Karachi in Dhurandhar is not a backdrop. It is not a location scout’s decision or a production designer’s canvas. It is the franchise’s most consequential creative construction, the element that separates the films from every other Indian spy thriller that has used Pakistan as a setting, and the thing that makes Hamza’s decade of undercover work feel like a decade spent in a real place rather than a cinematic approximation of one. The argument this article makes is specific and worth stating at the outset: the Lyari that Aditya Dhar and his production team built for the Dhurandhar franchise is a living character, not a setting, and it earns this designation through a combination of visual, social, economic, and psychological specificity that no comparable Bollywood film has previously achieved. The franchise’s world-building is its most underrated achievement because it is the foundation on which every other achievement rests.

A spy thriller’s credibility depends on the credibility of the world its spy inhabits. If the world feels constructed, the performance feels performative. If the world feels real, the performance of deception within it becomes genuinely tense, because the audience understands what the operative would lose if the world’s inhabitants discovered the truth. Dhurandhar builds a Karachi that the audience comes to understand with the cumulative familiarity of someone who has spent years in the neighborhood, and this understanding is what makes the franchise’s emotional stakes real rather than abstract. By the time Part 1’s climactic sequences arrive, the audience is not watching a spy thriller set in a generic hostile territory. They are watching a specific person navigate a specific world they have come to know, and the specificity of that world is what transforms genre mechanics into genuine dramatic investment.

The underrated quality of the world-building is itself worth examining before the analysis begins. The most discussed elements of the Dhurandhar franchise, in both popular and critical conversation, are the performances, the action sequences, the political controversy, and the box office records. The production design and world-building rarely feature in the headline analysis, which is understandable: world-building is the kind of achievement that succeeds most completely when it is least noticed. A world that feels real does not call attention to itself as a constructed world. It simply is, and the audience inhabits it without pausing to marvel at its construction. The Lyari that Dhar built is most successful precisely in the moments when it is least visible as a creation, when it functions as environment rather than as achievement. This invisibility is the mark of the best production design, and it is also what makes serious analysis of the world-building a necessary counter to the tendency to take successful world-building for granted.

The analysis that follows moves through the Karachi world systematically but always in service of the same argument: that the franchise’s world-building is not decoration but structure, not atmosphere but character, and that understanding how Lyari works as a fictional environment is inseparable from understanding how the franchise works as cinema. The world Dhar builds is the film’s most complex creation, more complex in some ways than any of the human characters who move through it, and it deserves analytical attention proportionate to its creative ambition.

Lyari as a World: The Production Design of Lived Experience

The Lyari that Dhurandhar constructs was shot primarily in locations in India and Thailand, with no production access to the actual Lyari neighborhood in Karachi. This is the franchise’s most significant production challenge and its most significant production achievement: building a convincing representation of a specific real neighborhood without being able to shoot in it, in a country that is a political adversary, using a production team that has primarily worked in Bollywood’s domestic context. The result is a Lyari that is not a replica of the real place but something arguably more useful for the franchise’s purposes: a cinematic Lyari that has the sensory and social texture of the real neighborhood’s public character while being designed specifically to serve the franchise’s dramatic needs.

The most immediately visible element of the production design is the color palette. Lyari in Dhurandhar reads in amber and ochre and the warm dirty golds of sun-baked concrete, with occasional saturated punctuation from painted walls and commercial signage. This palette is not generically South Asian or generically tropical. It is specifically calibrated to distinguish the franchise’s Karachi from every other South Asian urban environment that Bollywood films have used as settings, and it functions as a visual grammar that the audience learns to read: when the frame is warm and amber-toned, we are in Lyari, in Hamza’s operational world, in the cover’s domain. The visual distinction between Lyari and the cooler, more institutionally grey Delhi sequences is so consistent across both films that the color temperature functions as a narrative signal independent of any spoken dialogue. The cinematography analysis develops this color grammar in full detail; what matters for the world-building analysis is that the palette is the production design’s first layer of character, establishing Lyari’s sensory identity before anything else in the frame has been processed.

The architecture the production design presents is Lyari’s most narratively significant visual element, and it is handled with a specificity that rewards close attention. The franchise’s Lyari is built vertically in a way that is specific to dense, old South Asian urban neighborhoods: multiple stories of residential construction above street-level commercial activity, balconies and windows and rooftops constituting a public life that exists above the street plane and that is as socially active as the ground level. The vertical dimension of Lyari serves a dramatic function: it creates sight lines, positions, and territorial claims that the franchise’s narrative regularly exploits. Rehman Dakait’s domain is established partly through his elevated positions within the neighborhood, his ability to survey from above, to be seen being above. Hamza’s navigation of Lyari includes a constant awareness of the vertical dimension, of who can see him from where, of the neighborhood’s layered visual architecture as a field of surveillance and counter-surveillance.

The signage that populates the franchise’s Lyari is among its most carefully researched visual elements. Street-level commercial signage in South Asian urban contexts carries an enormous amount of cultural information: the languages used, the fonts and calligraphic styles, the types of businesses represented, the religious images and phrases that appear on commercial facades, all of these are immediately legible to an audience familiar with the cultural context and immediately foreign to an audience that is not. The franchise’s production design team created a signage environment for Lyari that is specifically Pakistani in its linguistic and cultural character, using Urdu script rather than Hindi Devanagari, using the specific commercial typography that Pakistani street businesses employ, and populating the commercial landscape with the specific mix of businesses, pharmacies, mobile repair shops, food stalls, fabric merchants, that characterizes a dense Pakistani working-class neighborhood rather than a generic South Asian one.

The food visible in the franchise’s Lyari sequences is a detail that most film analysis overlooks entirely but that functions as one of the world-building’s most precise instruments. The specific dishes present at communal meals, the specific way that food is prepared and shared in the neighborhood’s social gatherings, the particular hospitality rituals around tea and bread: these details are calibrated to Pakistani cultural practices rather than generically South Asian ones, and they are legible to the audience as markers of genuine cultural specificity rather than generic gesture. When Hamza eats with Rehman’s household in Part 1, the meal is specifically Pakistani Muslim in its composition and its rituals, and the ease with which Hamza participates in these rituals is one of the clearest visual signals that the cover is functioning as it should. A Bollywood spy film that had treated its Pakistani setting as a generic enemy territory would have used generic set dressing for these scenes. Dhurandhar’s decision to get the food right is part of the same production philosophy that gets the signage right and the architecture right: the world must be real because the cover must be real, and the cover can only be real if the world it operates within earns the description.

The franchise’s handling of Lyari’s street life extends beyond the visual to the social. The specific patterns of interaction between neighborhood residents, the hierarchies of greeting and acknowledgment, the particular rhythms of a day in the neighborhood from the early-morning call to prayer through the market’s noon peak to the evening gathering of men outside the tea stalls, are rendered with enough specificity that the neighborhood’s daily calendar feels like a living structure rather than a film set’s approximation of urban life. This temporal dimension of the world-building is one of its most sophisticated elements: Lyari in Dhurandhar exists in time as well as in space, and the franchise’s attention to the neighborhood’s daily rhythms makes the world feel inhabited in a way that a spatially accurate but temporally flat construction would not achieve.

The clothing of the franchise’s Lyari residents is another element that rewards close attention as a world-building instrument. The specific combination of traditional South Asian menswear with contemporary Pakistani street fashion, the particular way that religious identity is expressed or not expressed in dress choices, the visible economic stratifications that clothing communicates within the community: these are details that the franchise’s costume design handles with an accuracy that distinguishes it from the costume decisions of most Indian films set in Pakistani contexts, which tend toward either generic South Asian traditional dress or dramatic villain costuming that signals threat rather than community membership. Lyari’s residents in Dhurandhar dress like Lyari’s residents, and the ordinariness of this is itself a significant world-building achievement.

The sound design’s contribution to the Lyari world-building is analyzed in detail in the franchise’s soundtrack and sound design analysis, but its relationship to the production design deserves acknowledgment here. The ambient sound of Lyari in the franchise, the specific blend of traffic and street commerce and the human noise of dense community life, works in concert with the visual production design to create a world that is felt as much as seen. A visually convincing Lyari accompanied by generic urban ambient sound would be considerably less convincing than the Lyari the franchise constructs, because the sonic character of a neighborhood is as specific and as recognizable to people familiar with it as its visual character. The franchise’s decision to build the Lyari soundscape with the same specificity it brought to the visual environment is the production decision that most clearly indicates that the world-building was approached as a unified creative project rather than as a series of independent departmental decisions.

The lighting strategy for the Lyari sequences reinforces the world-building’s characterization. The franchise’s cinematography uses available light and practical sources for the interior Lyari sequences in a way that gives them a domestic, inhabited quality rather than the dramatically lit look of conventional film interiors. Rehman’s household feels like a home because it is lit like a home: with the warm incandescent quality of ordinary domestic lighting rather than the sculpted shadows that signal dramatic importance in conventional cinematography. This willingness to sacrifice dramatic impact for residential authenticity in the interior sequences is one of the franchise’s most telling production decisions, because it reflects a creative hierarchy in which the world’s reality is more important than the image’s beauty.

The Power Structure: Mapping the Karachi Underworld

The Karachi underworld that Dhurandhar presents is not a single criminal organization with a clear hierarchy. It is a competitive ecosystem of power centers, each with its own territorial claims, its own economic base, its own relationships with the formal and informal institutions of Pakistani civic life, and its own logic of alliance and betrayal. Understanding this ecosystem is essential to understanding the franchise’s narrative, because Hamza’s operational objective requires him to navigate among these power centers with an accuracy that depends on understanding how they relate to each other.

Rehman Dakait occupies the franchise’s central criminal position, and his characterization is the power structure’s most developed element. Rehman is not simply a crime lord in the generic action-thriller sense. He is a specific type of power figure: a man who has built his authority not merely through violence or economic control but through a form of community legitimacy that is peculiar to the neighborhoods from which criminal enterprises in the real Karachi have historically emerged. The franchise presents Rehman as someone whose power in Lyari is partly coercive and partly earned, someone who provides services to the neighborhood, protection, employment, dispute resolution, informal justice, that the formal institutions of the Pakistani state either cannot or will not provide. This is not a romantic portrayal of criminal power: the franchise is entirely clear about the violence that underlies Rehman’s authority and the human cost it extracts. But it is a specific and accurate portrayal of how criminal power actually operates in communities like Lyari, where the state’s failure to provide basic civic services creates a vacuum that informal power structures fill, and where those informal structures develop genuine community roots that make their leaders something more than simply criminals.

The relationship between Rehman’s criminal authority and the formal power structures of the Pakistani state is one of the franchise’s most politically sophisticated elements. The franchise presents ISI, the Pakistani military intelligence service, as occupying an ambiguous position relative to Lyari’s criminal network: not simply opposed to it, not simply complicit with it, but engaged in a transactional relationship where mutual utility determines the nature of each interaction. This portrayal is consistent with what is publicly known about the actual relationship between Pakistan’s intelligence apparatus and various criminal and militant organizations in Karachi, and the franchise’s willingness to dramatize this complexity rather than collapsing it into a simple villain-villain dynamic is one of the clearest indicators of how seriously it takes its political setting.

The ISI dimension of the franchise’s power structure is also its most diplomatically sensitive element, and the franchise handles it with a kind of strategic vagueness that is simultaneously diplomatically prudent and artistically frustrating. The ISI figures who appear in the franchise are never named in ways that would constitute specific accusations against real individuals or real operations, and their portrayal is organized around the institutional relationship rather than around individual characterization. This is defensible as a creative and legal strategy, but it produces a gap in the world-building where the most politically significant dimension of the power structure is the least fully rendered. The franchise is prepared to show the criminal hierarchy in vivid detail and to give the criminal figures genuine human complexity, but it is less prepared to apply the same specificity and complexity to the institutional Pakistani actors whose relationship to that hierarchy is the mission’s primary strategic subject.

Uzair Baloch, as the franchise presents him, represents the rival power center that complicates Rehman’s otherwise dominant position. The character, which draws on the real Uzair Baloch whose arrest and subsequent revelations generated significant coverage in Pakistan, is used in the franchise to illustrate the competitive nature of Karachi’s criminal ecology: power in Lyari is not a monopoly but a market, and Rehman’s position is maintained against constant competitive pressure from rivals who have their own territorial ambitions, their own ISI relationships, and their own community bases. The Rehman-Uzair rivalry is not merely a narrative convenience. It is the franchise’s primary vehicle for illustrating that the criminal world Hamza must navigate is genuinely complex, genuinely dangerous, and genuinely unpredictable in ways that no amount of pre-operation intelligence could have fully anticipated.

The treatment of the rivalry between Rehman and Uzair also serves a specific function in the franchise’s portrayal of Hamza’s operational challenge. An undercover operative embedded in a criminal organization that is itself under competitive pressure from rival organizations faces a compounded exposure risk: not only must the cover hold against scrutiny from within the organization, it must also hold in the context of interorganizational conflict, where loyalties are tested and where a new figure’s position within the network becomes subject to heightened evaluation. The franchise uses the Rehman-Uzair tension as a recurring source of this compounded pressure, placing Hamza in situations where his loyalty to Rehman must be demonstrated in the context of the rivalry in ways that carry both operational risk and moral cost.

The police as a power center within the Lyari ecosystem are handled in the franchise with a nuance that distinguishes the portrayal from both the corrupt-police-villain trope and the heroic-police-protagonist trope. The franchise’s Lyari police occupy a specific structural position: they are neither Rehman’s servants nor independent enforcers of law, but a competing interest group within the same power market, people who have their own financial relationships with the criminal economy, their own territorial stakes, and their own political connections to the formal structures of the Pakistani state. The franchise’s treatment of the police reflects the real complexity of law enforcement in neighborhoods like Lyari, where the boundary between policing and participating in the criminal economy has historically been permeable in both directions.

The character of S.P. Choudhary Aslam, which draws on the real Chaudhry Aslam Khan who served as a senior police officer in Karachi and was assassinated in 2014, is the franchise’s most direct engagement with the police dimension of the Lyari power structure. The character represents a specific figure in the real Karachi criminal ecology: a police officer who had developed his own power base within the same structures that the criminal networks inhabit, who operated with methods that were not strictly lawful, and who was effective precisely because he understood the criminal ecosystem from the inside rather than attempting to impose external legal order on it. The franchise uses this character to illustrate that the power structure Hamza must navigate includes institutional figures who are not simply criminals or simply law enforcement but both simultaneously.

The mapping of the Lyari power structure that the franchise provides across both films is one of the more sophisticated pieces of narrative cartography in recent Bollywood cinema. By the end of Part 1, the audience has a working understanding of how power flows through the neighborhood, who controls what, who owes what to whom, and where the pressure points are that a covert operation might exploit. This understanding is not delivered through exposition but through accumulated observation: the audience learns the power map the way Hamza learned it, through years of embedded presence, and this experiential learning is what makes the knowledge feel earned rather than given. The power structure is one dimension of the Lyari character, and like any complex character, it reveals itself incrementally rather than all at once.

The Economy of Lyari: How Money Flows Through the World

The franchise’s economic specificity is one of its most analytically underappreciated dimensions, and it is a dimension that directly serves the narrative’s dramatic logic. Understanding how money flows through Lyari is essential to understanding what Hamza is doing there, because the intelligence objective of Operation Dhurandhar is not merely to identify criminal figures but to understand and ultimately disrupt the economic infrastructure that connects Karachi’s criminal networks to the cross-border violence that is the mission’s ultimate target.

The franchise presents the Lyari criminal economy as operating on several simultaneous layers. The most visible layer is the protection economy: Rehman’s power is partly maintained through a system of levies on the neighborhood’s legitimate commercial activity, payments made to his organization by businesses in exchange for security and the resolution of disputes that the formal legal system cannot efficiently handle. This protection economy is not unique to Lyari; it is the basic economic foundation of criminal authority in dense urban communities across South Asia and globally. The franchise presents it with enough specificity that the audience understands it as a genuine economic system rather than a cinematic shorthand for criminal menace.

What distinguishes the franchise’s treatment of the protection economy from conventional crime thriller presentations is the attention it gives to the community’s relationship to this system. The businesses that pay the levy are not portrayed as purely victimized: for many of them, the protection economy provides genuine services that the Pakistani state cannot. Dispute resolution without the corruption and delay of the formal legal system, security in a neighborhood where the police’s protective capacity is limited and conditional, predictable costs in an otherwise unpredictable environment: these are real values that the criminal protection economy provides, and the franchise is honest enough about this to show community members who have a transactional relationship with Rehman’s organization that goes beyond simple victimhood. This honesty is part of what makes the world-building morally sophisticated rather than simply politically sympathetic.

The second layer is the drug trade, which the franchise presents as the primary source of the larger fortunes that Rehman’s organization controls and that ultimately connect Lyari’s local criminal economy to international networks. The franchise is specific about the drug trade without being gratuitous: it presents the economic logic of the trade, the movement of product, the financial relationships with suppliers and distributors, the mechanisms by which cash is managed and laundered, in enough detail to establish the economic reality without turning the narrative into a drug war film. The drug trade’s connection to the cross-border violence that motivated Operation Dhurandhar is the franchise’s primary economic argument: the money that flows through Lyari’s drug economy is what finances the activities that the intelligence mission is designed to disrupt.

The franchise makes a specific and analytically interesting claim about the relationship between the drug trade and the broader security threat the mission addresses: that the economic infrastructure of criminal organizations in Lyari is not a separate phenomenon from the cross-border terrorism the franchise is concerned with but is instead the financial substrate on which that terrorism depends. This argument, which mirrors real documented relationships between criminal economies and militant financing in the region, gives the franchise’s economic specificity a strategic significance that goes beyond character and world-building. Understanding the Lyari economy is understanding why the mission matters, and the franchise takes this seriously enough that the economic mapping it performs in its early sequences is genuinely informative rather than merely atmospheric.

The third layer is the political economy: the relationship between the criminal network and the formal political structures of the Pakistani state. The franchise presents this relationship as transactional and mutually constitutive: Rehman’s organization provides electoral muscle and financial support to political figures who in turn provide protection from serious legal consequences and access to state resources that the organization can exploit. This political economy is not merely a narrative detail. It is the mechanism that explains why an organization like Rehman’s can operate as openly as the franchise depicts it operating, and why a deep-cover operation requiring years of embedded presence was the intelligence approach that RAW determined was necessary: the formal economic and political relationships that protect the network from disruption are precisely the relationships that an undercover operative can map from the inside and that external intelligence collection cannot adequately illuminate.

The franchise’s most economically precise moment is the sequence in Part 1 where Hamza is positioned to observe a financial negotiation between Rehman’s representatives and figures from the network’s ISI connections. The sequence is staged as a social event rather than a business meeting, which is itself an accurate representation of how such relationships actually operate: the financial arrangements are embedded in social forms that make them difficult to identify from outside and that require an insider to distinguish the significant exchanges from the ambient social noise. Hamza’s ability to operate in this social environment, to be present without being noticed, to observe the financial markers that an outsider would miss, is the central demonstration of why his cover identity’s decade of cultivation was operationally necessary.

The economic world-building also provides the franchise with a specific mechanism for tracking Hamza’s operational progress that is more sophisticated than the conventional spy thriller’s mission-milestone structure. The audience is not watching Hamza collect intelligence about named individuals or specific events. They are watching him map an economic system, and the progress of this mapping is registered in his deepening understanding of who controls what, how money flows among the power centers, and where the vulnerabilities in the network’s financial architecture lie. This is intelligence work as it actually operates, concerned more with structures and systems than with individuals, and the franchise’s willingness to render this process with economic specificity is one of the clearest indicators of the creative seriousness it brings to its subject matter.

Hamza’s Navigation: The Social Intelligence of Deep Cover

The world-building argument this article makes depends on understanding how Hamza moves through the Lyari world, because the franchise’s treatment of Hamza’s navigation is where the world-building and the character analysis intersect most productively. The Lyari ecosystem that the production team constructs is, dramatically, a field of challenges that the cover must meet, and the specific nature of those challenges is determined by the specific nature of the world.

The social intelligence that Hamza must possess to function in Lyari goes well beyond language fluency or cultural knowledge, though both are necessary. It includes an understanding of the neighborhood’s social architecture: the specific relationships between families and factions, the history of alliances and betrayals that shapes current interactions, the protocols of respect and hospitality that regulate social encounters among people whose relationships are partly cooperative and partly competitive. This social architecture is not written down anywhere and cannot be learned from external observation. It must be learned from the inside, through participation, through the slow accumulation of social experience that builds the kind of contextual knowledge that allows a person to read a room correctly.

The franchise dramatizes this social intelligence through a series of encounters in Part 1 that function as tests of Hamza’s cover. Each encounter involves a different dimension of the social architecture: one tests his religious practice, another his knowledge of local history, another his relationship to the specific codes of masculine honor that govern interactions among men in Lyari’s criminal world. The franchise does not present these as formal tests, as scenes where characters are explicitly checking whether Hamza’s cover holds. It presents them as normal social interactions in which the social intelligence required to navigate correctly is the same social intelligence that any long-term resident of Lyari would possess, and the drama comes from the audience’s knowledge that Hamza does not naturally possess this intelligence but has had to acquire it through a decade of deliberate and disciplined learning.

The specific social codes of the Lyari world that the franchise requires Hamza to master are among the world-building’s most precisely rendered elements. The codes of masculine hospitality and generosity that operate within Pakistani Punjabi and Baloch cultural communities require specific responses to specific offers, specific ways of accepting and declining food and drink and shelter, specific protocols around debt and obligation that are unwritten but immediately legible to community members. Getting these codes right is as important as getting the language right, because the codes operate at the level of automatic social behavior: a person who has to consciously calculate the correct response to a social offer is a person who is performing rather than being, and the performance is detectable to the people around them who have been running these codes on autopilot since childhood.

The threat of exposure is always present in the franchise’s Lyari sequences, but the franchise is sophisticated about how it dramatizes that threat. The conventional spy thriller stages exposure risk as explicit dramatic confrontation: a suspicious character begins asking questions, the operative must improvise answers, the audience holds their breath while the cover either holds or fails. Dhurandhar uses this device when it is dramatically appropriate, but it also dramatizes exposure risk in a more diffuse and in some ways more unnerving way: as the constant background condition of deep-cover life, the ambient threat that is always present even in the most routine interactions, that cannot be switched off or set aside, that must be managed every moment of every day across years of continuous performance.

The most revealing aspect of Hamza’s navigation of Lyari is not the dramatic moments of near-exposure but the ordinary moments of successful belonging. The scene where Hamza participates in a neighborhood argument about cricket, offering opinions and accepting ribbing and giving as good as he gets, is a scene that would be meaningless in a less carefully built world. In Dhurandhar’s Lyari, it is the franchise’s deepest statement about what successful deep-cover work looks like from the inside: not dramatic confrontations survived by quick thinking but ordinary daily interactions completed without conscious effort, the cover so thoroughly integrated that the ordinary social life of the neighborhood has become genuinely the operative’s social life. The cricket argument is the cover succeeding at its most fundamental level, and it is also Jaskirat disappearing at his most complete, because the person who has that argument is not performing being a Lyari resident. He is one.

The scene in Part 1 where Hamza is invited to a religious gathering, a scene that most viewers experience primarily as a character moment between Hamza and Rehman, is actually the franchise’s most precise dramatization of the diffuse exposure threat. The gathering requires Hamza to participate in Islamic religious practice in a communal context, surrounded by men who have known each other for years and who will register any deviation from expected practice with the alertness that close community members apply to behavior that seems wrong. Hamza’s performance in this scene, the specific way he positions himself within the gathering, the precise management of his participation, the calibration of when to be conspicuous and when to be invisible, is the cover’s most technically demanding passage, and the fact that it passes without incident is more terrifying than a direct confrontation would be: it means the performance has succeeded, and success at this level of precision means the cover has become genuinely functional.

The franchise’s treatment of the relationships Hamza builds in Lyari is where the world-building’s emotional stakes are highest. The relationships with Rehman, with the members of the inner circle, and most significantly with Yalina, are relationships that the cover requires Hamza to construct and maintain with the authenticity of a genuine community member. The franchise is honest about what this requires: not simply a performance of friendship and trust, but the actual development of something that functions, at the behavioral and sometimes at the emotional level, like friendship and trust. An operative who merely performs warmth will eventually be detected by the people around him, who are themselves skilled readers of social behavior. Hamza must feel the warmth, at some level, to project it convincingly enough that a decade of daily interaction with the same people does not reveal the performance beneath.

The specific texture of Hamza’s relationship with Rehman deserves attention within the navigation framework, because it is the relationship that most clearly illustrates how the world-building and the emotional arc interact. Rehman is not merely an intelligence target. He is, over the course of the decade the franchise depicts, something that functions like a patron and something that approaches friendship without ever achieving it, because friendship requires honesty and Hamza’s relationship to everyone in Lyari is structurally dishonest. The franchise tracks this relationship with enough granularity that the audience develops its own relationship to Rehman through Hamza’s eyes, understanding what Hamza values in Rehman, what he finds comprehensible and what he finds alien, what makes the eventual betrayal of this relationship a moral weight that the mission’s success cannot simply dissolve. This is the world-building’s deepest narrative function: it makes the people in the world real enough that what happens to them at the mission’s conclusion carries the weight of what happens to real people.

Dhurandhar’s Karachi Among Cinematic Underworlds

The franchise’s world-building is most fully understood in comparison to the other cinematic underworlds that constitute its most relevant precedents, because the comparison reveals both what Dhurandhar achieves and where it situates itself within the larger tradition of crime and criminal-world cinema.

The Wire’s Baltimore, City of God’s favela, Gomorrah’s Campania, Gangs of Wasseypur’s Dhanbad: these are the reference points that Dhurandhar’s Karachi most productively invites, because all of them are criminal world constructions that prioritize social specificity over genre convention and that treat the criminal ecosystem as a complex social system rather than as a backdrop for individual heroics. What these works share, and what distinguishes them from conventional crime cinema, is the willingness to build the world from the inside out rather than the outside in: to begin with the social logic of the criminal community and derive the narrative from that logic, rather than imposing a generic narrative on a superficially exotic setting.

The Wire is the most structurally analogous precedent, because it is organized around the same insight that drives Dhurandhar’s world-building: that criminal organizations are social institutions with their own internal logic, their own economics, their own hierarchies and codes, and that understanding them requires the kind of embedded, patient observation that only sustained presence can provide. David Simon’s Baltimore drug trade operates by rules that are internally consistent and that the series patiently teaches its audience over multiple seasons. Rehman Dakait’s Lyari criminal network operates by rules that are internally consistent and that the franchise patiently teaches its audience across two films. The Wire’s most famous observation, that the game is the game, applies equally to the franchise’s Lyari: the criminal world has its own logic, and that logic does not stop operating because a RAW operative has entered the room.

The specific debt Dhurandhar owes to The Wire’s approach is visible in the franchise’s treatment of institutional behavior. The Wire is fundamentally a series about institutions and how institutions shape individual behavior, constrain individual action, and ultimately protect institutional interests at the cost of individual welfare. Dhurandhar applies this institutional lens to both the Lyari criminal network and the RAW apparatus that deploys Hamza against it: both are institutions with their own interests, their own inertia, and their own tendency to treat the individuals within them as means rather than ends. The institutional analysis is less developed in Dhurandhar than in The Wire, partly because feature film structure does not permit the episodic depth that television’s format allows, but the analytical impulse is the same.

City of God is relevant for a different reason: its construction of the favela as a world with its own history, its own geography of power, and its own generational dynamics creates a model for how cinematic world-building can make a specific criminal geography feel real to an audience that has no direct experience of the place. Fernando Meirelles’s favela feels real not because it is comprehensively documented but because the camera’s relationship to the space is that of a community member rather than an observer: the neighborhood is inhabited from the inside, and the audience’s perspective is always that of someone who knows the neighborhood rather than someone visiting it. Dhurandhar achieves the same effect through a combination of production design and camera strategy: the franchise’s Lyari sequences are shot with a proximity and a spatial familiarity that communicate community membership rather than external observation. The camera knows where it is in Lyari, and it moves through the neighborhood with the confidence of someone who has been there before.

The specific cinematographic lesson Dhurandhar draws from City of God is the use of the wide shot as an establishing statement of community rather than as a compositional choice. In conventional cinema, the wide shot establishes geography. In City of God, the wide shot establishes belonging: the camera’s willingness to pull back far enough to show the favela’s full complexity as a community space communicates that the film knows this place, that it has earned the right to show it in its full extent rather than in the selective close-ups of tourist observation. Dhurandhar’s Lyari wide shots carry the same communicative function: they show a neighborhood, not a set, and the distinction is felt even by viewers who cannot articulate its source.

Gangs of Wasseypur is the most directly relevant Indian cinema precedent, and the comparison is instructive both for what it shares with Dhurandhar’s approach and for where the two films diverge. Anurag Kashyap’s Dhanbad coal mafia world is built with the same commitment to social specificity that Dhurandhar brings to Lyari: the specific texture of a community shaped by its criminal economy, the way that criminal power structures are embedded in legitimate social forms, the generational dynamics of criminal organizations and the communities that host them. Both films resist the temptation to aestheticize their criminal worlds for genre purposes and both insist that the criminal ecosystem be understood on its own terms. The difference is one of perspective and purpose: Gangs of Wasseypur builds its world from the inside, following characters who are native to it, while Dhurandhar builds it from the perspective of an outsider who is learning to navigate it from within. This difference changes the narrative relationship between audience and world: in Gangs of Wasseypur, the audience occupies the world alongside its native inhabitants. In Dhurandhar, the audience occupies it alongside a foreigner performing nativeness, and the performance is legible against the world’s specificity in ways that a less precisely built world would not support.

The critical insight that Dhurandhar draws from Gangs of Wasseypur is the understanding that criminal power in South Asian contexts is always embedded in community rather than imposed on it. Kashyap’s Dhanbad crime families are not external threats to the community they inhabit: they are the community in its most concentrated form, the expression of the community’s values, conflicts, and economic logic through the specific medium of organized violence and criminal enterprise. Dhurandhar applies this understanding to Lyari: Rehman’s power is not a parasite on the neighborhood’s body but a part of its organism, shaped by the same forces that shaped everything else in the neighborhood, and responsive to the same pressures. This is why infiltrating the power structure requires becoming part of the community rather than simply gaining access to the criminals.

Gomorrah, Matteo Garrone’s adaptation of Roberto Saviano’s study of the Neapolitan Camorra, is the most tonally analogous international precedent. Like Dhurandhar, Gomorrah builds a criminal world that is simultaneously mundane and terrifying, that refuses the romanticism of conventional crime cinema and insists on the criminal ecosystem as an economic system with human consequences. Both films are interested in what it costs to be inside the system, whether as a member or as a pretender, and both films resist providing the audience with a morally safe position from which to observe the criminal world without implication. Gomorrah’s world offers no clean exit and no heroes whose ethical clarity would allow the audience to enjoy the world’s violence from a comfortable distance. Dhurandhar’s Lyari offers the same uncomfortable implication: knowing the world is knowing the people in it, and the more completely you know them, the less comfortable the mission becomes.

What places Dhurandhar’s Karachi in genuine dialogue with these works, rather than merely in comparison with them, is the franchise’s commitment to the world-building as a moral instrument rather than a narrative backdrop. The Lyari that Dhar builds is built to be known, inhabited, and eventually betrayed, and the moral weight of the betrayal is inseparable from the depth of the knowledge. A less fully realized Karachi would produce a less morally serious franchise. The world-building is not in the service of the story. It is the story’s foundation, and every dramatic and moral element that the franchise builds above it depends on the solidity of what has been constructed beneath.

Where the Franchise Falls Short

A serious analysis of the franchise’s world-building must acknowledge where the ambition of the Lyari construction exceeds its execution, because those places are real even if they do not ultimately undermine the overall achievement.

The most significant limitation is the franchise’s perspective on Lyari’s resident population. The franchise builds a rich and specific world, but it builds it primarily as seen through the operational eyes of a RAW operative whose mission is to use the world rather than to understand it on its own terms. The Lyari characters who exist outside the operational hierarchy, the ordinary residents, the neighborhood’s working population, the families who are not part of the criminal network but who live within its social and economic sphere, are largely absent from the franchise’s world-building. The Lyari the franchise constructs is the criminal Lyari, the underworld, and while this is dramatically appropriate and operationally accurate, it is also a selective portrait that the franchise occasionally treats as comprehensive. The real Lyari neighborhood is a community of hundreds of thousands of people, the vast majority of whom have no involvement in the criminal activities the franchise depicts, and the franchise’s construction tends to conflate the neighborhood with its criminal subculture in ways that a more balanced portrait would complicate.

The franchise’s production design, for all its achievement, also has visible seams in certain sequences. There are moments, particularly in some of the exterior wide shots, where the combination of practical locations and production design creates a visual texture that is recognizably South Asian without being specifically Pakistani in the way the franchise’s best sequences achieve. An audience with direct knowledge of the real Karachi would identify these moments as the places where the reconstruction is working from reference rather than from embodied knowledge. This is an inevitable consequence of the production challenge: building a convincing representation of a specific place you cannot access will always produce some seams, and the franchise’s achievement is that the seams are so infrequent that they read as exceptions rather than as the rule.

The power structure analysis, while sophisticated, also leaves some aspects of the Lyari political economy underexplored. The franchise’s primary focus on Rehman’s criminal organization means that the neighborhood’s formal political dimension, the elected representatives, the local governance structures, the community organizations that exist alongside and sometimes in tension with the criminal hierarchy, are largely absent from the world the franchise builds. The real Lyari has a political life that is distinct from but entangled with its criminal life, and the franchise’s near-total focus on the criminal dimension produces a world that is richer than most Bollywood spy thrillers but less comprehensive than the best examples of the crime-world genre it cites as its precedents. The Wire, for all the comparison this article draws, includes city hall and the school system and the newspaper alongside the drug trade: it builds the criminal world within the full social context that makes the criminal world legible. Dhurandhar cannot achieve this comprehensiveness within its feature film format, but the limitation is worth acknowledging because it marks the boundary of what the franchise achieves rather than what the tradition it draws on is capable of.

The women of Lyari are another underrepresented dimension of the world-building. The franchise focuses almost entirely on the masculine social world of the criminal network, which is dramatically understandable: the operational target is a world organized around male power, male loyalty, and male violence. But Lyari as a community is not an exclusively masculine world, and the near-absence of women’s social life from the franchise’s construction produces a neighborhood that feels incomplete in ways that the best cinematic underworlds avoid. City of God’s favela includes women as social actors with their own roles in the community’s organization. Gangs of Wasseypur’s Dhanbad gives women both narrative agency and structural function within the criminal world it depicts. Dhurandhar’s Lyari is more uniformly masculine, and the uniformity reflects both the operational focus and a creative limitation that a fuller world-building commitment would have addressed.

The Bigger Argument: Why Lyari Changes What the Franchise Is

The world-building argument comes full circle when you ask what Dhurandhar would be without the Lyari it has built. The answer is: a competent spy thriller with a psychologically interesting protagonist. With the Lyari it has built, it is something more: a film about what it means to inhabit a world that is not your own so completely that the world’s logic becomes your logic, its relationships your relationships, its rhythms your rhythms. The world-building is not the context for this film. It is the film’s subject.

Every serious analytical dimension of the franchise, the themes of identity and belonging, the moral cost of the mission, the psychological damage of deep-cover work, the question of what Jaskirat loses in becoming Hamza, all of these depend for their dramatic and emotional realization on the Lyari that the production design team constructed being real enough that the audience understands what it means to be genuinely at home in it. A cartoon Karachi, a generic South Asian enemy territory, would not produce the moral weight that the franchise achieves. Only a Lyari specific enough that the audience comes to know it the way a resident knows a neighborhood, only that kind of world-building, can produce the experience the franchise is designed to create: the experience of watching a person become the world they infiltrated, and mourning the original person in the wreckage of that becoming.

The world-building’s relationship to the franchise’s dialogue and performance is also worth noting in this final argument. The franchise’s dialogue is effective partly because it is delivered within a world that the audience has come to believe in, and the believability of the world gives the dialogue’s specific texture, the Urdu idioms, the social protocols embedded in how characters address each other, the particular rhythm of trust and guardedness that characterizes conversation in Lyari’s criminal circles, the weight it needs to carry. Ranveer Singh’s performance as Hamza navigating Lyari is effective partly because the Lyari he is navigating is specific enough to provide genuine resistance: the performance of belonging in a real world is more difficult and more impressive than the performance of belonging in a generic one, and the audience’s awareness of the world’s specificity is part of what allows them to appreciate the performance’s precision.

The franchise’s commercial achievement, visible in the extraordinary collection data tracking both installments across their complete theatrical runs, is partly a testament to the world-building’s success. Audiences returned to Dhurandhar not merely for the plot’s resolution but for the world’s texture, for the specific experience of inhabiting Lyari alongside Hamza across two viewings that revealed different layers of the same constructed environment. This is the kind of audience relationship that great world-building produces, and it is the kind of relationship that distinguishes a franchise with genuine artistic ambition from one that merely has a successful formula. Dhurandhar built a world worth returning to, and that world is Lyari.

The comparison to the best cinematic criminal underworlds, to The Wire and City of God and Gangs of Wasseypur, ultimately serves to locate Dhurandhar within a tradition of serious world-building cinema and to make the claim that the franchise belongs in that tradition on the merits of what it has achieved. This is a claim that mainstream Bollywood films have rarely been able to make about their world-building, because mainstream Bollywood has historically treated setting as atmosphere rather than as character. Dhurandhar changed this by building a world serious enough to carry the moral and psychological weight that the franchise’s narrative demands, and by demonstrating that an Indian spy thriller can care about the world its spy inhabits with the same depth and specificity that the best examples of international crime cinema have always brought to their criminal geographies. Lyari is the franchise’s hidden masterpiece, the achievement that underpins every other achievement, the world that makes the story possible and makes the story matter.

That Lyari was built on a set in India, assembled from research and reference and creative intelligence rather than from direct experience, makes it no less real as cinema. It makes it more impressive as craft. The production team built a world they could not visit from documentation, consultation, and the deep creative imagination that serious filmmaking requires, and they built it with enough specificity that the audience inhabits it rather than observes it. This is cinema’s most fundamental achievement: making the imagined feel real enough to matter. Dhurandhar achieves it for an entire neighborhood of a city on the other side of a closed border, and the world it builds in the process is the most ambitious and most successful single act of cinematic world-building in recent Bollywood history.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Was Dhurandhar actually filmed in Karachi?

The franchise was not filmed in Karachi. The Lyari sequences were shot primarily in India and Thailand, using locations selected for their architectural and visual resemblance to the real Lyari neighborhood and then extensively modified through production design, including custom signage, street dressing, color grading, and set construction, to create a convincing representation of the Pakistani neighborhood. The production team conducted extensive research using visual documentation, cultural consultation, and reference from people with direct knowledge of the real Lyari to ensure the constructed environment was as specific and accurate as the dramatic requirements allowed. The franchise’s achievement in creating a convincing Karachi without access to the actual location is one of its most impressive production accomplishments.

Q: Is the Lyari depicted in Dhurandhar based on the real Lyari neighborhood in Karachi?

The franchise’s Lyari is based on the real Lyari neighborhood in Karachi but is not a documentary representation of it. The real Lyari is a densely populated working-class neighborhood in Karachi that has historically had significant involvement with criminal organizations and that has experienced serious political violence, including a sustained conflict between criminal gangs and Pakistani state security forces in the early 2010s. The franchise draws on documented aspects of Lyari’s criminal ecology, including real power structures, real conflict dynamics, and real figures who inspire several of the franchise’s characters, while taking dramatic liberties appropriate to a fictional spy thriller. The franchise explicitly positions itself as fiction and does not claim to represent the real Lyari comprehensively or with documentary accuracy.

Q: Who is Rehman Dakait based on in real life?

The character of Rehman Dakait in Dhurandhar is a fictional creation, but bears similarities to real criminal figures who have operated in Lyari’s underworld. The franchise’s creative team has indicated that Rehman is a composite figure drawing on elements of several real criminal leaders who have been documented in Pakistani journalistic and law enforcement accounts of Lyari’s criminal history. The character’s specific combination of community authority, criminal power, family life, and complex relationship with state institutions reflects documented patterns in real Lyari criminal leadership rather than a specific single individual. As with other characters in the franchise whose names echo real people, the portrayal is best understood as inspired by rather than depicting any specific real person.

Q: How accurate is Dhurandhar’s portrayal of Karachi’s criminal power structures?

The franchise’s portrayal of the relationship between Karachi’s criminal organizations, the Pakistani state apparatus, and ISI is broadly consistent with what has been publicly documented about these relationships in Pakistani and international journalism and in the testimony of officials and witnesses in various legal and investigative proceedings. The transactional relationship between criminal organizations and intelligence services, the protection economy that gives criminal leaders community authority, the competition between rival criminal factions for territorial and economic control, and the embedded nature of criminal networks within legitimate political structures: all of these are documented features of Karachi’s criminal landscape that the franchise dramatizes with reasonable accuracy. The franchise takes dramatic liberties with specific events and timelines, as any fictional treatment would, but its basic social and political mapping of the criminal ecosystem reflects genuine research rather than generic genre convention.

Q: How does Dhurandhar’s Karachi compare to how Pakistan is typically portrayed in Indian cinema?

The conventional portrayal of Pakistan in Indian mainstream cinema, particularly in the action and spy thriller genres, tends toward one of two poles: either a generic hostile territory populated by villains defined by their national and religious identity, or an abstract geopolitical threat without significant human texture. Dhurandhar represents a significant departure from both conventions. The franchise builds a Pakistan, specifically a Karachi neighborhood, that has genuine human complexity: characters with comprehensible motivations, a social world with its own internal logic, a community life that the franchise treats with enough respect that the audience can understand why the people who inhabit it have made the choices they have made. This does not mean the franchise presents a neutral or balanced portrait of Pakistan: it maintains a clear Indian operational perspective and its sympathies are entirely with its Indian protagonist. But within that perspective, it creates a Pakistani world that is a world rather than a set, and this is the clearest measure of the advance it represents over previous Bollywood treatments of the same subject.

Q: What makes Lyari specifically different from other Pakistani settings used in Indian films?

Most Indian films that use Pakistani settings treat Pakistan as either a generic South Asian environment with enemy-signaling modifications or as a vaguely exotic landscape defined by its foreignness. Dhurandhar’s Lyari is specific in ways that neither of these approaches is: it has a specific neighborhood identity, a specific criminal ecology, a specific social architecture, and a specific visual and sensory character that distinguishes it not just from Indian settings but from other Pakistani cities and even from other Karachi neighborhoods. The production design team made choices that locate the franchise’s setting in the real Lyari neighborhood, not just in Pakistan generally, and this level of specificity is what allows the franchise to achieve the world-building density that its dramatic ambitions require. The specificity is the achievement: any production team can create a generic South Asian environment with Urdu signage. It takes genuine research and creative commitment to create something as specifically located as Dhurandhar’s Lyari.

Q: How does the franchise handle the ethical complexity of portraying Lyari and its residents?

The franchise navigates the ethical complexity of its setting by consistently treating the Lyari world with enough specificity and enough human depth that the community it depicts cannot be read as a simple villain landscape. The characters who inhabit Lyari are rendered with individual complexity: Rehman has a domestic life, genuine loyalties, and comprehensible motivations. Jameel Jamali is genuinely warm and genuinely funny. Yalina has her own interiority and her own moral standing. The franchise does not ask the audience to admire these characters or to endorse the criminal world they inhabit, but it does ask the audience to understand them as people rather than as obstacles or symbols. This approach allows the franchise to maintain its Indian operational perspective while resisting the reduction of Lyari and its community to simple enemy territory.

Q: How does the production design for Lyari connect to the franchise’s emotional stakes?

The connection is direct and structural: the emotional stakes of the franchise, particularly the moral cost of the betrayal that Hamza’s mission ultimately requires, depend entirely on the Lyari world being real enough that the betrayal feels like a betrayal of real people and a real community rather than a narrative operation against a generic enemy setting. If Lyari is a cartoon, then the relationships Hamza builds there are cartoon relationships, and their eventual destruction carries no more moral weight than a chess piece being removed from a board. Only because Lyari is built with enough human specificity that the audience comes to know its people and its rhythms does the mission’s conclusion carry the moral weight that the franchise’s ambitions require. The production design is not decorating the emotional stakes. It is creating them.

Q: Does the franchise romanticize Lyari’s criminal world?

The franchise does not romanticize the criminal world in the sense of presenting violence and criminal authority as glamorous or admirable, but it does treat Lyari’s criminal ecosystem with the kind of engaged curiosity and detailed attention that is sometimes misread as romanticization. The distinction matters. To portray a criminal world in enough detail that its internal logic is legible is not the same as endorsing that logic. The Wire’s detailed portrayal of Baltimore’s drug trade is not an advertisement for drug dealing. Gomorrah’s intimate portrait of the Camorra is not a celebration of organized crime. Dhurandhar’s Lyari, similarly, is built with enough specificity and enough human texture to be understood rather than simply judged, and understanding is not the same as endorsing. The franchise is entirely clear about the violence that underlies Rehman’s authority and the human cost that the criminal economy extracts from the community it inhabits. The specificity of that portrayal is what makes the moral cost legible rather than what obscures it.

Q: How does Hamza’s relationship to Lyari change across both films?

The franchise tracks Hamza’s relationship to the Lyari world as a narrative arc in its own right, and this arc is one of the franchise’s central character movements. In Part 1’s early sequences, Hamza’s relationship to Lyari is that of a skilled visitor performing residency: he knows the world and moves through it competently, but the relationship is strategic rather than genuine. As Part 1 progresses and the cover deepens, the relationship shifts: the Lyari world begins to function less as a field to be navigated and more as an environment that Hamza inhabits with genuine familiarity. By Part 2, the relationship has reached its most disturbing phase: Lyari is, in some meaningful sense, home for Hamza, more thoroughly home than the Delhi he cannot return to and the Pathankot that no longer exists in the form he knew it. The world that was built to serve the mission has become the world that defines the operative, and the franchise’s most emotionally devastating sequences in Part 2 occur at the intersection of this recognition and the operational requirements that cannot accommodate it.

Q: What does the franchise’s box office performance reveal about the audience’s relationship to the Lyari world?

The sustained commercial performance of both Dhurandhar films, which you can trace in detail through the franchise’s complete day-wise and week-wise collection data, reveals an audience that returned to these films repeatedly, a pattern more typical of prestige television than of mainstream commercial cinema. Repeat viewership at the level the franchise generated is almost always the product of world-building that rewards return engagement, of environments rich enough that a second or third visit reveals something new. The Lyari world that Dhurandhar constructs is exactly this kind of environment: dense enough with visual and social detail that repeat viewers consistently report discovering elements they missed on first viewing. The franchise’s sustained holds beyond Week 3, which significantly exceeded industry projections for films of this length and rating, are partly attributable to audiences returning specifically to spend more time in the world the franchise built. This is the commercial evidence for the world-building argument: a setting that can produce this kind of repeat engagement is a setting that has achieved what the thesis claims for it. It is a character rather than a backdrop, a world rather than a stage.

Q: How does the Lyari world-building connect to the franchise’s action sequences?

The action sequences in Dhurandhar are inseparable from the world in which they are staged, which is one of the elements that distinguishes them from conventional Bollywood action. The franchise’s action sequence analysis develops this argument in full detail, but the world-building dimension is worth noting here: the Lyari fights and chases are specifically located in the neighborhood’s spatial architecture, using the vertical dimension, the narrow streets, the rooftop terrain, and the specific geography of Rehman’s domain in ways that make the action sequences feel embedded in the world rather than staged for the action sequence’s own sake. When Hamza fights in Lyari, the audience knows where they are. They know what the space means, who controls it, and what is at stake beyond the immediate physical confrontation. This narrative embeddedness is the world-building’s most direct contribution to the franchise’s action cinema, and it is the difference between action that is exciting and action that is meaningful.

Q: How does the franchise’s Lyari compare to the depiction of Karachi in Pakistani films and television?

Pakistani cinema and television have their own tradition of Karachi representation, rooted in the direct experience and cultural knowledge that Indian productions necessarily lack. Pakistani crime dramas and social serials have depicted Lyari and similar Karachi neighborhoods with the specific insider knowledge that comes from cultural proximity, and the comparison between these representations and Dhurandhar’s construction is instructive. The franchise’s Lyari is inevitably more selective and more dramatically organized than what Pakistani productions bring to the same territory: it emphasizes the criminal and power dimensions that serve the spy thriller’s narrative requirements while necessarily giving less attention to the broader community life that Pakistani representations more naturally include. This is not a failure of the franchise but a consequence of its perspective and purpose: Dhurandhar is building Lyari as a field for a specific intelligence operation, not as a comprehensive social portrait, and the construction reflects these priorities. What the franchise achieves within these constraints is considerable; what it omits would require a Pakistani production with different purposes to supply.

Q: How does Rehman Dakait’s character function as a guide to the Lyari world?

Rehman Dakait serves a dual narrative function in the franchise: he is simultaneously the intelligence target that justifies the operation and the primary guide through whose eyes the audience learns the Lyari world. The franchise uses Hamza’s relationship with Rehman as the primary vehicle for conveying the neighborhood’s power structure, social codes, and human texture, because Rehman is the figure who knows all of it most completely and who, over the course of their relationship, shares enough of his world with Hamza that the audience gains access to a perspective they would otherwise never occupy. This is one of the franchise’s most sophisticated structural choices: by making the intelligence target also the world’s primary explainer, the franchise ensures that the world-building and the character work are inseparable rather than parallel. Understanding Rehman is understanding Lyari, and understanding Lyari is understanding why what happens to Rehman at the mission’s conclusion carries the moral weight that the franchise is committed to giving it. The complete analysis of the franchise develops the Rehman character in full depth; what matters here is his function as a world-building instrument.

Q: What does the franchise’s Lyari reveal about the relationship between poverty and criminal power?

The franchise engages with the economic dimension of Lyari’s criminal ecology with enough honesty to acknowledge, without ever quite stating directly, that criminal power structures in neighborhoods like Lyari exist in a relationship to poverty and state failure that is more complex than simple cause and effect. Rehman’s organization does not merely exploit the neighborhood’s poverty. It is partly constituted by it: the absence of reliable formal employment, the inadequacy of state-provided services, the absence of effective legal institutions, all of these create the conditions in which a parallel economy and a parallel governance structure can develop with genuine community roots. The franchise’s willingness to show Rehman as a figure who provides real services to the community, who has genuine loyalty from the people who work with him, who is not simply a predator on the neighborhood but an outgrowth of its conditions, reflects an engagement with the sociology of criminal power that most action cinema avoids. This engagement does not make the franchise sympathetic to criminal violence. It makes the criminal world comprehensible rather than simply alien, which is a much more demanding artistic and ethical achievement.

Q: How does the Lyari world connect to the franchise’s themes of identity?

The Lyari world functions as one of the franchise’s primary instruments for exploring its central theme of identity displacement, because the world Hamza inhabits is itself organized around questions of who belongs and who does not, who is recognized as a community member and who is identified as an outsider. The criminal ecosystem that Rehman governs is a community with strict and consistently enforced membership criteria: you are in or you are out, and being in requires demonstrating your belonging through every social interaction, every expression of loyalty, every act of reciprocity that the community’s codes require. Hamza’s navigation of this world is therefore simultaneously a spy operation and an identity test: the cover works to the extent that the world accepts Hamza as Hamza, and acceptance requires performing belonging at the level of automatic authenticity rather than conscious effort. The franchise’s central identity themes are thus embedded in the specific logic of the world that the production design constructs: the world’s criteria for belonging are precisely the criteria that the cover must meet, and meeting them requires the identity transformation that the franchise tracks as its central moral and psychological subject.

Q: How does Part 2 change the franchise’s relationship to the Lyari world?

Part 2’s relationship to the Lyari world that Part 1 established is one of the franchise’s most interesting structural challenges, because Part 2 must simultaneously honor what Part 1 built and develop it in directions that the second installment’s different narrative requirements demand. Part 2’s Lyari sequences have a different quality from Part 1’s: they are experienced through the knowledge that the world is nearing the end of its usefulness to the operation, that the relationship between Hamza and the community he has built will be severed by the mission’s conclusion, and that the community members who are most genuinely bonded to Hamza have no idea that this severance is coming. This foreknowledge changes the audience’s relationship to every Lyari sequence in Part 2: the world that was built and inhabited in Part 1 becomes, in Part 2, the thing that is going to be lost, and the specific human texture of the loss is what makes the mission’s completion feel simultaneously like success and like tragedy. The complete Part 2 analysis develops the narrative dimension of this transition in detail; what matters here is the world-building’s contribution to the loss’s emotional weight.

Q: What does Lyari’s world-building reveal about Aditya Dhar’s development as a filmmaker?

The Lyari construction in Dhurandhar represents a significant expansion of Aditya Dhar’s world-building ambitions from his earlier work. Uri: The Surgical Strike is a film that takes place in real locations, including actual military settings, and whose world-building challenge is primarily one of authenticity rather than construction. Dhurandhar faces the opposite challenge: it must construct a world that cannot be accessed directly, in a country that is both the political adversary and the setting for the franchise’s central narrative. The move from filming in real locations to constructing a fictional equivalent of an inaccessible real place represents a qualitative shift in Dhar’s directorial practice, and the success of the construction is evidence of a filmmaker who has significantly expanded his creative range between his debut and his franchise work. The Aditya Dhar filmmaking analysis traces this development in full detail; the Lyari construction is its most visible and most impressive evidence.

Q: How does the franchise use the Lyari world to comment on the India-Pakistan relationship?

The franchise’s Lyari construction is, among other things, a political statement about the nature of the India-Pakistan relationship, though it is a statement made through implication rather than through direct expression. By building Pakistan as a place rather than an abstraction, by giving Karachi’s criminal underworld a human texture and a social logic that the audience comes to understand, the franchise complicates the simple us-versus-them binary that most Indian action cinema applies to Pakistan. This complication does not extend to moral equivalence: the franchise remains entirely aligned with the Indian intelligence mission and never suggests that the Pakistani state or the Lyari criminal network are morally comparable to the Indian protagonists. But it does suggest that the enemy territory is a place where human beings live by a recognizable social logic, and this suggestion is itself a form of political commentary that goes beyond what most Bollywood spy films have been willing to make. The controversies the franchise generated partly reflect the discomfort that some audiences felt with a mainstream Indian film that treated Pakistan with this degree of human specificity.

Q: How does the franchise’s commercial success reflect the audience’s appetite for immersive world-building?

The sustained box office performance of both Dhurandhar films, which you can examine in full detail through the franchise’s complete collection data, is partly a reflection of the Lyari world’s power to generate the kind of repeat engagement that sustains commercial runs beyond their initial opening weekend. Films with richly constructed worlds, from the Lord of the Rings trilogy to the early entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, consistently generate repeat viewership at rates that exceed simpler narratives, because the audience’s relationship to the world extends beyond the plot’s resolution. Once the plot question is answered, the world remains as an object of continued attention and exploration. Dhurandhar’s Lyari is this kind of world for this franchise: specific enough, dense enough, and human enough that returning audiences consistently report discovering elements they missed on first viewing. The sustained holds in Part 1’s third and fourth weeks, which significantly exceeded industry projections for a film of its length and rating, are partly attributable to audiences returning to spend more time in the world the franchise built. This is the commercial validation of the world-building argument: a setting that generates this kind of repeat engagement has earned the designation of character rather than backdrop.

Q: How does the franchise handle the supporting characters in the Lyari world relative to Rehman?

The supporting population of Dhurandhar’s Lyari is one of the world-building’s most important instruments, because a world is only as real as the people who inhabit it at its margins. The supporting character analysis examines these figures in full character-analytical depth; what matters for the world-building analysis is their function in establishing Lyari as a community rather than as a criminal headquarters. Jameel Jamali, Mohammad Aalam, and the other secondary figures who populate Hamza’s Lyari life are not merely comic relief or plot convenience. They are the human texture of the neighborhood, the evidence that the world Rehman governs is a lived community rather than simply an organizational chart. Each of these characters has specific social relationships with the others, specific positions within the neighborhood’s hierarchy, specific personal histories that shape their behavior in the world. The density of this supporting cast’s characterization is what allows the franchise to claim that Lyari is a community: not the production design alone, and not Rehman alone, but the full ensemble of people who move through the world with their own purposes and their own social gravity.

Q: What would be lost from the franchise if the Lyari world-building were less specific?

This is perhaps the most direct way to test the world-building argument: imagine Dhurandhar’s Lyari replaced by a generic South Asian criminal environment, an unnamed Pakistani city with generic underworld figures and generic street-level signage and generic ambient sound. What changes? The answer is: everything that makes the franchise morally and dramatically serious rather than merely commercially successful. Without the specific Lyari, the relationships Hamza builds are relationships with types rather than with people, and the betrayal of those relationships carries the weight of a plot event rather than a moral act. Without the specific Lyari, the franchise’s central theme of identity displacement has nowhere to anchor: Jaskirat can only become Hamza if Hamza is a person from a real place, and the realness of the place is what makes the personhood real. Without the specific Lyari, the franchise is a competent spy thriller with a psychologically interesting premise. With it, the franchise is the thing it actually is: a sustained meditation on what it means to inhabit a world that is not your own, told through the specific details of one man’s decade in one neighborhood of one city that the franchise has taken the care and the creative intelligence to make genuinely real.

Q: How does the franchise’s action choreography interact with the Lyari world-building?

The action sequences in Dhurandhar are inseparable from the Lyari world in which they are staged, and this spatial embeddedness is one of the key differences between the franchise’s action cinema and the action sequences of most comparable Bollywood films. The warehouse confrontations, the rooftop chases, the close-quarters violence in the neighborhood’s narrow lanes: all of these are staged with an awareness of the specific spatial character of the franchise’s Lyari, using the architecture, the vertical dimension, and the social geography of the neighborhood as choreographic material rather than as scenery. When Hamza fights in Lyari, the audience knows where they are in the neighborhood’s geography, and that knowledge carries implications: a fight at the edge of Rehman’s territory has different stakes from a fight in its center, a chase through the market has different risks than a chase through the residential lanes. The action is embedded in the world’s logic rather than paused from it, and the embeddedness is what makes the franchise’s violence feel meaningful rather than spectacular.

Q: Does the franchise ever acknowledge the gap between its Lyari and the real Lyari?

The franchise presents itself explicitly as a work of fiction, not as a documentary or as a reconstruction of real events. Within this fictional frame, the production design’s construction of Lyari is not presented as a comprehensive or authoritative representation of the real neighborhood: it is a specific fictional environment built to serve specific dramatic purposes. The film does not claim that this is what Karachi looks like or that this is how Pakistani neighborhoods operate. It claims that within the fiction, these are the conditions that a RAW operative would have to navigate, and it builds those conditions with enough specificity and enough research-grounded detail that the fiction is believable and dramatically productive. The gap between the franchise’s Lyari and the real Lyari is the gap between any serious fictional representation and the reality it draws on: real enough to be emotionally and dramatically credible, specific enough to carry analytical weight, but ultimately a creative construction in service of a story rather than a documentary in service of fact.

Q: How does the Karachi world compare to the Delhi sequences in terms of production design?

The contrast between the franchise’s Karachi and Delhi environments is among the most deliberate and consequential production design decisions in both films. The Delhi sequences, which represent the institutional dimension of the franchise’s world, are built in a register of controlled, cool functionality: offices and safe houses that are functional without being warm, institutional spaces that communicate competence and authority without communicating home. Against Lyari’s warm amber palette and organic social texture, Delhi reads as cool, grey, and abstract, a world organized around institutional purpose rather than around human community. This contrast is not accidental and is not merely aesthetic. It is the franchise’s visual argument about the difference between the world that Hamza has been sent into and the world that sent him: Lyari is lived, Delhi is administered, and the gap between the lived and the administered is where the franchise’s moral argument about institutional violence and individual cost is most concisely expressed. The production design enforces this argument without a word of dialogue, which is the mark of visual storytelling working at its highest level.

Q: What does the world-building reveal about the franchise’s ambitions for Indian cinema globally?

The Dhurandhar franchise’s Lyari construction is, among other things, a statement about what Indian cinema is capable of when it chooses to build rather than to approximate. The decision to construct a convincing Pakistani neighborhood from scratch, without access to the real location, reflects an ambition that is not merely commercial but artistic: the ambition to produce world-building cinema that can be evaluated against the best international examples of the form rather than against the more modest conventions of domestic genre cinema. This ambition is visible in the research investment, in the production design’s specificity, in the franchise’s willingness to let the world-building slow the narrative’s momentum when the narrative’s momentum needs to wait for the world to establish itself properly. Indian cinema has the technical capacity and the creative intelligence to build worlds of this quality: what it has historically lacked is the creative ambition and the commercial confidence to attempt it at this scale. Dhurandhar provides both the example and the commercial validation that should make such ambition more accessible to future productions.

Q: How does Lyari’s world-building connect to the franchise’s treatment of violence?

The Lyari world’s specificity transforms the franchise’s violence from spectacle into consequence, and this transformation is the world-building’s most direct contribution to the franchise’s action sequences and to its moral register. Violence in a world the audience knows produces a different response from violence in a world the audience does not know, because the stakes are different. When a fight breaks out in a Lyari lane the audience has spent an hour learning to read, the fight carries the weight of what that lane means: whose territory it is, who controls the sight lines, what history of alliances and betrayals makes this particular confrontation significant rather than random. The world-building provides the context that makes violence meaningful, and meaning is what separates a fight scene that matters from a fight scene that merely entertains. The franchise’s A certificate, which classifies it as adult-only in India, is partly a consequence of the violence’s meaningfulness: violence that carries narrative and moral weight is viscerally different from violence that exists purely for spectacle, and the franchise’s violence carries enough weight that the certification reflects the emotional experience rather than simply the physical content.

Q: How does the franchise use space to reflect Hamza’s psychological state?

The spatial architecture of the Lyari world functions as a psychological mirror for Hamza’s operational and emotional state across both films, and this function is one of the world-building’s most sophisticated narrative instruments. In the early Part 1 sequences, Hamza moves through Lyari along the edges: he is present but not central, observing more than participating, occupying the peripheral spaces of the neighborhood’s social geography. As the cover deepens and the inhabiting becomes genuine, Hamza moves toward the center: he is present in Rehman’s inner circle, in the neighborhood’s most privileged social spaces, in the rooms where the decisions that matter are made. This spatial progression tracks the cover’s success with a precision that requires no dialogue to register: the viewer who is attending to where Hamza stands in each scene will observe his movement from margin to center across Part 1 and understand what it means without being told. By Part 2, the spatial grammar has shifted again: Hamza occupies the center of the Lyari world but the film’s framing increasingly places him at the edge of the frame, slightly outside the group, slightly displaced from the community he fully inhabits. The world-building’s spatial language is tracking the psychological displacement that the origin story analysis identifies as the cover’s deepest cost: to be at the center of a world while remaining, at some inarticulate level, apart from it.

Q: What research process produced the franchise’s Lyari?

The production team’s research process for constructing Dhurandhar’s Lyari is documented in enough detail to understand its scope, though not every element of it has been publicly discussed. The process involved extensive visual research using documented photography and film footage of the real Lyari neighborhood, cultural consultation with Pakistani community members who could verify the accuracy of specific details about daily life, social codes, and architectural character, and engagement with journalistic and academic documentation of Karachi’s criminal ecology to ensure the power structure and economic dynamics the franchise depicts were grounded in documented reality rather than in generic crime genre conventions. The production design team built detailed physical reference libraries before construction began, and the costume design drew on specific photographic documentation of the real neighborhood’s clothing culture rather than on generalized South Asian fashion references. This investment in research is visible in the construction’s specificity: the details that distinguish the franchise’s Lyari from a generic South Asian criminal environment are details that require research rather than imagination to produce, and the accumulated specificity of the construction is the cumulative result of that research investment.

Q: How does the franchise handle the generational dimension of Lyari’s criminal culture?

The generational dimension of criminal culture is one of the elements that The Wire and Gangs of Wasseypur both treat with exceptional depth, and it is an area where Dhurandhar’s construction is thinner than its best precedents. The franchise gives the Lyari world historical depth through Rehman’s established authority and through occasional references to the network’s history, but it does not develop the generational logic of the criminal ecosystem with the sustained attention that would make the world’s historical depth fully legible. Rehman is presented as a figure who has built his authority over time, but the franchise does not show us the previous generation of Lyari’s criminal leadership that his generation displaced, nor does it develop the next generation of figures who will eventually replace Rehman’s cohort. This temporal thinness is partly a consequence of the franchise’s operational focus: the mission requires Hamza to understand the current power structure, not its historical antecedents or its future successors. But the absence limits the world-building in ways that the most comprehensive cinematic underworlds avoid: a world without a historical dimension and a generational logic is a world that exists only in the present, and the present is always thinner than the past and future that surround it.

Q: What does the Lyari world-building contribute to the franchise’s legacy?

The franchise’s legacy in Indian cinema is partly the legacy of the Lyari world it built, because that world represents a proof of concept that had not previously existed: that Bollywood can construct a Pakistani setting with the kind of human specificity and social depth that allows it to serve as a genuine dramatic environment rather than as a generic enemy backdrop. This proof of concept matters beyond the franchise itself, because it establishes a benchmark against which future Indian films set in Pakistan or in other adversarial territories will be measured. A filmmaker who attempts to set a spy thriller in Karachi after Dhurandhar cannot credibly fall back on the generic approach: the audience has now seen what a seriously constructed Karachi looks like, and the comparison will be made. This is how great world-building changes a cinematic tradition: not by direct imitation but by raising the standard of what the audience expects from serious work in the same territory. Dhurandhar’s impact on Bollywood extends to this world-building dimension as well as to the more commonly discussed dimensions of narrative ambition and commercial scale, and the Lyari construction is the specific element of that impact most likely to endure in the industry’s creative practice.

The Lyari world is the franchise’s most durable achievement, the thing that makes Dhurandhar not merely a successful commercial film but a work of genuine cinematic ambition that will be studied, cited, and built upon long after its box office records have been surpassed.