a review was properly called sahřdaya-samīkṣa or aesthetic appreciation. It was a rigorous academic discipline by itself. However, this hoary subject was first degraded by Marxist theorists and today, it has reached a nadir, which is most pronounced in cinema reviews.
The “reviews” of Dhurandhar churned out by this tribe are actually templatesque ideological screeds. They speak almost nothing at all about the film but approach it with a medieval executioner’s axe simply because it violates their political screenplay.
I was amused by their discursive acrobatics when I began as a writer in the 1990s. I remain amused even now.
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