Have you seen Dhurandhar? And watched Ranveer Allahbadia explain the real World that, apparantly, lies behind it? I ask becuase I propose a comparison between a film which makes a respectable business out of exploding human beings and a podcast which makes a respectable business out of putting them back together. I suffered the movies and the @BeerBiceps interviews for a paper I wrote recently, and now I ask as a good Christian to suffer with me and be cleansed thereof.
One Ranveer supplies the damaged bodies and the other Ranveer offers to heal the soul. The first has Ranveer Singh with a Machine gun; the second has Ranveer Allahbadia with a microphone, some decorative plants, and the air of a young man who has just discovered that thinking is a wonderful alternative to knowing anything. both Ranveers sell intensity. The difference is that one charges admission and the other asks us to subscribe, breathe deeply, and achieve the best possibel version of ourselves.
In the episode titled Watch This After Dhurandhar 2, Allahbadia speaks to Anirudhya Mitra, an ex-Journalist acquainted with the ISI, the Karachi underworld and South Asian geopolitics. The episode is advertised as an investigation of the real-life stories behind the film. A history lesson which first assumes the film is the question worth answering; a very economical pedagogy, better than any University which still foolishly keeps insisting on reading books (increasingly few). Somewhere around the beginning of the conversation, the matter of the 'composite character' acutally arises (as someone who knows how Proust combined real people to make characters this brought me close to vomit). Mitra explains that the stories of several people must be combined into one fictional protagonist. Allahbadia agrees. The invisible operative is therefore constructed out of several invisble operatives, none of whom can be produced for inspection, while his exploits acquire a beautifully visible body, excellent hair, an inexhaustible ammunition supply and the exact number of muscles required to rescue the nation's pride.
One could scarcely have invented a more perfect academic alibi: when asked for a source, reply that the source is a composite. When asked what has been composed, reply that the details are secret. when asked whether the film is history, invoke the Cinema. The podcast advertises a concluding section called 'Why This Film is National Service.' There we have it. A public service which charges at the box office, then rewards its patients with an illustrated consultation on the real history they have just been watching. Nor would I mistake the published transcript for a confession of personel fanaticism by the host. What it shows, more interestingly, is the conversion of caveat into credential: the admission that the story was invented becomes the most convincing reason to take it seriously.
There were of course brutal gangsters in Karachi, real intelligance institutions, the 1999 hijacking of IC-814, the attacks on Parliament and Mumbai, and grievous losses suffered by actual people. The scandal of Dhurandhar consists precisley in the method by which the Reality of these events is made to certify a story that has no comparable record behind it. For the record, when the parents of Major Mohit Sharma objected to promotional associations of their son's life with the film, the makers denied the connection in the Delhi High Court. The court asked the CBFC to consider the objections; the Board subsequently reported finding no link to his life.
A fictional man can be presented as every spy in India except, apparantly, any spy whose family might ask for evidence. ajay Sanyal, played with the mournful confidence of the nation's Headmaster by R Madhavan, appears close enough to Ajit Doval for reviewers to identify the resemblance. Yet he remains a fictional invention, suitably protected from all those inconvenient archival questions which occasionally trouble the careers of actual Intelligence officials. The film installs a disclaimer identifying its fictional character and dramatised events, then proceeds to borrow real footage, actual atrocities, recognisable public faces and the air of an academic monograph.
The old trick was to say that a picture is based on a true story, and then invent almost all the things which make it intresting. The new trick is more hygienic. You begin with a complete archive of headlines; you add dates, maps, intelligance acronyms, security briefings, court cases, Public speeches and the actual noises made by actual murderers. To each genuine incident is then attached a fictional explanation, often involving the same invisible agent whose existence is secured by the claim that he must remain invisible. The movie does not merely simulate Reality; it simulates the procedures through which reality becomes academically believable. A dossier aesthetic. We have thus arrived at a cinema in which a document's typeface is considered as good as its provenance. The chronological precision is ravishing. A real Prime Minister speaks; a fictional spy receives another assignment. A real city burns; a fictional intelligence chief's jaw acquires the expresion of a man whose warnings were ignored. what an immense pity that the researchers who write actual histories cannot obtain such a cooperative past.
Consider Lyari, which THe film has converted into a series of picturesque abattoirs connected by obliging lanes. Rehman Dakait existed; so did Uzair Baloch and the policeman Chaudhry Aslam, and the criminal wars involving them were anything but harmless inventions. These are what make the reconstruction so effective. History furnishes the names, the neighbourhood and some of the corpses, leaving fiction to supply the grand Indian cause behind all of it. But the film's protagonist penetrating these events and reorganising them into the story of Indian national vengence is a screenplay, not an established chapter of intelligance History.
The Pakistani scholar Nida Kirmani has objected to the cultural and geographical fantasy of Lyari that emerges from such a portrait. A neighbourhood of football, labour, migration, families and politcal movements is made to exist as a background to the hero's ethical education in beheading. The method is familiar. place an actual Pakistani in the frame, then an invented Indian behind him, and soon the Indian appears to have created the history which the Pakistani in fact lived through. This is a rather extraordianry form of authorship. The colonial ethnographer generally had the decency to pretend that he was describing his Subject. Here the fictional operative becomes its author, editor, executioner and ultimately its only intresting inhabitant.
The triumph of the film lies in its invention of an academic aesthetic: the clip which resembles evidance, the chronology which resembles a bibliography, the intelligance-room briefing which resembles an official archive, and the soundtrack which removes any remaining temptation to verify them, every documentary component is an affidavit on behalf of something it cannot establish.
The real footage of 26/11 contributes the moral weight of a real atrocity; the spy, his mission, his miraculous connections and his one-man solutions to history are composed for the cinema. The film arranges them in a single sequence, and the spectator is expected to transfer the truth of the first item to every item that follows. It is a most astonishing syllogism. The attacks happened. The Audience remembers them. Therefore Madhavan's imaginary intelligence-room conference must also have happened, as of course must the secret protocol that explains why none of us had previously heard of it. this is a propaganda technique worth examining precisely becuase it is not simply a bare-faced lie. The fragment of real is indispensable to the fantacy. What finally disappears is the distance between the two. One becomes thoroughly educated by the time the interval closes.
Let us consider the alleged economic heroism of the sequel. In Dhar's national collective ablution, the Intelligence trail culminates in the 2016 announcement withdrawing the old 500 and 1,000 rupee notes; the spectacle invites the conclusion that a contentious domestic policy was an almost secret act of warfare. A bit of counterfeit currency, some dangerous men in Karachi, an Indian agent who has presumably never required an independant audit, and the exercise becomes a patriotic assassination carried out through the Reserve Bank. Of course the government did cite counterfeit currency and illicit finance amoung its objectives. Of course Pakistan-linked criminal networks and the circulation of counterfeit notes are matters of genuine investigation. But the particulr causal chain on screen remains a scriptwriter's achievement. The RBI's 2017–18 annual report recorded that almost all the demonetised money had returned. It did not issue a cinematic certificate declaring that Hamza's dossier had secretly authored monetary History. To treat a state policy as the dramatic reward for a gunman's labour is to rewrite politcal economy as the memoir of a composite intelligence officer. even propaganda usually has to go to the trouble of inventing documents. Here it can borrow the nation's memory of standing in a bank queue and supply an orchestral score for the whole affair.
The recreation of the 2023 killing of Atiq Ahmed makes the procedure even clearer. The assassination of a gangster-politician in police custody is a publicly documented fact; the invented connection to a Pakistani intelligance design is an additional cinematic claim. The movie draws upon this recognisable event but fictionally connects the character to the ISI. No police charge-sheet, presented to the Audience by the Film, establishes the grand historcial synthesis. Once again it is the real corpse that signs the fiction's affidavit. this is what I mean by academic aesthetics rather than simply misinformation. The filmed event arrives wearing the garments of research, chronology and objective reconstruction. You could almost use it in a seminar, provided the students knew beforehand that all the important claims must be considered proven simply becuase the director has a very large budget.
In my previous pieces I suggested two trajectories, which for THe time being I shall continue to call Simulacra A and Simulacra B. The first is a production of dissonance through which an image, gesture or phrase exceeds the Identity to which it had been assigned; an unfamiliar other enters the field, there is a displacement of the speaker and therefore the possibility of collective invention. The second is the capture of this very dissonance inside an increasinly elaborate machinery of identity. A meme begins with a face that can become anyone's and ends by telling everyone precisley which face they must have.
One could call the first a possibility of becoming and the second an identity-machine. Dhurandhar gives us a particulalry acchomplished version of B. The apparantly uncontainable intensity of clandestine life is continually assigned a single national address. Its impersonal excitement, the uncertainty of the agent who must become somebody else, is returned to an impeccable Figure of the patriotic Self. The spy's disguise looks like alterity, but the film is arranged to ensure that it never becomes alterity for a moment. each change of face is a further confirmation of the one face which cannot be changed.
Dhurandhar does not belong to the identical state institution or historcial period, and calling it fascist cannot depend upon erasing those differences.
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Here I want to invoke Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasys, particulalry his account of the Freikorps soldiers whose writings made the female Body into a terrible unstable thing and the male body into a threatened fortress. Theweleit asks us to take the fantasies seriously as arrangements of bodily desire, rather than infer a neat ideology that produces them afterwards. The soldier protects himsef against what he experiences as the dissolving flood of woman, desire and collective life through hardness, enclosure, drill, militarised fraternity and the destruction of what threatens to cross his borders. In one passage he writes that 'The sexuality of the patriarch is less "male" than it is deadly.' This is a useful correction to the business of explaining violent masculinity by discovering an excess of testosterone, as though History had been one long experiment in endocrinology. The relevant question concerns the socail relations through which male sexuality takes shape as domination and female sexuality is made available as the thing to be controlled or punished. The threat is not simply a sexually available woman; it is a woman who exists beyond the frame required for masculine coherence. In Dhurandhar the violated sister is asked to possess just enough of a body to produce the man's anger, while being denied the fuller existence that might interrupt its orchestration. The filmmakers need not consciously endorse such fantasies for the sequence to operate through them. We learn much more from the staging than from the later assurances that it were all done to honour women.
The question is who does this particular fantasy appeal to? Some articles suggest lonely men, citing the male loneliness epidemic.
Theweleit's argument also helps with the supposed Male Loneliness epidemic, although it would be monstrous to treat loneliness itself as proof of fascism. The problem concerns what sorts of relation a given masculinty has been trained to endure. One can build enormous male institutions and remain incapable of relating to another person except through ranks, duties, prohibitions and objects of conquest. The fraternity is in this sense the most sociable possible form of isolation. It offers a place in the formation withou permitting any member to come undone. A lonely man enters a private room with a few thousand other lonely men and discovers that every difficult feeling has a ready-made politcal or sexual enemy. The men are never literally alone. They is surounded by faces, screens, jokes, legends, gurus, National Security Advisors, imaginary operatives and every conceivable supplement to the ego. The only missing thing is the possibility that another person might transform the very identity around which the group has gathered. this is where Theweleit's armoured male body and Guattari's closed refrain become illuminating companions: the repeated chant keeps the boundaries intact, while all that lives outside is organised as threatening flood.
A 2025 reveiw of Indian research found the empirical literature astonishingly thin, concentrated heavily on older people. The frequenlty circulated statistics about a single, unified Indian male crisis should therefore be treated with some care. every discomfort in the male population is immediatly given a capital letter, a crisis, a lifestyle podcast and possibly a sponsored protein powder, somewhere beneath this enormous publicity there is a person who is actually alone.
The Times of India recently published a sympathetic essay about the men of duty, men who obeyed the commands of patriarchy only to discover that duty had left them emotionally isolated. It contains an important truth: men need not be powerful simply becuase the institutions through which they live are patriarchal. But there is also a more uncomfortable question. why has heteronormative masculinty been constructed so that women must provide the greater portion of intimacy while men are permitted to specialise in duty, rivalry and the exchange of jokes? And what happens when women, increasinly able to refuse the old bargain, decide that the work of emotional rehabilitation shall not be added gratis to the cost of being someone's wife? The newly uncoupled man is no biological disaster. He is one very possibel consequence of modernity colliding with a patriarchical contract which had assumed that a woman would remain available to organise his domestic and emotional World. One cannot simultaneously celebrate heteronormative Male sovereignty and demand that the world supply a companion whenever sovereignty becomes a bore.
This does not mean that all unattached men are misogynists.
It means the phrase Male loneliness conceals a very large difference between wanting human company and wanting the old guarantees of masculine importance restored. A person might lack friends becuase of work, migration, precarity, illness or the breakdown of common spaces. another might be perfectly surrounded by men and yet incapable of speaking to them. The latter has no shortage of male company. He has a shortage of relations that do not require a hierarchy. The more elaborate this hierarchy becomes, the more each man is measured as a provider, a winner, a Chad, an alpha, a loyal son, a patriot, a person whose worth can always be displayed by putting somebody beneath him. The endless catalogues of Self-improvement reveal the awful possiblity that the man who has maximised every part of himsef has left nothing with which to encounter another person.
The life coach becomes especially useful here. If Loneliness is a defect of the private self, then the answer must be a new technique, a disipline, a product, an app or a higher vibration of confidence. The very socail world that has made emotional dependence appear weak is permitted to continue untouched. A young man listens to accounts of covert murders, then listens to instructions on concentration, self-improvement and spiritual well-being. These are not logical contradictions when one sees the assemblage rather than its slogans. The same macho self which must never admit dependence is allowed a spiritual dependence on the Guru, the Coach, the invisible operator and the father of the Nation.
Demonetisation was real, but the great cleansing promised by the dramatic reconstruction is not something a film can certify. The RBI's own later accounting found 99.3 percent of the demonetised notes had returned to the banking system. this figure alone does not settle every question about counterfeit notes or terror financing; it certianly prevents the movie's triumphant montage from becoming economic analysis. These are not mere poetic liberties inserted into an otherwise innocent adventure. They are a cinematic order of proof in which the government’s preferred moral is introduced first and subsequent scenes are trained to look like its sources.
In this precise sense I call the films fascistic: they manufacture the affective certainty of an immaculate collective Self by collapsing enemies, history, state power and justified violence into one unanswerable Body.
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