A NEWLY released Bollywood spy thriller is winning praise and raising eyebrows in equal measure in India and Pakistan, over its retelling of bitter tensions between the South Asian neighbours.
Sunk in a sepia tone, Dhurandhar, which was released in cinemas last week, is a 3.5-hour-long cross-border political spy drama that takes cinemagoers on a violent and bloody journey through a world of gangsters and intelligence agents set against the backdrop of India-Pakistan tensions.
It comes just months after hostilities broke out between the two countries in May, following a rebel attack on a popular tourist spot in Pahalgam, in Indian-administered Kashmir, which India blamed Pakistan for. Islamabad has denied role in the attack.
Since the partition of India to create Pakistan in 1947, the nuclear-armed neighbours have fought four wars, three of them over the disputed region of Kashmir.
The film stars the popular actor Ranveer Singh, who plays an Indian spy who infiltrates networks of “gangsters and terrorists” in Karachi, Pakistan. Critics of the film argue that its storyline is laced with ultra-nationalist political tropes and that it misrepresents history, an emerging trend in Bollywood, they say.
Directed by Aditya Dhar, the film dramatises a covert chapter from the annals of Indian intelligence. The narrative centres on a high-stakes, cross-border mission carried out by India’s Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), and focuses on one operative who conducts operations on enemy soil to neutralise threats to Indian national security.
The film features a heavyweight ensemble cast led by Singh, who plays the gritty field agent tasked with dismantling a “terror” network from the inside. He is pitted against a formidable antagonist played by Sanjay Dutt, representing the Pakistani establishment, and gangsters such as one portrayed by Akshaye Khanna, while actors including R Madhavan portray key intelligence officers and strategists who orchestrate complex geopolitical manoeuvering from New Delhi.
Structurally, the screenplay follows a classic cat-and-mouse trajectory.
Beneath its high-octane set pieces, the film has sparked an angry debate among critics and audiences over the interpretation of historical events and some key figures.
Despite the longstanding geopolitical tensions between the two countries, India’s Bollywood films remain popular in Pakistan.
Depicting Pakistan as the ultimate enemy of India has been a popular theme retold for years, in different ways, especially in Bollywood’s spy thrillers, however. In this case, the portrayal of Pakistan’s major coastal city, Karachi, and particularly one of its oldest and most densely populated neighbourhoods, Lyari, has drawn strong criticism.
“The representation in the film is completely based on fantasy. It doesn’t look like Karachi. It does not represent the city accurately at all,” Nida Kirmani, an associate professor of sociology at Lahore University of Management Sciences, told Al Jazeera.
Kirmani, who has produced a documentary on the impact of gang violence in Lyari of her own, said that like other megacities in the world, “Karachi had periods of violence that have been particularly intense.”
However, “reducing the city to violence is one of the major problems in the film, along with the fact the film gets everything about Karachi – from its infrastructure, culture, and language – wrong”, she added.
Meanwhile, a member of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) has taken legal action in a Karachi court alleging the unauthorised use of images of the late former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in 2007, and protesting against the film’s portrayal of the party’s leaders as supporters of “terrorists”.
Critics, including Kirmani, say the film also bizarrely casts gangs from Lyari into geopolitical tensions with India, when they have only ever operated locally.
Kirmani said the makers of the movie have cherry-picked historical figures and used them completely out of context, “trying to frame them within this very Indian nationalistic narrative”.