‘Dhurandhar: The Revenge’ and the perils of ‘nationalist’ violence

With Dhurandhar’s second part, it is as if director Aditya Dhar wanted to prove his critics right, and not wrong. With the first part there was a huge backlash against the few critics who had called it propaganda. Now, even ardent fans find it difficult to deny that the sequel is propaganda as the political messaging is no longer subtle.

This propaganda is not in favour of the state, like many Hollywood films, but in favour of the ruling party, thus collapsing together the state and the party. Nevertheless, the label “propaganda” is hardly novel in a Bollywood climate suffused with propagandist productions. What is more critical, in a political reading, is that films such as Dhurandhar are enabling the construction of a new kind of Indian citizen, in which a narrowly defined nationalism is the only virtue and is also indissolubly associated with violence. This has grave implications for culture as well as democracy.

When the chief antagonist, a barbaric ISI figure Major Iqbal (Arjun Rampal) who wants to commit unspeakable horrors on Indians, is told by his father: “You said your people would win again this time, didn’t you?” against the backdrop of the 2014 visual of the oath-taking of Prime Minister Modi, the film is emphatic about labelling the main opposition in the world’s largest democracy, the Congress party, as an ally of the terror-sponsoring Pakistani state.

Rewriting history

When the film portrays demonetisation as a masterstroke against Pakistani production of Indian fake currency, it seeks to rewrite history. After all, demonetisation led to the deaths of over a hundred people, did not eliminate terrorism or black money (99.3% of currency was returned to the banks), devastated the vast informal sector and brought down India’s GDP growth rate from 8.3% (2016) to 3.9% (2019). For a film that is lauded for showing real events, many of the terrorists and gangsters were killed, unlike depicted, before 2014.

As histories are being blatantly rewritten for explicitly militarist-nationalist causes, the film ends with an actual Army motto, ‘Balidan Param Dharm.’ Here, every male citizen is encouraged to perform what sociologist Klaus Theweleit — who studied male fantasies and Nazism — would call as “soldierly masculinity.”

After all, the film is unabashed when a lead character Ajay Sanyal (R. Madhavan playing Ajit Doval) tells the protagonist Jaskirat/Hamza (Ranveer Singh): We are men… we are meant to fight. For our cause. For our dreams. For our rights. For our family.” Unsurprisingly, the female lead, Yalina (Sara Arjun), gets around 15 minutes of screen time in the four-hour film as her husband sets out exacting revenge for all the nation’s wounds.

Reducing nationalism to performative violence

Being an actual soldier and a metaphorical soldier for the nation are intertwined. Jaskirat, a young man whose father and grandfather were in the Army, wanted to join the military himself. But his dreams are scotched when his father and sister are killed, and another sister is kidnapped. In the face of a failed government (conveniently in Punjab) that protects the politically influential rapists and murderers, Jaskirat is “forced” to kill the 12 perpetrators and find his sister.

But if the visible face of the state gives him capital punishment, the invisible face of the state rescues him from death row and turns him into the nation’s soldier. Anger against those who destroyed his family and the government that failed to protect him is now channelled into an external enemy state — or internal enemies who aid the external enemy. As Jaskirat declares — after a few years as Hamza, the spy, in Pakistan — he has abandoned his longing to return to his family as his only obsession is to complete the task of the elimination of nation’s enemies.

This is the sorcery that Dhurandhar performs: the reduction of nationalism from the Constitution’s goals of establishing a democratic republic that ensures justice, liberty, equality and fraternity of all to one that is merely about protecting the nation from enemies through performative violence. Every other socio-economic goal is inconsequential.

“Internal” enemies

While the external enemy is crystal clear, the internal enemies, who aid the external enemy, are also the usual suspects: Khalistanis, Naxalites, Kashmiri militants, Popular Front of Kerala, Uttar Pradesh slaughterhouses, NGOs, socialists and universities. Here, even legitimate democratic dissidents are termed as terror allies. While the film places the UP-don Atiq Ahmad as the linchpin of the Pakistani terror network and shows Dawood Ibrahim saying that there is fear in “our people” since the chaiwala has come, it cannot mention, that Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, who was once charged under terror laws for harbouring Dawood-gang terrorists, was a 5-term ruling party MP (until 2024).

Violence becomes the sine qua non of nationalist justice here. If the “Angry Young Man” trope of the 1970s Hindi cinema is a rebellious anti-hero taking on the establishment against poverty and inequality and resolutely on the side of the poor, the angry young man of the present is a hero of the establishment, especially the popcorn-chomping classes. They vicariously enjoy the violent nationalist justice delivered by him, which includes forcing a terrorist who called Hindus cowards to utter “Bharat Mata ki Jai” as he is killed.

The film does not just depict ghastly violence; it revels in it as spectacular entertainment juxtaposed with pulsating music, a music which liberally uses English hip-hop. Violence assumes, what cultural critic Henry Giroux calls, “a glamorous and fascist edge.” Audience comments indicating that among the most enjoyed portions of the film were Jaskirat’s brutal killings of his family’s murderers show how films build common sense around vigilante justice when police encounter killings have wide legitimacy.

Unmentionable violence

Just as a reductionist form of nationalism is invoked, the film conveys that only a certain form of violence in reality should evoke citizen anger: terrorist violence. As director Rajamouli said, commenting on Madhavan’s role: “You carried the helplessness and frustration of a nation so well.” All other forms of everyday violence (including structural violence), that of vast inequalities (the top 1% of Indians earn more income now than in the last year of the British Raj), the million plus lives lost due to air pollution annually, the hundreds of thousands who died under the COVID-19 pandemic for the lack of health care, those who were lynched in the name of religion, the children who died consuming contaminated cough syrup, and so on become unmentionable violence in the new nationalist cinematic imagination.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt had argued that the roots of totalitarianism lay in thoughtlessness and the lack of critical thinking. India, the nation of 1.5 billion people, is throbbing with a treasure trove of human stories. Yet, Dhurandhar’s New India asks to monochromatise our imagination. Its tsunamic success portends an unfortunate closing of the Indian mind.