Bollywood did not invent India’s relationship with terrorism, but it did something arguably more consequential: it gave that relationship a narrative arc, a soundtrack, and a hero’s journey. Between 1992 and 2025, Hindi cinema’s depiction of terrorism completed a transformation so thorough that the same country whose films once showed helpless civilians weeping over bomb blasts now produces blockbusters where undercover agents execute terrorists in Pakistani mosques to standing ovations. The nation watched itself change on screen before it changed in reality. Mani Ratnam’s Roja in 1992 asked audiences to feel pity. Neeraj Pandey’s A Wednesday in 2008 channeled their frustration. Kabir Khan’s Phantom in 2015 whispered that revenge was permissible. Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar in 2025 declared that killing was heroic. Tracing this arc across fifteen films and three decades reveals not just a genre’s evolution but a democracy’s changing relationship with state violence, a shift that India’s real shadow war has both reflected and accelerated.

The Film’s Version

Bollywood’s terrorism genre traversed a complete arc in roughly two decades: from helpless victims through frustrated citizens to triumphant aggressors. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the political scientist who has written extensively on Indian democratic culture, calls this progression a “cultural barometer” of national self-perception, arguing that popular cinema does not merely reflect political attitudes but actively constructs the emotional infrastructure on which policy consent rests. The fifteen films that constitute the genre’s core offer a map of that construction project, readable not as isolated entertainments but as a chronological record of how India’s mass audience has processed the experience of being attacked and has gradually moved toward endorsing a particular kind of response.

The classification this article proposes divides the genre into four posture categories. The first is Victim, where India is the subject of violence and the emotional register is grief, helplessness, or endurance. The second is Frustration, where India remains unable to respond but the emotional register shifts from sorrow to anger, and the protagonist channels the audience’s sense that something must be done. The third is Reactive, where India begins to act but the action is framed as morally complex, grudging, or institutionally constrained. The fourth is Triumphant, where India acts decisively and the action is framed as unambiguously heroic, deserved, and emotionally satisfying. Each posture category corresponds to a phase of India’s strategic evolution, and the transitions between categories correspond to specific real-world inflection points.

Ramachandra Guha, the historian whose work on Indian popular culture spans four decades, has argued that Bollywood functions as what he calls a “democratic mirror” in which the nation sees not what it is but what it wishes to become. Applied to the terrorism genre, this insight suggests that the progression from Victim to Triumphant was not a record of what India was doing about terrorism at each moment but a record of what India wanted to be doing, a preview of policy preferences that would later become policy realities.

The timeline begins in 1992 with Mani Ratnam’s Roja, released on August 15, India’s Independence Day, a date that would prove symbolically resonant. Roja is the purest expression of the Victim posture. Set in Kashmir, the plot follows Rishi Kumar, a cryptologist working for RAW, who is kidnapped by Kashmiri militants led by the character Liaqat. Rishi’s wife Roja spends the film desperately petitioning authorities for his release. The emotional weight falls entirely on the victim and her helplessness. The militants are humanized to a degree that later films would find unthinkable: Liaqat engages Rishi in philosophical debate, and the film treats the separatist cause as misguided rather than monstrous. India, in Roja’s narrative universe, is a civilization whose decency prevents it from responding to violence with violence. A. R. Rahman’s debut soundtrack, including the iconic “Chinna Chinna Aasai,” wrapped the film in a melodic tenderness that made the political violence feel like weather: terrible, impersonal, something to be endured rather than avenged. The film won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film on National Integration, a category whose existence says as much about India’s anxieties as the film’s content does about its aspirations. Roja earned commercial success across four language dubs, confirming that the Victim posture resonated with a national audience that, in 1992, still processed terrorism primarily as something that happened to ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

Ratnam’s Bombay followed in 1995, and Dil Se in 1998, completing what critics call his “terrorism trilogy.” Bombay set a Hindu-Muslim love story against the 1992-1993 Bombay riots, and Dil Se placed a journalist’s romance against the backdrop of insurgency in the Northeast. Both films maintained the Victim posture but introduced a complication that Roja had avoided: the question of whether India’s own internal fissures, Hindu-Muslim tension, caste politics, regional separatism, made terrorism partly a symptom of national failure rather than purely an external assault. Ratnam treated these questions with a directorial sophistication that earned him international acclaim, including nominations at the Moscow International Film Festival and screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival. His trilogy established the foundational grammar of Bollywood’s terrorism genre: terrorism as backdrop, romance as foreground, the nation as the real subject.

John Abraham’s character in Kabir Khan’s New York (2009) offered a variation on the Victim posture that moved the setting offshore. The plot centered on a Muslim student at a New York university who is detained and tortured by the FBI after 9/11, radicalized by the experience, and ultimately killed. The film’s emotional argument was that terrorism creates victims on all sides, including among the communities whose members are blamed for it. New York expanded the Victim category to include Indian Muslims as objects of sympathy, a posture that the genre would increasingly abandon as it moved toward Triumphant territory.

The first decisive shift in the arc came with A Wednesday in 2008, directed by Neeraj Pandey and released on September 5, two years after the 2006 Mumbai train bombings that killed 209 people. Pandey, a first-time director working with a modest budget, created what remains the genre’s most important transitional text. The plot is deceptively simple: an unnamed man, played by Naseeruddin Shah, calls Mumbai’s police commissioner, played by Anupam Kher, and claims to have planted five bombs across the city. He demands the release of four imprisoned terrorists. The commissioner complies. The man then detonates a device that kills the released terrorists, revealing that his actual plan was not ransom but extrajudicial execution. His motive is explicitly personal: he is a common man who lost friends in the 2006 train bombings and has decided, in the absence of state action, to act alone.

A Wednesday is the Frustration posture crystallized. The unnamed protagonist is not a soldier, not a spy, not even a vigilante in any organized sense. He is a citizen who has concluded that the state cannot protect him and that the legal system cannot punish those who attack him. The film earned critical acclaim, winning the Indira Gandhi Award for Best Debut Film of a Director at the 56th National Film Awards, and achieved commercial success despite competing with two other terrorism-themed releases that month, Mumbai Meri Jaan and Hijack. Pandey’s script did something that no previous Bollywood terrorism film had attempted: it made the audience complicit in an act of killing. When the unnamed man revealed his plan, audiences in theaters cheered. They did not cheer for the state. They cheered for a citizen who had taken the state’s job because the state had failed. Pandey later noted in interviews that the audience reaction surprised him; he had expected moral discomfort, not celebration. The gap between his expectation and the audience’s response is the gap the rest of the genre’s evolution would exploit.

The year 2008 also produced Aamir, directed by Rajkumar Gupta, which told the story of a returned NRI Muslim blackmailed by terrorists into carrying a bomb through Mumbai. Aamir reinforced the Frustration posture from the Muslim citizen’s perspective: the protagonist is trapped between terrorists who exploit his community and a state that suspects his community. The film’s claustrophobic tension, much of it filmed in the narrow lanes of Mumbai’s Muslim neighborhoods, made the frustration feel physical, architectural, built into the very geography of urban India.

Sarfarosh, released in 1999 and directed by John Mathew Matthan, deserves a retroactive note here because it anticipated the transition from Victim to Frustration by a decade. Aamir Khan played an IPS officer investigating a nexus between Pakistani intelligence and ghazal musicians smuggling weapons across the border. The film’s emotional register was not helplessness but professional anger: the protagonist knows who the enemy is, knows the evidence, and is thwarted by bureaucratic and diplomatic constraints. Sarfarosh earned commercial success and Khan’s performance was praised, but the film arrived in a cultural moment when India was still in the Victim phase. The 1999 Kargil War and the IC-814 hijacking, both occurring the same year as the film’s release, would soon shift the national mood toward the posture Sarfarosh had previewed.

Between Sarfarosh and A Wednesday, a decade passed in which Bollywood processed terrorism through two distinct registers that do not fit the main arc cleanly but illuminate its trajectory. Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday, based on Hussain Zaidi’s investigative book about the 1993 Bombay bombings, was completed in 2004 but held from release until 2007 by court order because the trial of the accused was ongoing. Kashyap reconstructed the bombing conspiracy with procedural exactitude, tracing the chain from Dawood Ibrahim’s order through the logistics of landing explosives on the Konkan coast to the placement of car bombs at the Bombay Stock Exchange and Air India building. His camera was unflinching, clinical, and deliberately unemotional. Black Friday is the Victim posture stripped of Ratnam’s melodic tenderness: no A. R. Rahman soundtrack softens the carnage, no love story mediates the politics. Kashyap’s refusal to provide catharsis made Black Friday a critical landmark but a commercial niche product. When it finally reached theaters in February 2007, the audience that might have responded to its raw anger had already begun to move toward the Frustration that A Wednesday would channel the following year. Kashyap himself would eventually move away from the terrorism genre entirely, turning to crime dramas (Gangs of Wasseypur) that applied the same forensic eye to different kinds of Indian violence.

Kabir Khan’s debut feature Kabul Express (2006), starring John Abraham and Arshad Warsi as Indian journalists in post-Taliban Afghanistan, offered a different transitional register. Kabul Express was not a terrorism film in the strict sense, but it placed Indian protagonists in the geographic theater of the War on Terror and depicted them navigating a landscape shaped by Taliban violence, American military power, and Pakistani intelligence maneuvering. The film’s commercial performance was modest, approximately 20 crore rupees, but Khan’s career trajectory would prove significant: he went on to direct New York (2009), Ek Tha Tiger (2012), Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015), and Phantom (2015), accumulating a body of work that explored India’s relationship to terrorism from multiple postures. Khan’s progression from Kabul Express to Phantom traces a personal version of the genre’s evolution: early curiosity about distant conflicts, growing engagement with India’s own vulnerability, and eventual participation in the revenge narrative.

Shoojit Sircar’s Madras Cafe (2013), starring John Abraham as an RAW agent embedded in the Sri Lankan civil war during the IPKF intervention, added geopolitical texture to the Reactive category. The film depicted Indian intelligence conducting covert operations in a foreign country’s civil war, an operational framework that prefigured what Dhurandhar would later depict in Pakistan. Madras Cafe earned approximately 45 crore rupees domestically and was banned in Sri Lanka and by Tamil Nadu political parties, demonstrating that the genre’s political volatility was not limited to India-Pakistan themes. Abraham’s protagonist in Madras Cafe operated with institutional support but personal reluctance, a posture midway between Baby’s professional competence and Phantom’s moral anguish. Sircar’s film also introduced the genre to a more sophisticated understanding of how intelligence operations intersect with domestic politics, ethnic conflict, and great-power maneuvering, analytical dimensions that Dhurandhar would later incorporate into its Karachi setting.

Neeraj Pandey returned to the genre with Baby in 2015, and the shift from Frustration to Reactive was complete. Akshay Kumar played Ajay Singh Rajput, a member of a covert counter-terrorism unit inspired by the National Security Guard. Baby depicted India as institutionally capable of covert action but constrained by political hesitation and diplomatic risk. The covert team operates in the shadows, carrying out an operation against a terrorist in the fictional Middle Eastern country of “Janbil” (transparently Saudi Arabia). The emotional register is professional competence undercut by institutional anxiety: the protagonists can do the job, but they are not sure the state will back them if things go wrong. Baby’s box office performance was strong, earning over 95 crore rupees domestically, and it established Pandey as the genre’s most commercially reliable voice after Ratnam. The film’s significance lies less in its plot than in its posture: India, for the first time in the genre, was depicted as having the capability to strike back. The question was no longer whether India could act but whether India would act.

Phantom, also released in 2015 and directed by Kabir Khan, pushed the Reactive posture further by depicting an explicitly retaliatory operation. Saif Ali Khan played a disgraced army officer recruited for a covert mission to assassinate the masterminds of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, characters transparently based on Hafiz Saeed, David Headley, and other real figures. Phantom was technically a revenge fantasy, but its emotional register was complicated by the protagonist’s moral uncertainty and by the film’s acknowledgment that the operation required violating Pakistani sovereignty. The detailed comparison between Dhurandhar, Baby, and Phantom reveals how each film treated the question of moral cost differently: Baby externalized it (the state is nervous), Phantom internalized it (the agent is conflicted), and Dhurandhar, a decade later, eliminated it entirely. Khan later noted in interviews that Phantom was the hardest of his films to write because the audience wanted catharsis, pure revenge, and the story demanded ambiguity. The film was banned in Pakistan, a fate that would become standard for the genre’s later entries. Phantom earned approximately 86 crore rupees at the domestic box office, slightly below Baby’s performance, a commercial signal that audiences preferred competence over ambiguity.

Meghna Gulzar’s Raazi (2018) complicated the Reactive category by centering a female agent. Alia Bhatt played Sehmat Khan, a real-life RAW spy who married into a Pakistani military family during the 1971 war to pass intelligence to India. Raazi earned over 194 crore rupees domestically, more than Baby and Phantom combined, but its emotional register was neither frustration nor triumph. Sehmat’s sacrifice was depicted as devastating, not heroic. The film’s closing scene, in which an elderly Sehmat refuses to be honored for her service because she associates it with personal destruction, positioned India’s covert capability as real but humanly costly. Raazi represented the Reactive posture’s most sophisticated expression: yes, India acts; yes, the action works; but the price is visible and the film refuses to hide it. Gulzar, whose father Gulzar (the poet and lyricist) had himself explored partition’s human costs in literature, brought a literary sensibility to the genre that made Raazi feel more like a novel than an action film.

Hotel Mumbai (2019), directed by Anthony Maras, returned to the Victim posture at a moment when the genre had largely moved beyond it. Based on the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the film reconstructed the siege of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel with forensic precision and overwhelming emotional intensity. Dev Patel and Anupam Kher anchored a multinational cast in a narrative that emphasized civilian courage and suffering. Hotel Mumbai made no argument about India’s strategic posture; it was a survival film, not a revenge fantasy. Its commercial reception in India, approximately 35 crore rupees domestically, was modest compared to Raazi or Baby, and the film performed better in international markets than in domestic ones. The differential is instructive: by 2019, Indian audiences had moved beyond the Victim posture. They did not want to relive the helplessness of 26/11. They wanted what happened next. International audiences, less embedded in India’s strategic trajectory, still found the Victim narrative compelling on its own terms.

Uri: The Surgical Strike, also released in January 2019 and directed by Aditya Dhar, arrived like a detonation. Vicky Kaushal played Major Vihaan Singh Shergill, a Para Special Forces officer leading the 2016 surgical strikes across the Line of Control in response to the Uri attack that had killed 19 Indian soldiers. The film earned 244 crore rupees at the domestic box office, making it the highest-grossing Hindi film of 2019, produced on a budget of approximately 25-42 crore rupees. Uri was the genre’s first unambiguously Triumphant film. The emotional register contained no ambiguity, no moral cost, no institutional hesitation. India strikes. India wins. The audience cheers. Kaushal’s dialogue, “How’s the josh?” (How’s the spirit?), became a cultural phenomenon adopted by politicians, corporate leaders, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, who quoted it at the inauguration of the National Museum of Indian Cinema. The line’s migration from screenplay to political speech represents exactly the kind of cinema-to-reality feedback loop that Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s “cultural barometer” framework predicts. Uri won four National Film Awards, including Best Director for Dhar and Best Actor for Kaushal, institutional validation that confirmed the Triumphant posture had become not merely popular but prestigious.

The arc reached its apex with Dhurandhar, released on December 5, 2025, directed by the same Aditya Dhar who had made Uri six years earlier. Ranveer Singh played Hamza Ali Mazari, an undercover Indian intelligence agent who infiltrates Karachi’s criminal syndicates and political structures to dismantle a terror network targeting India. Akshaye Khanna co-starred as Rehman Dakait, a gangster with political ambitions. The complete analysis of Dhurandhar documents how the film draws loose inspiration from multiple real events: the IC-814 hijacking of 1999, the 2001 Parliament attack, the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and developments linked to Pakistan’s Operation Lyari. Produced by Jio Studios and B62 Studios, Dhurandhar earned over 1,056 crore rupees at the domestic box office and approximately 1,350 crore rupees worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing Indian film of 2025 and the third-highest-grossing Hindi film of all time. Its sequel, Dhurandhar: The Revenge, released in March 2026, earned over 1,837 crore rupees worldwide, making it the second-highest-grossing Indian film of all time. The duology’s combined worldwide gross exceeded 3,000 crore rupees.

Dhurandhar is the Triumphant posture without restraint. The film depicts India not as a country that retaliates but as a country that infiltrates, subverts, manipulates, and executes on Pakistani soil with professional competence and zero moral reservation. The protagonist does not question his mission. He does not grieve for his targets. He does not hesitate before killing. When Indian media began describing real targeted killings in Pakistan as “Dhurandhar-style,” the film had completed the vocabulary transfer that Guha’s “democratic mirror” framework describes: fiction was no longer reflecting reality. Reality was being narrated through fiction’s vocabulary.

The progression from Roja to Dhurandhar can be mapped as a posture evolution timeline across fifteen key films, each assigned to one of the four categories:

Roja (1992, Mani Ratnam): Victim. A woman pleads for her kidnapped husband. India endures.

Bombay (1995, Mani Ratnam): Victim. A couple survives communal riots. India fractures.

Maachis (1996, Gulzar): Victim. Punjabi youth are radicalized by police brutality. India creates its own enemies.

Dil Se (1998, Mani Ratnam): Victim. A journalist falls for a suicide bomber. India is seduced by its own destruction.

Sarfarosh (1999, John Mathew Matthan): Frustration. A police officer identifies the Pakistan-ISI nexus but cannot act freely. India knows but cannot strike.

Black Friday (2004/2007, Anurag Kashyap): Victim. A docudrama reconstructs the 1993 Bombay bombings. India remembers.

A Wednesday (2008, Neeraj Pandey): Frustration. A common man kills terrorists because the state will not. India loses patience.

Aamir (2008, Rajkumar Gupta): Frustration. A Muslim citizen is trapped between terrorists and the state. India’s minorities pay the price.

New York (2009, Kabir Khan): Victim. A Muslim student is brutalized after 9/11. India’s diaspora suffers.

Baby (2015, Neeraj Pandey): Reactive. A covert team acts but worries about political cover. India can strike but hesitates.

Phantom (2015, Kabir Khan): Reactive. A disgraced officer hunts Mumbai attack masterminds. India wants revenge but feels the moral weight.

Raazi (2018, Meghna Gulzar): Reactive. A female spy sacrifices everything for intelligence. India acts but acknowledges the human cost.

Hotel Mumbai (2019, Anthony Maras): Victim. Civilians survive the 2008 siege. India endures again, but the audience has moved on.

Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019, Aditya Dhar): Triumphant. Special forces cross the LoC and destroy terrorist camps. India strikes and celebrates.

Dhurandhar (2025, Aditya Dhar): Triumphant. An agent infiltrates Karachi and executes terrorists on Pakistani soil. India dominates.

This timeline is the article’s findable artifact: a fifteen-point chronological map that traces not just which films were made but what emotional posture each film adopted, what real-world event preceded it, and how the audience responded. The map reveals that Bollywood’s terrorism genre has not simply depicted terrorism. It has processed the national experience of terrorism through progressively aggressive emotional registers until the genre became, in Dhurandhar, an explicit endorsement of covert state violence presented as popular entertainment.

The genre’s intermediate films further texture this arc. Black Friday, Anurag Kashyap’s docudrama about the 1993 Bombay bombings, was completed in 2004 but not released until 2007 due to legal challenges. Kashyap’s forensic reconstruction of the bombing conspiracy and its aftermath maintained the Victim posture in its purest documentary form, refusing to editorialize the violence or offer catharsis. The film’s three-year legal delay meant it arrived in theaters after A Wednesday had already shifted the cultural ground beneath it, and Black Friday’s refusal to provide emotional release read, by 2007, as a deliberate artistic choice rather than a default posture.

Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider (2014), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet set in 1995 Kashmir, complicated the genre by presenting the Indian military’s counterinsurgency operations as themselves a form of violence that demanded accountability. Haider did not fit neatly into the four-posture framework because it questioned the premise that India was exclusively a victim: in Bhardwaj’s Kashmir, the Indian state was also a perpetrator. Shahid Kapoor’s Haider confronted his father’s disappearance at the hands of the Indian Army, and the film’s climax refused the revenge its Shakespearean source demanded. Haider was commercially modest, earning approximately 110 crore rupees, and its reception was polarized along political lines. Critics praised Bhardwaj’s courage. Nationalist commentators accused him of anti-national sentiment. The controversy around Haider illustrates the genre’s narrowing: by 2014, films that complicated India’s self-image as victim-turned-hero were penalized commercially and politically.

The narrative presented here, a clean four-phase arc from Victim through Frustration and Reactive to Triumphant, is necessarily a simplification. Real genre evolution is messier. Hotel Mumbai, a Victim-posture film, appeared in the same year as Uri, a Triumphant-posture film. Raazi, a Reactive film with profound ambiguity, was released between the Frustration-era A Wednesday and the Triumphant-era Uri. Films do not obey linear teleology. Audiences contain multitudes. A country that gave Dhurandhar a 1,350-crore-rupee domestic gross also gave Raazi a 194-crore-rupee gross, and neither audience was wrong about what it wanted. The arc this article traces is not a claim that every Indian filmgoer marched in lockstep from pity to aggression. It is a claim that the genre’s commercial center of gravity, the posture that generates the largest box office, has shifted decisively and consistently in one direction. The genre’s outliers prove that alternative postures remain artistically viable. The genre’s blockbusters prove that the Triumphant posture is now commercially dominant.

The Reality

Bollywood’s four-phase arc from Victim to Triumphant did not occur in a narrative vacuum. Each phase transition corresponded to a real-world inflection point that altered how India experienced terrorism, how the Indian state responded, and how the Indian public processed the gap between the threat and the response. The genre’s evolution tracks India’s strategic evolution with a fidelity that is either coincidental, reflective, or causal, a question this article will adjudicate in subsequent sections.

The Victim phase (1992-2006) coincided with a period in which India genuinely was a victim of cross-border terrorism without a credible retaliatory option. Between 1989 and 2006, India absorbed a sustained campaign of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in Kashmir, a series of devastating attacks on Indian soil, and two nuclear-flavored crises, all without crossing the threshold of overt military retaliation against Pakistani territory. The 1993 Bombay bombings killed 257 people across twelve coordinated blasts that targeted the Bombay Stock Exchange, Air India building, and the landmark Zaveri Bazaar. The attacks were traced to Dawood Ibrahim’s crime syndicate operating from Dubai and Karachi with ISI logistical support, but India’s response was limited to law enforcement and diplomatic protest. The 1999 IC-814 hijacking forced India into the humiliation of releasing Masood Azhar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar in exchange for 176 hostages at Kandahar airport. India’s foreign minister Jaswant Singh physically accompanied the released terrorists to Kandahar, an image of capitulation that seared itself into national memory and became, two decades later, the emotional origin point of Dhurandhar’s revenge narrative. The 2001 Parliament attack, in which five JeM and LeT terrorists stormed the Indian Parliament complex in New Delhi and killed nine people before being shot dead, brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war. India mobilized over 500,000 troops to the border in Operation Parakram, the largest military mobilization since 1971, but no strike was executed. The mobilization cost approximately 6,500 crore rupees and achieved no military objective. Each of these events reinforced the narrative that Roja and Bombay had established: India was attacked, India suffered, India endured. Bollywood processed this reality through the only posture available to it, the Victim’s grief, because the state had not yet provided the alternative narrative of retaliation.

Between 2001 and 2006, India experienced a pattern of attacks that normalized terrorist violence as a recurring feature of urban life. The 2002 attack on the American Center in Kolkata killed five police officers. The 2003 twin bombings in Mumbai killed 54 people near the Gateway of India and Zaveri Bazaar. The 2005 Ayodhya temple complex attack, though thwarted with minimal casualties, demonstrated continued vulnerability of the most politically sensitive site in Indian religious politics. The 2005 Delhi serial bombings on October 29, two days before Diwali, killed 62 people across three markets. Each attack reinforced the public’s sense that the state could not protect its citizens, but the cumulative effect was suppressed grief rather than organized anger. Bollywood’s output during this period, from Mani Ratnam’s literary adaptations to the dance-heavy commercial formula of mainstream Hindi cinema, did not engage with the serial attacks directly. The genre was in a holding pattern, processing terrorism through retrospective narratives (Black Friday’s reconstruction of 1993) rather than responding to the ongoing campaign.

The transition to the Frustration phase corresponded precisely to the event that made frustration impossible to contain: the 2006 Mumbai train bombings, which killed 209 people and injured over 700 across seven commuter trains in eleven minutes. The bombings were significant not only for their scale but for their target: Mumbai’s commuter rail system, used daily by millions of middle-class Indians who constituted Bollywood’s core audience. The 2006 bombings brought terrorism into the everyday life of the class that buys movie tickets, reads newspapers, and votes. When Neeraj Pandey released A Wednesday two years later, his unnamed protagonist explicitly cited the 2006 bombings as his motivation. The alignment between the real attack and the fictional response was not accidental. Pandey had watched the bombings’ aftermath as a Mumbaikar and had processed the experience through the screenplay. The audience’s enthusiastic response to A Wednesday’s vigilante justice confirmed that the Frustration posture resonated because it articulated an emotion that millions of Indians were already feeling but that the political system had not yet channeled into policy.

The 2008 Mumbai attacks, the event known globally as 26/11, represented the reality that pushed the genre decisively beyond Frustration and toward Reactive. Ten Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives trained in Pakistan attacked multiple targets across Mumbai over four days, killing 166 people. The siege of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel was broadcast live on global television for 60 hours. The attack’s scale, its audacity, its real-time visibility, and its direct link to Pakistani state-sponsored terrorism created a political environment in which the demand for action became too loud for the Indian state to absorb without response. India’s actual response to 26/11 was diplomatic rather than military: dossiers were presented, bilateral talks were suspended, international pressure was applied. The gap between the scale of the attack and the scale of the response produced the emotional territory that Baby and Phantom would later occupy. Both films were released in 2015, seven years after 26/11, and both depicted fictional retaliatory operations that India’s real government had not (publicly) executed. The seven-year gap between the attack and the films’ release is significant: it took that long for the frustration to mature into a fictional response that audiences would accept as emotionally plausible.

India’s actual transition from restraint to retaliation began with the 2016 surgical strikes, the real-world event that produced Uri: The Surgical Strike. On September 18, 2016, four Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists attacked an Indian Army brigade headquarters near the town of Uri in Jammu and Kashmir, killing 19 soldiers. On September 29, India’s Special Forces crossed the Line of Control and struck terrorist launch pads on the Pakistani side. The strikes were acknowledged publicly by India’s Director General of Military Operations, a departure from India’s historical preference for deniability. The public acknowledgment transformed the strikes from a military operation into a political narrative: India can and will cross the LoC. Uri: The Surgical Strike, released in January 2019, dramatized this narrative with a directness that left no room for ambiguity. The film’s 244-crore-rupee domestic gross confirmed that the Triumphant posture had found its audience.

The subsequent escalation was relentless. The Pulwama attack in February 2019 killed 40 CRPF personnel when a JeM suicide bomber rammed a car laden with explosives into a convoy. India responded with the Balakot airstrike on February 26, 2019, sending twelve Mirage 2000 aircraft across the international border to strike a Jaish-e-Mohammed training facility in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Balakot crossed a threshold that the surgical strikes had not: the 2016 strikes were on the Pakistani side of the LoC, which India considers its own territory; Balakot was on undisputed Pakistani soil. The distinction mattered because it established that India’s retaliatory repertoire now included strikes on sovereign Pakistani territory, the very capability that Dhurandhar would later depict as routine.

The Pahalgam tourist massacre in April 2025 killed 26 people, including Hindu and Christian tourists who were reportedly selected based on their religious identity. India’s response, Operation Sindoor, involved precision missile strikes against nine targets across Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. Sindoor was the most significant Indian military operation against Pakistan since 1971, and it occurred eight months before Dhurandhar’s December 2025 release. The film’s production timeline, principal photography from July 2024 to October 2025, means that Dhurandhar was being filmed while the real-world events it loosely depicted were unfolding. Aditya Dhar could not have scripted Pahalgam or Sindoor into the film (the story draws on earlier events), but the film arrived in theaters in an India that had just conducted missile strikes on Pakistani soil. The audience that gave Dhurandhar its record-breaking gross was an audience that had watched its own military cross the threshold the film celebrates. Reality and fiction had converged so completely that critics like Uday Bhatia of Mint described the film as “propaganda in service of a hawkish India, designed to flatter the ruling BJP leadership.”

India’s shadow war, the parallel campaign of targeted killings of wanted terrorists inside Pakistan by unidentified gunmen on motorcycles, in mosques during prayer time, outside homes and shops in Karachi and Rawalpindi, represents a dimension of the reality that Bollywood has processed most directly through Dhurandhar. The comparison between Dhurandhar’s fiction and the real shadow war’s operations shows that the film’s operational details, motorcycle-borne hit squads, mosque-time targeting, Karachi as the primary theater, map closely onto the documented pattern of real killings. The shadow war predates Dhurandhar; documented targeted killings in Pakistan stretch back to at least 2014. But Dhurandhar gave the shadow war a vocabulary, a visual grammar, and a cultural legitimacy that the real operations, conducted in secrecy and officially denied by the Indian government, could not generate on their own.

The shadow war’s acceleration after Operation Sindoor further tightened the relationship between cinema and reality. In the months following the May 2025 ceasefire, targeted killings in Pakistan increased rather than decreased, producing more documented eliminations in early 2026 than in any previous year. Indian media covered each killing through the vocabulary Dhurandhar had supplied: “Dhurandhar-style” became the default descriptor for motorcycle assassinations of wanted terrorists. Indian news channels displayed side-by-side comparisons of Dhurandhar’s action sequences and CCTV footage of real killings, a visual juxtaposition that collapsed the distance between entertainment and intelligence operations. The acceleration created a feedback loop in which the film generated the vocabulary for discussing real events, and real events validated the film’s depiction of Indian capability, each reinforcing the other in a cycle that neither the filmmakers nor the intelligence establishment needed to orchestrate deliberately. The cycle was self-sustaining because both parties, the entertainment industry and the security apparatus, benefited from the same narrative: India is capable, India is decisive, India reaches its enemies wherever they hide.

Viewed as a whole, the reality is a four-phase strategic evolution that mirrors the genre’s four-phase narrative evolution. India’s strategic posture moved from absorption (1990s-2000s) through diplomatic response (2008-2015) to overt military retaliation (2016-2025) to covert operations on Pakistani soil (2014-present). Each phase produced the emotional raw material that Bollywood processed into the corresponding narrative posture. The Victim films emerged from an India that absorbed attacks. The Frustration films emerged from an India that could not respond. The Reactive films emerged from an India beginning to act. The Triumphant films emerged from an India that had struck, and struck again, and was prepared to strike indefinitely.

Where Film and Reality Converge

The convergence between Bollywood’s genre arc and India’s strategic arc is specific enough to resist dismissal as coincidence. Three dimensions of convergence deserve analysis: chronological alignment, operational convergence, and political feedback.

Chronological alignment is the most straightforward. Each genre phase transition corresponds to a specific real-world event with a lag of two to seven years, the time required for a film to be conceived, produced, and released. A Wednesday (2008) followed the 2006 Mumbai train bombings by two years. Baby and Phantom (both 2015) followed the 2008 Mumbai attacks by seven years. Uri (2019) followed the 2016 surgical strikes by three years. Dhurandhar (2025) followed the 2019 Balakot airstrike by six years and coincided with Operation Sindoor. The lag is consistent enough to suggest a predictable production cycle: a major attack occurs, public sentiment shifts, a film enters development, and the film arrives in theaters at a moment when the sentiment it expresses has ripened into broad consensus. The two-to-seven-year lag also means that each film arrives after the shock of the originating event has faded but before the emotional demand for narrative closure has dissipated. Dhurandhar landed at the precise moment when India’s military escalation had created an appetite for cinematic celebration of that escalation.

Operational convergence is more provocative. Dhurandhar’s depiction of covert operations on Pakistani soil, including motorcycle-borne assassinations, mosque-time targeting, and infiltration of Karachi’s criminal networks, mirrors the documented pattern of India’s shadow war with a specificity that raises the question of whether the filmmakers had access to operational information or were simply reading the same open-source reporting that this publication has analyzed across its complete coverage of the campaign. The operational details in Dhurandhar are consistent with what could be assembled from The Guardian’s reporting, Indian news coverage of individual killings, and the pattern analysis that defense journalists like Nitin Gokhale have published. The convergence is real but does not necessarily imply insider access. It implies that the shadow war’s operational signature is distinctive enough that a competent filmmaker researching the subject would arrive at the same operational grammar.

Dhar’s directorial method reinforces this assessment. For Uri, Dhar spent months researching the 2016 surgical strikes through interviews with military personnel, defense journalists, and published accounts. His production team built sets based on satellite imagery of the targeted camps. Kaushal’s physical training replicated actual Para Special Forces conditioning. Dhar’s approach to Dhurandhar appears to have followed a similar research-intensive methodology: the film’s depiction of Karachi’s Lyari neighborhood, its criminal-political networks, and its geographic relationship to LeT and JeM safe houses is consistent with open-source intelligence analysis rather than Hollywood-style invention. Dhar did not need classified briefings to produce Dhurandhar’s operational texture. He needed The Guardian, The Hindu, Al Jazeera, and the pattern analysis available to any journalist or researcher who follows the shadow war closely. The convergence between his film’s operations and the real shadow war’s operations reflects the accessibility of the operational pattern rather than privileged access to classified sources.

Political feedback represents the most consequential dimension of convergence. The analysis of how cinema shapes counter-terror policy documents a three-stage feedback loop. In the first stage, a real attack produces public emotional demand for response. In the second stage, a film processes that demand into a narrative that makes a particular kind of response emotionally legible and morally permissible. In the third stage, the film’s commercial success signals to politicians that the public is ready for the policy the film depicts. The loop then repeats: the policy produces new events, new events produce new films, and new films produce new political signals.

The most documented instance of this feedback loop involves Uri: The Surgical Strike and the 2019 Indian general election. Uri was released in January 2019. India held general elections in April-May 2019. The BJP’s campaign heavily emphasized the Balakot airstrike and the surgical strikes as evidence of Prime Minister Modi’s willingness to act decisively against terrorism. Kaushal’s “How’s the josh?” line was quoted by Modi himself and became an unofficial campaign slogan. Uri’s 244-crore-rupee box office demonstrated that the electorate, or at least the ticket-buying segment of it, responded enthusiastically to the Triumphant posture. The BJP won a landslide. Political scientists, including Christophe Jaffrelot and Suhas Palshikar, have debated whether Uri influenced voting behavior directly or merely captured a sentiment that already existed. The distinction may be less important than the convergence itself: a film about military action against Pakistan achieved record-breaking commercial success in the same electoral cycle in which military action against Pakistan became a dominant campaign theme. Film and policy were moving in the same direction, at the same speed, toward the same audience.

Dhurandhar’s 2025 release extended this pattern. The film arrived in an India that had just conducted Operation Sindoor, and it depicted an India that conducts operations of precisely this kind routinely and heroically. The nationalism debate around Dhurandhar mirrors the debate that followed Uri but at higher intensity: supporters called it the definitive expression of India’s new strategic confidence, while critics described it as propaganda that flattered state violence into heroism. Both readings are correct simultaneously, which is precisely the analytical problem the convergence poses. The film is propaganda in the sense that it adopts the state’s narrative framework without interrogation. The film is also a genuine commercial entertainment that earned its audience through craft, performance, and spectacle. Siddhant Adlakha of IGN’s observation that the film “walks a fine line between raucous entertainment and hateful propaganda” captures the duality that makes the convergence analytically interesting.

Beyond individual films, the convergence extends to the genre’s institutional infrastructure. As the genre evolved from Victim to Triumphant, the relationship between filmmakers and India’s security establishment deepened in measurable ways. Mani Ratnam researched Roja independently, drawing on journalist accounts and a single real-life kidnapping incident involving IOC executive K. Doraiswamy in Kashmir in 1991. Ratnam had no documented cooperation from RAW or the Indian military. By contrast, Aditya Dhar’s production of Uri involved five months of military training for Vicky Kaushal at a naval base in Cuffe Parade, Mumbai, supervised by serving Captains and Majors who taught the cast slithering, weapons handling, and tactical drills used by the armed forces. Dhurandhar’s production, while its specific military cooperation remains less documented, was conducted across multiple Indian states and Thailand with a scale and logistical complexity that suggests at minimum institutional tolerance and plausibly active coordination. The Ranveer Singh character’s claim to be based on a real-life Indian operative became a legal controversy when the parents of Major Mohit Sharma, a decorated Para Special Forces officer killed in action in 2009, approached the Delhi High Court seeking to stay the film’s release, arguing that their deceased son’s story could not be depicted without consent. The petition failed, but the legal contest itself reveals how closely the film’s narrative tracks real operational history.

The history of Bollywood’s relationship with RAW documents three phases of institutional engagement. In the first phase (1970s-2000s), RAW barely appeared in Hindi cinema, and the few films that referenced Indian intelligence did so obliquely. In the second phase (2010s), the Tiger franchise starring Salman Khan romanticized RAW as a backdrop for action-romance, and Baby and Phantom depicted RAW as an institutional capability. In the third phase (2019-2025), Uri and Dhurandhar depicted the security establishment as a heroic instrument of national will, with institutional cooperation in production creating a material nexus between the state’s operational capabilities and the entertainment industry’s narrative capabilities. Each phase deepened the convergence, and each phase’s films performed better commercially than the last, creating an economic incentive for the convergence to continue.

The convergence extends to the institutional relationship between Bollywood and India’s security establishment on a broader level. Renuka Vyavahare of The Times of India described Dhurandhar as a “power-packed Karachi mafia thriller” in which Ranveer Singh delivers a “subdued yet scorching” performance, and the film’s three-and-a-half-hour runtime “rarely feels overbearing” due to “stylish, tight storytelling.” Devesh Sharma of Filmfare noted that Dhar “refuses to be contained by the grammar of a conventional spy thriller.” These critical assessments, even when couched in praise, acknowledge that Dhurandhar operates at a scale and with a confidence that earlier entries in the genre did not attempt. The confidence is not merely cinematic. It reflects a convergence between what India’s entertainment industry believes it can depict and what India’s security establishment has demonstrated it can do. When the capability gap between fiction and reality narrows, as it has between Dhurandhar and the documented shadow war, the convergence becomes less a coincidence and more a structural feature of how a rising power narrates its own ascent.

Where Film and Reality Diverge

Despite these documented convergences, significant divergences complicate the linear narrative of cinema tracking strategy.

Moral divergence is the most consequential. India’s real shadow war, the documented campaign of targeted killings of wanted terrorists inside Pakistan, is officially denied by the Indian government. No Indian official has acknowledged ordering, directing, or knowing about the killings. The operational details are available only through Pakistani police reports, open-source journalism, and pattern analysis. India’s official posture is that these killings are internal Pakistani matters. Dhurandhar, by contrast, depicts an Indian intelligence agent conducting operations on Pakistani soil with the explicit knowledge and support of the Indian state. The film celebrates what the government denies. This divergence creates a peculiar situation in which the most popular cultural representation of India’s counter-terror capability depicts a version of that capability that the state refuses to confirm exists. The film says India does this. The state says India does not. The audience believes the film.

The genre’s treatment of Pakistani civilians represents a second significant divergence from reality. Dhurandhar depicts Karachi’s civilian population as either complicit in terrorism (the gangster networks that shelter the protagonist), indifferent to it (the bystanders who look away), or hostile to India (the ISI operatives who hunt the protagonist). The reality is more complex. Pakistan’s civilian population has suffered enormously from terrorism, with over 80,000 Pakistanis killed in terrorist violence and counterinsurgency operations since 2001 according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal. The Army Public School massacre in Peshawar on December 16, 2014, in which Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan gunmen killed 149 people including 132 schoolchildren, remains one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in world history. Karachi itself has experienced waves of sectarian violence, gang warfare, and political killings that have taken thousands of lives. Pakistani civilians in Karachi, where much of Dhurandhar is set and where many real shadow-war killings have occurred, live under the same threat of violence that Indian civilians in Mumbai experienced during 26/11. The genre’s evolution from Victim to Triumphant has progressively dehumanized the population on the other side of the border, a narrative choice that serves dramatic clarity but distorts strategic reality. Roja humanized its Kashmiri militant Liaqat, giving him philosophical convictions and personal motivations that the audience could understand even while rejecting them. Bombay depicted Pakistani-adjacent Muslim characters with sympathy and nuance. A Wednesday never identified the religion of its unnamed protagonist, a deliberate choice by Pandey that widened the film’s moral ambit. By the time the genre reached Dhurandhar, this humanizing impulse had been fully suppressed. Dhurandhar humanizes no one on the Pakistani side except those who assist the Indian protagonist, and even their humanity is subordinated to their utility as assets.

A third divergence concerns the legal and ethical framework that the genre has systematically abandoned. Raazi, the genre’s most ethically sophisticated entry, depicted the human cost of covert operations through Sehmat’s psychological destruction. Dhurandhar depicts no such cost. Ranveer Singh’s Hamza Ali Mazari completes his mission, eliminates his targets, and survives. The film does not ask whether targeted killing is legal under international law. It does not address whether India’s operations violate Pakistani sovereignty. It does not engage with the moral philosophy of assassination. The international comparison with Spielberg’s Munich reveals how different national cinemas handle this question differently: Munich’s Avner Kaufman is consumed by moral doubt, questions whether his targets are the right men, and ultimately abandons his mission. Dhurandhar’s Hamza has no such doubts. The divergence is not a filmmaking failure. It is a cultural choice that reveals how completely the Indian audience has moved beyond the stage where moral cost is considered relevant to the narrative.

The genre has also diverged from reality in its treatment of institutional dysfunction. India’s real intelligence and military establishments are characterized by inter-agency rivalry, bureaucratic inertia, political interference, and operational failures that rarely appear in the Triumphant-phase films. The 2016 Pathankot airbase attack, in which six JeM terrorists infiltrated one of India’s most sensitive military installations and killed seven security personnel, exposed security failures that Uri and Dhurandhar elide. The 2019 Pulwama bombing itself represented an intelligence failure: the CRPF convoy was unprotected, intelligence warnings were reportedly ignored, and the suicide bomber was a local Kashmiri recruit. The Triumphant-phase films select the successes (the surgical strikes, the Balakot airstrike) and omit the failures (Pathankot, Pulwama’s security lapses), creating a narrative of institutional competence that the real institution does not consistently demonstrate.

Temporal divergence deserves attention as well. Dhurandhar’s plot is set between 2007 and 2009, centered on the period around the 2008 Mumbai attacks. The film uses this historical setting to tell a story about Indian capabilities that were, in 2007-2009, largely aspirational. India’s covert capability in that period was not what Dhurandhar depicts. The surgical strikes did not occur until 2016. The Balakot airstrike did not occur until 2019. The shadow war’s documented acceleration did not begin until the 2020s. By setting its narrative in a period before these capabilities were demonstrated, Dhurandhar retroactively inserts competence into a historical moment characterized by restraint. The film says India was already doing this in 2008. The evidence suggests India was not. The retroactive insertion serves a narrative purpose, making the shadow war feel like a permanent feature of India’s strategic DNA rather than a recent development, but it diverges from the documented timeline.

Production geography has also shifted in ways that diverge from reality. The genre’s Victim-phase and Frustration-phase films were produced by a diverse ecosystem of studios and independent filmmakers: Mani Ratnam worked with K. Balachander’s production house, Anurag Kashyap worked independently, Neeraj Pandey worked with UTV and later Friday Filmworks. The Triumphant-phase films have been produced by larger studios with closer ties to the political establishment: Uri was produced by Ronnie Screwvala’s RSVP Movies, and Dhurandhar was produced by Jio Studios, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries, India’s largest conglomerate, whose founder Mukesh Ambani maintains a documented relationship with the ruling BJP. The shift in production infrastructure from independent to corporate, from diverse studios to studios with political adjacency, represents a structural change in the genre that the films themselves do not acknowledge. The genre’s content says India has become more decisive. The genre’s production infrastructure says India’s entertainment industry has become more consolidated around studios that benefit from a particular political narrative.

A sixth divergence concerns the genre’s treatment of gender and the erasure of women’s agency as the posture shifted from Victim to Triumphant. Roja’s narrative centered on a woman’s perspective: Madhoo’s Roja was the film’s emotional and dramatic protagonist, and the entire plot hinged on her determination to recover her husband. Bombay’s female lead Shaila Bano, played by Manisha Koirala, was an equal partner in the narrative, and her Hindu-Muslim marriage was the film’s structural premise. By the time the genre reached its Reactive phase, women had been repositioned from protagonists to supporting roles: Yami Gautam in Uri played an RAW analyst whose contribution was significant but subordinate to Kaushal’s combat leadership. Raazi stands as the only Reactive-phase film with a female protagonist, and Alia Bhatt’s Sehmat paid for her centrality with psychological destruction, as though the genre could not imagine a woman at the center of a counter-terror narrative without also punishing her for occupying that space. Dhurandhar completed the erasure: Sara Arjun played a supporting role, and the film’s women exist primarily as motivational props for the male protagonist’s mission. Renuka Vyavahare’s otherwise positive review for The Times of India noted this imbalance without fully analyzing its structural implications.

Meghna Gulzar’s Raazi represents the counter-evidence that complicates this claim, and it is worth dwelling on why Raazi succeeded both commercially and artistically with a female protagonist when no other Reactive or Triumphant-phase film has attempted the same. Gulzar’s directorial sensibility, inherited from her father’s literary tradition but sharpened by her own documentary work (including Talvar, her 2015 investigation of the Aarushi Talwar murder case), treats women as fully competent agents whose competence comes at a price the narrative is willing to name. Sehmat is not merely brave; she is intelligent, resourceful, and operationally effective. Her recruitment by RAW is not romanticized; it is depicted as an institutional exploitation of a young woman’s patriotism. The film’s 194-crore-rupee domestic gross suggests that audiences will accept a female-led counter-terror narrative if the craft is sufficient, but no subsequent filmmaker has tested this proposition. The genre’s commercial incentive structure, in which Dhurandhar’s male-led Triumphant posture generated seven times Raazi’s gross, may explain why.

A seventh divergence, perhaps the most analytically consequential, concerns the genre’s progressive elimination of Pakistani subjectivity. Roja gave its Kashmiri militant Liaqat a philosophical position and a backstory: he was fighting for a cause, even if the film ultimately rejected that cause. A Wednesday’s terrorists were humanized only to be killed, but the film at least depicted them as individuals with names and faces. Baby depicted its terrorist antagonist Bashir Khan with some psychological depth, including a scene in which he prays before his planned attack, an acknowledgment that his violence emerged from conviction rather than mere malice. Dhurandhar, arriving in the genre’s Triumphant phase, offers no equivalent humanization. Akshaye Khanna’s Rehman Dakait is a gangster with ambitions, not a person with beliefs. The ISI operatives who pursue Singh’s protagonist are institutional functions, not characters. Pakistani civilians appear as atmospheric texture: crowded streets, noisy bazaars, anonymous faces in a country the film has no interest in understanding. The progressive dehumanization tracks precisely with the genre’s escalating violence: it is easier to celebrate the killing of characters the audience has not been invited to see as human.

This divergence between the genre’s representation and the human reality of Pakistan matters analytically because it shapes how Indian audiences process real-world events. When Indian media reports that a “Dhurandhar-style” killing has occurred in Karachi, the audience’s mental image of Karachi is not the real city of 15 million people, with its literary culture, its culinary traditions, its professional middle class, and its own devastating experience of terrorism. The audience’s mental image of Karachi is Dhurandhar’s Karachi: a dark, violent, crime-ridden landscape populated by gangsters and terrorists. The genre’s divergence from reality on this point is not a cinematic failing. It is a strategic choice that makes the shadow war’s real operations more palatable by ensuring that the audience does not think about who lives in the cities where people are being killed.

What the Comparison Reveals

Placing the genre’s evolution against India’s strategic evolution reveals three analytical conclusions that neither the films nor the policy literature has articulated independently.

The first conclusion is that the genre did not merely reflect India’s changing strategic posture. It prepared the emotional ground for each escalation by making the next level of violence imaginable and morally permissible before the state adopted it. A Wednesday made vigilante justice emotionally legible in 2008. Baby made covert action emotionally legible in 2015. Uri made military strikes across the LoC emotionally legible in 2019. Dhurandhar made covert assassination on Pakistani soil emotionally legible in 2025. In each case, the film preceded the policy reality by depicting it as fiction, testing the audience’s emotional response, confirming through box office performance that the audience was ready, and thereby signaling to the political class that the public would support the real-world version. The genre functioned as a focus group for strategic escalation, calibrating the national appetite for violence in real time through ticket sales.

This conclusion must be held with some care. The causal arrow, whether films shape policy preferences or merely capture pre-existing preferences, is genuinely uncertain. Namrata Joshi, the film critic who has tracked this genre’s evolution more closely than perhaps any other Indian cultural journalist, argues that the relationship is reciprocal: “Films respond to what audiences feel, and audiences feel what films have trained them to feel. The loop has no origin point.” Joshi’s position is analytically stronger than either the pure-reflection theory (films are mirrors) or the pure-shaping theory (films are propaganda), because it accounts for the documented feedback between box office performance and political messaging without requiring either the filmmakers or the politicians to be manipulating the other deliberately.

The second conclusion is that the genre’s arc reveals a democracy negotiating with itself about the limits of state violence. Roja asked: Is terrorism something we must simply endure? A Wednesday answered: No, but the state cannot be trusted to act. Baby asked: Can covert action be institutionally legitimate? Phantom answered: Perhaps, but at moral cost. Uri declared: Overt military retaliation is both legitimate and glorious. Dhurandhar declared: Covert assassination is both routine and heroic. Each film advanced the boundary of what the democratic public was willing to accept, and each film’s commercial success confirmed that the boundary had been accepted. The genre’s arc is a record of democratic consent being manufactured, tested, and ratified at the box office. The process is not unique to India; the United States conducted a similar negotiation through its post-9/11 war-on-terror cinema, from Black Hawk Down (2001) through Zero Dark Thirty (2012). The Dhurandhar and Munich comparison explored how different democracies conclude this negotiation differently. The American arc ended in ambiguity (Zero Dark Thirty’s final shot of Maya weeping suggests that the cost of killing bin Laden was psychologically devastating). The Indian arc ended in celebration (Dhurandhar’s finale suggests that the cost of killing terrorists is zero).

Pratap Bhanu Mehta has argued that this difference reveals something fundamental about the two democracies’ self-images. American post-9/11 cinema eventually developed what Mehta calls “imperial guilt,” a recognition that the War on Terror had produced its own atrocities (Abu Ghraib, drone strikes on civilians, indefinite detention at Guantanamo). Indian post-Pahalgam cinema has not yet developed an equivalent self-reckoning. Dhurandhar contains no Abu Ghraib scene. No Indian spy film has depicted an operation that killed the wrong person, targeted a civilian, or produced intelligence that was later revealed to be fabricated. The genre’s trajectory suggests that the Indian audience’s appetite for moral complexity in counter-terror narratives has decreased as India’s real-world operations have escalated, the inverse of what Mehta argues a healthy democracy should exhibit.

The third conclusion concerns the genre’s future trajectory. The detailed ranking of Bollywood counter-terror films demonstrates that the genre’s commercial peak coincides with the Triumphant posture: Uri and Dhurandhar are the two highest-grossing entries by a wide margin. If box office performance is the primary signal that determines which posture subsequent films adopt, the genre will remain in the Triumphant phase until a film that adopts a different posture achieves comparable commercial success. The commercial data suggests three possible futures.

Escalation represents the first possible future. Each Triumphant film depicts a more aggressive version of India’s capability than the last. Uri depicted military strikes across the LoC. Dhurandhar depicted covert operations deep inside Pakistan. The sequel, Dhurandhar: The Revenge, escalated further. If the genre continues to escalate, the next major entry would need to depict capabilities beyond what Dhurandhar has shown: assassination of senior political figures, sabotage of Pakistani infrastructure, or operations coordinated with foreign intelligence agencies. Each escalation would move the genre further from documented reality and closer to fantasy, which could either enhance box office appeal (audiences want bigger spectacle) or erode it (audiences sense the loss of plausibility). The escalation path has a natural ceiling determined by what the audience is willing to believe India’s intelligence services can do.

Maturation represents the second possible future. India eventually produces its own Munich: a film that depicts covert operations with genuine moral complexity, that asks whether the shadow war is worth its costs, and that treats Pakistani civilians as human beings rather than background furniture. Raazi represents the closest approach to this future, but Raazi’s box office, while excellent by normal standards, was dwarfed by Uri and Dhurandhar. The maturation path requires either a commercial shock (a Triumphant film that fails at the box office, breaking the equation between aggression and profit) or a cultural shift (a new generation of audiences that finds celebration of killing unsatisfying). Neither condition is currently present.

Saturation represents the third and most likely long-term future. Audiences tire of the terrorism genre regardless of posture. The genre’s commercial dominance is a product of a specific historical moment, the convergence of real attacks, real retaliation, and real geopolitical tension, and when that moment passes, the genre’s commercial appeal fades. The saturation path is the most likely long-term outcome because no genre sustains commercial dominance indefinitely. American war-on-terror cinema peaked commercially around 2012-2013 and has declined since. India’s terrorism genre may follow a similar trajectory, with Dhurandhar’s duology representing the genre’s commercial zenith rather than a new baseline.

Between these three futures, the box office functions as a real-time referendum on India’s strategic culture. Each film’s ticket sales measure something that opinion polls cannot: the willingness of millions of individual Indians to pay money and spend three hours of their lives inside a particular narrative about their country’s relationship with violence. Uri’s 244-crore-rupee gross was not merely a commercial achievement. It was 244 crore rupees’ worth of Indians choosing, one ticket at a time, to sit in a dark room and experience the emotional satisfaction of watching Indian special forces cross the Line of Control. Dhurandhar’s 1,056-crore-rupee gross was a tenfold amplification of the same choice. The box office is the world’s largest, most expensive, and most revealing focus group, and the question it has been answering for two decades is: What story about terrorism does India want to hear? The answer, visible in the ascending commercial trajectory from Roja’s modest success through A Wednesday’s critical acclaim to Dhurandhar’s record-shattering dominance, has been consistent: India wants to hear that it has moved from passivity to power, from endurance to action, from victimhood to mastery.

Anupama Chopra, the film critic who has documented Bollywood’s evolution for three decades, has observed that the terrorism genre’s commercial trajectory tracks an emotional trajectory that is visible in Indian society beyond cinema. India’s cricket team, once known for defensive play, adopted aggressive tactics under Virat Kohli’s captaincy. India’s diplomatic posture, once characterized by non-alignment and strategic restraint, shifted toward what Jaishankar calls “multi-alignment” with explicit assertion of national interests. India’s space program, once modest, achieved a lunar landing in 2023. The terrorism genre’s evolution from Victim to Triumphant is, in Chopra’s framework, one expression of a broader national mood shift that encompasses sport, diplomacy, technology, and military policy. The genre did not create this mood. But it gave the mood its most emotionally potent and commercially validated expression, and in doing so, it reinforced the mood’s dominance in ways that Chopra argues are still underestimated by analysts who treat cinema as mere entertainment.

Beyond these three futures, the comparison reveals that the genre’s evolution was not inevitable. Bollywood’s terrorism cinema could have evolved differently. India could have produced films in the Maachis tradition that explored how state violence creates radicalization. India could have produced films in the Haider tradition that held India’s own military and intelligence establishment accountable for excesses. India could have developed what Gulzar (the director of Maachis, not Meghna Gulzar his daughter) called a “cinema of conscience” that depicted terrorism as a tragedy produced by systemic failures rather than a challenge requiring kinetic response. That India’s commercial cinema chose the Victim-to-Triumphant arc over these alternatives is itself the most revealing datum. The genre chose the arc that sold the most tickets. The arc that sold the most tickets was the one that told India what it wanted to hear: that India has moved from weakness to strength, from passivity to action, from victimhood to dominance. Whether this narrative is accurate, sustainable, or compatible with democratic values is a question the broader analysis of how cinema shapes policy addresses. The genre itself does not ask the question. The genre’s job is to make India feel powerful. At the box office, judged by the only metric cinema acknowledges as final, the genre has succeeded.

The complication that any honest analysis must acknowledge is that the linear narrative from Victim to Triumphant oversimplifies a messy reality. Films exist in a market, not a teleology. A Wednesday’s unnamed protagonist and Dhurandhar’s Hamza Ali Mazari are separated by seventeen years and approximately 1,300 crore rupees in box office differential, but they are both products of the same democratic audience voting with its wallet. The genre’s evolution is real, measurable, and consequential. It is also a story told by commerce as much as by culture, shaped by production economics, star power, release timing, and marketing budgets as much as by national sentiment.

Regional variations complicate the national narrative further. Bollywood’s terrorism genre is a Hindi-language phenomenon that reflects primarily the sensibilities of north Indian urban audiences, the demographic that constitutes the bulk of Hindi film viewership. South Indian cinema has its own terrorism genre with its own trajectory. Malayalam cinema, notably Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroopam (2013) and Prithviraj Sukumaran’s Kuruthi (2021), has explored terrorism with greater moral complexity than the Hindi mainstream. Tamil cinema’s engagement with the Sri Lankan civil war through films like Iruvar (1997) and Vettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu (2006) follows different narrative conventions rooted in the Tamil Nadu audience’s proximity to the conflict. Telugu and Kannada cinema have produced their own counter-terror narratives. The pan-Indian success of Dhurandhar, which earned significant revenue in south Indian markets through dubbing, represents the Hindi genre’s posture spreading across linguistic boundaries, a cultural unification that mirrors the BJP’s political project of constructing a unified national security consciousness.

Bollywood’s terrorism genre traversed a complete arc in two decades. Whether the nation’s strategic trajectory is better understood through its cinema or its classified operational orders is a question that neither filmmakers nor intelligence officers are positioned to answer objectively. What is certain is that both trajectories have been moving in the same direction, toward the same destination, at a pace that makes the question of which is leading and which is following increasingly academic. The destination, an India that considers covert violence against terrorists on foreign soil to be not just permissible but heroic, has been reached. The cinema arrived first. And having arrived first, it ensured that when reality followed, the audience was already seated, popcorn in hand, and ready to applaud.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: When did Bollywood shift from victim to aggressor terrorism films?

Gradual rather than instantaneous, the shift occurred across three transitional phases between 2008 and 2019. A Wednesday (2008) marked the departure from pure victim narratives by depicting a citizen taking lethal action against terrorists. Baby (2015) introduced institutional covert capability. Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019) completed the transition to the fully triumphant posture. Dhurandhar (2025) consolidated the triumphant phase at unprecedented commercial scale. The entire transition spanned roughly two decades from Roja (1992) to Dhurandhar, but the decisive shift from Frustration to Triumphant occurred in the four-year window between 2015 and 2019, during which India’s real-world strategic posture also shifted dramatically with the surgical strikes and the Balakot airstrike.

Q: Which film first showed India striking back?

A Wednesday (2008) was the first Hindi film to depict an Indian protagonist lethally striking back against terrorists, though the protagonist was a civilian acting outside state sanction. Baby (2015) was the first film to depict the Indian state’s covert counter-terrorism apparatus conducting an offensive operation against terrorists abroad. Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019) was the first to depict an acknowledged military operation against Pakistani-side targets. Sarfarosh (1999) anticipated the striking-back narrative through a police officer investigating cross-border weapons smuggling but did not depict offensive action on foreign soil.

Q: How many Bollywood films depict terrorism?

Between 1992 and 2026, at least thirty Hindi-language films have depicted terrorism as a central theme, with dozens more featuring terrorism as a background element. The fifteen films mapped in this article’s posture evolution timeline represent the genre’s core entries, those that most significantly shaped public discourse and achieved commercial visibility. The genre expanded rapidly after the 2008 Mumbai attacks, with the period between 2015 and 2026 producing the highest density of terrorism-themed productions in Bollywood history. This count excludes South Indian language films, which have their own robust terrorism-genre tradition.

Q: Does the genre evolution match real policy changes?

Chronological alignment between genre shifts and policy changes is documented and consistent. Each major genre shift corresponds to a specific real-world event with a production lag of two to seven years. The Frustration phase followed the 2006 Mumbai train bombings. The Reactive phase followed the 2008 Mumbai attacks. The Triumphant phase followed the 2016 surgical strikes and the 2019 Balakot airstrike. The alignment is strong enough that film critics and political scientists, including Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, have debated whether the relationship is reflective (films capture existing sentiment), causal (films shape sentiment), or reciprocal (both processes operate simultaneously). The evidence favors the reciprocal interpretation.

Q: Which films complicate the linear victim-to-aggressor arc?

Several films resist the clean four-phase arc. Haider (2014, Vishal Bhardwaj) depicted the Indian military’s counterinsurgency in Kashmir as a source of violence rather than a response to it. Raazi (2018, Meghna Gulzar) depicted covert action as humanly devastating rather than heroic. Hotel Mumbai (2019, Anthony Maras) returned to the Victim posture at a moment when the genre had largely abandoned it. Maachis (1996, Gulzar) explored how state violence creates radicalization. These films prove that alternative postures remain artistically viable but are commercially subordinate to the Triumphant posture that Uri and Dhurandhar represent.

Q: Is the aggressor phase of Bollywood terrorism cinema permanent?

Commercial data suggests the Triumphant posture will dominate as long as it remains the most profitable approach. Dhurandhar’s 1,350-crore-rupee worldwide gross and its sequel’s 1,837-crore-rupee gross create a commercial benchmark that incentivizes subsequent filmmakers to adopt the same posture. Three factors could end the Triumphant phase: audience saturation with the genre (viewers tire of terrorism themes regardless of posture), a commercial failure by a Triumphant-posture film (breaking the equation between aggression and profit), or a geopolitical shift that makes celebration of violence against Pakistan politically inopportune (such as a sustained peace process). None of these conditions is currently present.

Q: What drove the posture shift in terrorism films?

Four interrelated factors drove the shift, each reinforcing the others in an accelerating cycle. First, real terrorist attacks against India (the 2006 train bombings, the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the Pahalgam massacre) created escalating public demand for narrative responses that matched the scale of the violence experienced. Each successive attack was more audacious, more visible, and more politically intolerable than the last, and each demanded a cinematic response calibrated to the audience’s intensifying and increasingly articulated anger. Second, India’s actual military and covert responses (the surgical strikes, the Balakot airstrike, Operation Sindoor, the shadow war) provided factual material that filmmakers could dramatize with the confidence that audiences would recognize the real events behind the fiction. Third, the commercial success of each successive aggressive film incentivized studios to escalate further, creating a market logic in which the most aggressive posture was also the most profitable posture. Fourth, the political environment, including the BJP government’s emphasis on national security and decisive action, created a context in which aggressive films received institutional validation (National Film Awards, political endorsement, prime ministerial quotation of film dialogue).

Q: Did Baby prepare audiences for Dhurandhar’s aggression?

Baby (2015) played a specific transitional role in the genre’s evolution by establishing that Indian audiences would pay to see a covert counter-terrorism operation depicted on screen, even one set on foreign soil. Baby earned over 95 crore rupees domestically, proving commercial viability for the Reactive posture. Phantom (2015) pushed further by depicting assassination of Mumbai attack masterminds. Uri (2019) escalated to full Triumphant celebration. Dhurandhar (2025) arrived in a market that Baby, Phantom, and Uri had collectively prepared over a decade. Each film expanded the audience’s comfort zone with cinematic violence against Pakistani-linked targets, and each film’s success confirmed that the expansion was commercially productive.

Q: Do the three spy films Baby, Phantom, and Dhurandhar form a narrative trilogy?

They do not share characters, continuity, or production teams, but they function as a thematic trilogy that tracks India’s evolving comfort with state violence. Baby depicted covert action as institutionally legitimate but politically risky, with Akshay Kumar’s Ajay operating in a world where his superiors might disavow him. Phantom depicted revenge as emotionally satisfying but morally weighted, with Saif Ali Khan’s Daniyal wrestling with the implications of hunting specific individuals across borders. Dhurandhar depicted assassination as heroic and cost-free, with Ranveer Singh’s Hamza operating in a narrative universe where moral doubt has been eliminated entirely. The detailed comparison of these three films documents how each film’s protagonist embodies a different relationship to violence: Baby’s Ajay is a professional doing a job, Phantom’s Daniyal is a broken man seeking closure, and Dhurandhar’s Hamza is a weapon with no inner life outside his mission. The progression from professional to broken man to weapon is itself the genre’s thesis about what India needs from its counter-terror operatives: not human beings who struggle with the morality of killing, but instruments who execute without hesitation. Dhurandhar’s commercial dominance over both Baby and Phantom confirms that the audience prefers the weapon to the human being.

Q: Which Bollywood terrorism film was most commercially successful?

Dhurandhar (2025) holds the record with over 1,056 crore rupees at the Indian box office and approximately 1,350 crore rupees worldwide. Its sequel, Dhurandhar: The Revenge (2026), surpassed it with over 1,837 crore rupees worldwide. The combined duology earned over 3,000 crore rupees. Prior to Dhurandhar, Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019) held the genre record with 244 crore rupees domestically. Raazi (2018) earned approximately 194 crore rupees. The commercial trajectory of the genre shows exponential growth concentrated in the Triumphant posture.

Q: How does the victim-to-aggressor arc compare with other countries’ cinema?

American post-9/11 cinema offers the closest parallel, having traversed a similar arc from victim narratives (United 93, World Trade Center) through moral complexity (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty) to action celebration (American Sniper). The key difference is that American cinema eventually developed what Pratap Bhanu Mehta calls “imperial guilt,” with films questioning the War on Terror’s methods and costs. Indian cinema has not yet produced an equivalent self-reckoning. Israeli cinema, another relevant comparison, has produced both triumphant celebration (Entebbe adaptations) and profound moral questioning (Munich, Waltz with Bashir). India’s genre has produced moral complexity (Raazi) but has not allowed it to dominate commercially.

Q: Does Bollywood’s terrorism genre influence public opinion on counter-terrorism policy?

Evidence for direct influence is circumstantial but substantial. Uri’s “How’s the josh?” entered political discourse during the 2019 election campaign, with Prime Minister Modi quoting the line. Dhurandhar’s terminology was adopted by Indian media to describe real targeted killings. Public opinion surveys conducted during election cycles show correlation between exposure to Triumphant-posture films and support for aggressive counter-terrorism policies, though causation is difficult to establish. The feedback loop documented in this article, real events produce films, films produce cultural vocabulary, cultural vocabulary shapes political discourse, political discourse influences policy, suggests that influence operates through cultural mediation rather than direct persuasion.

Q: Which director most shaped the genre’s evolution?

Two directors stand out as the genre’s primary architects. Neeraj Pandey directed both A Wednesday (2008) and Baby (2015), engineering the genre’s transition from Frustration to Reactive across a seven-year span that saw his craft mature from low-budget indie (A Wednesday was filmed in 28 days on location in Mumbai) to studio-backed production (Baby was produced with Bhushan Kumar’s T-Series). Pandey introduced two concepts that shaped every subsequent film: vigilante justice as emotionally legitimate (A Wednesday) and institutional covert capability as cinematically viable (Baby). Aditya Dhar directed both Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019) and Dhurandhar (2025), engineering the transition from Reactive to Triumphant with a visual ambition and production scale that dwarfed Pandey’s work. Dhar’s military training background, his research-intensive production methodology, and his willingness to shoot seven hours of footage for a three-and-a-half-hour theatrical cut reflect a filmmaker whose relationship to the material is closer to documentary rigor than to commercial formula. Between them, Pandey and Dhar are responsible for four of the genre’s five most commercially successful films, and their combined body of work charts the precise trajectory from citizen frustration to state celebration. Mani Ratnam, though his trilogy predates the genre’s commercial explosion, established the narrative grammar that every subsequent filmmaker inherited: terrorism as backdrop, human relationships as foreground, the nation as the real subject.

Q: Has the genre’s evolution affected how Indian media covers real terrorism events?

Documented vocabulary migration from cinema to news coverage is one of the genre’s most visible impacts. Indian media outlets began using the phrase “Dhurandhar-style” to describe real targeted killings in Pakistan within weeks of the film’s release. The phrase has appeared in headlines across Times Now, Republic TV, India Today, and other major outlets. This vocabulary transfer means that real events are processed through fictional frameworks, with the film’s emotional register (heroism, triumph, satisfaction) coloring how audiences interpret news reports of actual killings. The coverage has shifted from neutral factual reporting toward narratives that frame targeted killings as chapters in an ongoing heroic saga, a framing that owes more to cinema than to journalism.

Q: Why did Victim-posture films decline commercially?

Hotel Mumbai (2019) provides the clearest evidence. Released in the same year as Uri, Hotel Mumbai earned approximately 35 crore rupees domestically compared to Uri’s 244 crore rupees. Both films addressed terrorism. Both featured competent performances and strong production values. Both were released in the first half of 2019. The difference was posture: Hotel Mumbai depicted civilian suffering during the 2008 siege, asking audiences to relive the helplessness of 26/11, while Uri depicted military triumph, asking audiences to celebrate the retaliation for Uri. The Indian audience in 2019 preferred triumph over suffering by a ratio of approximately seven to one. Hotel Mumbai performed better in international markets, particularly in the United States and Australia, where audiences had less emotional investment in India’s strategic trajectory and responded more to the film’s universal themes of courage and survival. The domestic-international performance split is itself revealing: Indian audiences had moved beyond the Victim posture that still resonated with foreign viewers. The commercial data suggests that the Victim posture lost market share as India’s real-world capability to respond to terrorism became visible and celebrated, making helplessness feel like an outdated narrative rather than an authentic emotional register. Anthony Maras, the film’s Australian director, crafted a technically accomplished and emotionally devastating film, but he was directing into a cultural headwind that no amount of craft could overcome.

Q: How does Ranveer Singh’s Dhurandhar performance compare to earlier genre leads?

Ranveer Singh’s performance in Dhurandhar represents a departure from the genre’s acting traditions. Naseeruddin Shah in A Wednesday embodied intellectual fury. Akshay Kumar in Baby embodied professional competence. Vicky Kaushal in Uri embodied patriotic determination. Singh’s Hamza Ali Mazari is something different: quiet, lethal, emotionally opaque, a character whose interiority is deliberately withheld from the audience. Singh stripped away his signature flamboyance to play a character defined by what he does not show. The performance’s commercial and critical success suggests that the Triumphant posture’s ideal protagonist is not the passionate patriot but the cold professional, a figure whose absence of moral conflict is itself the narrative’s argument about India’s evolved self-image.

Q: What role did the 2008 Mumbai attacks play in the genre’s evolution?

November 2008’s attacks on Mumbai function as the genre’s central inflection point. Before 26/11, Bollywood’s terrorism films were either Victim narratives (Roja, Bombay) or Frustration narratives (A Wednesday). After 26/11, the genre developed the Reactive posture (Baby, Phantom) and eventually the Triumphant posture (Uri, Dhurandhar). The attacks’ significance for the genre was threefold: they were massive enough to create a permanent emotional demand for cinematic response, they were broadcast live on global television (creating visual imagery that cinema would later rework), and they produced a geopolitical environment in which India’s government faced sustained pressure to act, pressure that eventually produced the surgical strikes, Balakot, and Sindoor. Every major terrorism-genre film released after 2008 references 26/11 either directly or implicitly.

Q: Can Bollywood produce a morally complex counter-terrorism film that is also commercially successful?

Raazi (2018) demonstrates that moral complexity and commercial success are not mutually exclusive. Raazi earned over 194 crore rupees domestically, a strong commercial performance by any standard. Raazi’s protagonist suffers devastating psychological consequences for her service, and the film refuses to frame her sacrifice as triumphant. Meghna Gulzar’s directorial approach, rooted in documentary precision and literary restraint inherited from her father’s tradition, proved that Indian audiences will engage with ambiguity when the craft is sufficient. The closing scene, in which an elderly Sehmat refuses to be honored for her wartime service because she associates it with personal destruction and moral compromise, represents the most sophisticated emotional register the genre has achieved. No audience cheered at the end of Raazi. Many wept. The film earned strong word-of-mouth, ran for weeks in theaters, and demonstrated sustained audience engagement with a narrative that offered pain rather than catharsis. The caveat is that Raazi’s 194 crore rupees is dwarfed by Dhurandhar’s 1,056 crore rupees, suggesting that while moral complexity can attract a substantial audience, it cannot currently compete with the Triumphant posture for dominance. A morally complex film that achieved Dhurandhar-level commercial success would represent a genuine shift in the genre’s trajectory. No such film is currently in production or publicly announced.

Q: Is the victim-to-aggressor evolution unique to Bollywood?

The trajectory is visible in other national cinemas that have experienced sustained terrorism, though none has produced an arc as commercially dominant as Bollywood’s. South Korean cinema’s treatment of North Korean threats evolved from victim-centered dramas (Joint Security Area, 2000) through thrillers (Shiri, 1999) to action spectacles (Steel Rain, 2017), but South Korea’s genre retains a consistent undercurrent of sympathy for North Korean characters as fellow Koreans trapped by geopolitics, a humanization that India’s genre has progressively abandoned. Turkish cinema’s depiction of Kurdish separatism has followed a similar arc, with Kurtlar Vadisi (Valley of the Wolves) representing the Turkish equivalent of Dhurandhar in its triumphalist posture and nationalist commercial appeal. Israeli cinema’s treatment of Palestinian violence has evolved across multiple phases but, crucially, has produced its own internal critique through films like Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Foxtrot (2017) that hold the Israeli military accountable for specific atrocities. What distinguishes Bollywood’s arc is its speed (two decades from Roja to Dhurandhar), its commercial scale (Dhurandhar’s worldwide gross exceeds any single terrorism-genre film from any other national cinema), and its explicit connection to an ongoing covert campaign that the government neither confirms nor denies. The combination of these three factors makes India’s case unique among democracies that have experienced sustained terrorism.

Q: How has Pakistan’s cinema responded to India’s genre evolution?

Pakistan banned Dhurandhar, Baby, Phantom, and Uri from theatrical release, a pattern consistent with its treatment of Indian films that depict Pakistan-based terrorism or military conflict. Pakistani filmmakers have produced counter-narratives: Waar (2013) depicted Pakistani military operations against terrorists and earned approximately 50 crore Pakistani rupees domestically, becoming one of Pakistan’s highest-grossing films. Yalghaar (2017) depicted the Pakistani Army’s North Waziristan operations with a similar triumphant posture to India’s Uri. Sherdil (2019) depicted Pakistan Air Force operations. These films demonstrate that Pakistan’s cinema is developing its own terrorism genre with its own aggressor posture, but these films have not achieved comparable commercial scale or international visibility. Pakistan’s total domestic box office is a fraction of India’s, which means that even the most successful Pakistani counter-narrative reaches a far smaller audience than its Indian counterpart. The banning of Indian terrorism-genre films in Pakistan creates an asymmetric information environment in which Pakistani audiences cannot directly engage with how India’s cinema depicts their country, while Indian audiences consume increasingly aggressive portrayals of Pakistan without access to Pakistani cinematic responses. Dhurandhar’s banning in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait further reinforced this asymmetry by ensuring that the populations most negatively depicted in the film had no opportunity to respond to it through the same cultural medium.

Q: What does the genre’s evolution reveal about Indian democracy?

From Victim to Triumphant, the arc reveals a democracy that has progressively expanded the zone of violence it considers legitimate, moving from a position where any killing was problematic (Roja’s humanized militants) to a position where assassination is celebrated (Dhurandhar’s cheering audiences). Whether this expansion represents democratic strength (the public has endorsed escalation through the democratic mechanism of box office voting) or democratic erosion (the public has been conditioned to celebrate state violence through a feedback loop between entertainment and political messaging) depends on normative premises about what democracies should tolerate. Ramachandra Guha argues that a democracy’s cultural production should include dissent and self-criticism; by this standard, the genre’s increasing homogeneity of posture is concerning. The genre’s commercial data offers a different reading: the Indian public has made its preference clear and repeatedly confirmed, and democracy means respecting that preference even when intellectuals find it uncomfortable.