Most blockbusters generate controversy as a side effect of their success. A scene offends, a song borrows too freely, a star says something careless on a talk show, and the noise fades by the second weekend. Dhurandhar did something rarer and more uncomfortable. It generated controversy as a structural feature, the way a building generates shadows, and the shadows turned out to be the most revealing thing about the building. The disputes that gathered around Aditya Dhar’s two-part epic were not accidents of reception. They were the predictable result of a saga that planted itself directly on the fault line where Indian popular cinema has always pretended it was not standing, the line between telling a story and making a case.

Here is the argument this piece will defend, and it is an argument you will not find made cleanly anywhere else on the internet. The reason Dhurandhar became the most fiercely disputed mainstream release of the decade is not that it is propaganda, though a serious viewer can build that reading and we will build it honestly. The reason is that the picture occupies, with unusual clarity, the exact position that every Hindi spy thriller and patriotic war picture has occupied for decades while denying it. Earlier films smuggled their ideology inside spectacle and let audiences pretend the flag-waving was incidental to the action. Dhar refused the disguise. He made a saga whose emotional logic and its ideological logic are the same logic, so that you cannot enjoy the one without consenting to the other, at least for the duration of the running time. The disputes are what consent looks like when a portion of the audience withdraws it mid-screening and says so loudly.

That is why the controversies deserve to be treated not as gossip but as criticism. They are, collectively, the most honest record of what the duology actually does to the people who watch it. A reviewer can call the picture thrilling and leave it there. A protest, a ban, a legal notice, a furious op-ed in a foreign newspaper, an equally furious rebuttal in a domestic one: these are responses with stakes, and stakes force people to say what they really think a movie is for. The pages that follow walk through each major flashpoint, give the strongest version of every position involved, and decline to tell you who is right. The job here is to illuminate the disagreement, not to win it. If you finish reading and feel the question is harder than you assumed, the piece has done its work.

The Propaganda Question Nobody Can Settle

The accusation that Dhurandhar is propaganda arrived before the first show ended on opening night, and it has never fully left. To examine it fairly, we have to do something most commentators refused to do, which is define the term before throwing it. Propaganda, in its precise sense, is communication designed to move an audience toward a predetermined conclusion by appealing to emotion in ways that bypass independent judgment. By that definition every persuasive work of art carries propagandistic elements, which is why the loose use of the word generates more heat than light. The useful question is not whether the duology persuades. All powerful cinema persuades. The useful question is whether it persuades honestly, through dramatic situations that earn their conclusions, or dishonestly, through assertion dressed up as drama.

Build the case for the prosecution first, because it is stronger than its detractors admit. There are stretches of the saga where the storytelling stops and the speechmaking starts. Consider the sequence near the midpoint of Part 1 when Ajay Sanyal briefs his superiors on the rationale for the long-cover operation. The staging is static, the cutting is reverent, and the dialogue does something dramatically suspicious: it explains to characters who would already know it a historical chain of cause and effect that the screenplay wants the viewer to accept as settled fact. Nobody in that room needs the lecture. The room is a delivery mechanism for the lecture aimed at us. When a screenplay invents a listener so that a character can tell the listener something the writer wants the public to believe, that is the mechanics of persuasion working underneath the costume of plot. A prosecutor would point to three or four such passages across the duology and argue that they reveal the true engine of the project.

The prosecution has a second, subtler point. The moral arithmetic of the saga is arranged so that the protagonist’s nation never bears genuine guilt for the violence it authorizes. Hamza does terrible things, and the screenplay is careful to frame each of them as either tragic necessity or someone else’s fault. There is no scene in which an operation he runs produces an innocent death that the picture forces him, and us, to sit inside without an exculpatory frame. Compare this to the way a film like Zero Dark Thirty refuses to let the viewer off the hook about torture. Dhar’s duology, the prosecution says, is unwilling to let its own side be genuinely wrong, and that unwillingness is the signature of advocacy instead of inquiry. A movie that interrogates power lets power be guilty. A saga that flatters power keeps it clean.

Now build the case for the defense, with equal force, because the defense is also stronger than its detractors admit. The first defense argument is structural. For most of its enormous running time the saga does the opposite of bypassing judgment. It dwells, at length and with discomfort, on the human cost of the protagonist’s deception. The relationships Hamza builds inside Lyari are not cardboard. Yalina Jamali is a fully realized person, and the screenplay knows exactly what it means that he is lying to her every minute they share. The long passages of domestic life in the Karachi underworld, the meals, the jokes, the small loyalties, exist precisely so that the betrayal lands as betrayal and not as a video-game objective. A propaganda picture has no incentive to make the enemy lovable. This one spends hours doing it. You can read the series’s portrait of the Karachi underworld and the people inside it in our study of how the films built the Lyari milieu, and the texture there is not the texture of agitprop.

The defense has a second argument about the speeches the prosecution flagged. Yes, they exist, and yes, they are the weakest passages in the duology. But a few inert briefing scenes inside a fourteen-hour body of project do not define the body of movie, any more than a clumsy monologue defines a Shakespeare play. The defense would say the prosecution commits a part-for-whole error, treating the least artful five minutes as the secret truth of the most artful five hundred. The honest verdict, the defense concludes, is that Dhar made a flawed work of art with propagandistic seams, not a work of propaganda with artistic decoration. The distinction matters because it changes what you are condemning. One condemnation says the project is rotten at the root. The other says a gifted filmmaker occasionally let his convictions outrun his craft.

What makes this dispute genuinely unsettleable, instead of merely contested, is that both readings are supported by the same footage. The briefing scene that the prosecution calls a lecture, the defense calls characterization, because Sanyal is a man who explains in order to control, and his need to narrate the operation reveals his psychology. The clean moral arithmetic that the prosecution calls flattery, the defense calls genre fidelity, because the spy thriller has always asked us to root for an agent without auditing every casualty. Each side can account for the other’s evidence without surrendering its frame. That is the mark of an interpretive question that has no mechanical answer, only a more or less honest engagement.

There is a deeper point underneath all of this, and it is the point that connects the propaganda dispute to the thesis of this piece. The reason the argument cannot be settled is that the duology genuinely does both things at once, fuses inquiry and advocacy so tightly that you cannot extract one without tearing the other. The thematic spine of the duology, which we examine at length in our reading of the duology’s themes and symbolism, is the cost of becoming the thing you infiltrate. That spine is, simultaneously, a meditation on identity and a justification for the operation. The film cannot mourn what espionage does to Hamza without also implying that the espionage was worth it, because the mourning only has weight if the mission mattered. The art and the argument are the same tissue. This is exactly why the picture provokes the dispute it provokes, and exactly why no critic will ever close the case.

The fairest thing a viewer can do is hold the discomfort instead of resolve it. If you walked out convinced the saga is a recruitment poster, you watched a actual movie that contains genuine recruitment-poster passages. If you walked out convinced it is a tragedy about the erosion of a self, you watched a actual movie that is also that. The error is not in either reading. The error is in believing the saga owes you a single verdict. It does not. It owes you the experience of being moved by something you are not sure you should trust, which is, when you think about it, the most sophisticated effect a political drama can achieve.

The Baloch Objection and the Ethics of Borrowed Lives

The second major flashpoint is the least discussed in the mainstream and the most serious in moral terms. Several characters in the duology carry the names, or close variants of the names, of living and in some cases still-living individuals, and the most prominent of these is the figure called Uzair Baloch, played by Danish Pandor. When you build a revenge saga on the bones of actual people, you take a power over their stories that they never granted you, and the objection that rose from sections of the Baloch community and its diaspora was, at bottom, an objection to that taking.

Let us be precise about what the objection is and is not. It is not, in its serious form, a complaint that the picture is unflattering. Gangster sagas are unflattering to gangsters; nobody expects otherwise. The serious complaint has two distinct strands, and they are worth separating because commentators kept collapsing them. The first strand is about consent and accuracy. When a mass-market entertainment assigns motives, words, and deeds to a person who actually exists, viewers around the world absorb that portrait as something close to fact, regardless of any disclaimer buried in the credits. The portrait travels farther and lasts longer than any correction the depicted person could ever issue. A novelist who fictionalizes the living at least signals fiction through the form. A photoreal blockbuster, marketed as torn from actual events, blurs the signal until the borrowed life and the invented one are indistinguishable to the ordinary viewer.

The second strand is about a whole people, not one man. Spokespeople from within the Baloch diaspora argued that the duology folds a complex regional reality, with its own long history of grievance and its own internal divisions, into the role of scenery for an Indian hero’s journey. In this reading the harm is not defamation of an individual but flattening of a community, the reduction of a living political landscape into a backdrop of menace and intrigue against which a foreign protagonist performs his sacrifice. The objection is that the saga uses Baloch suffering as set dressing while caring nothing for Baloch agency, and that this kind of borrowing, however unintentional, repeats the very dynamic of being spoken-for that the community already resents from larger powers.

The strongest counter-argument deserves to be stated with the same care. Defenders point out that the series never claims to be documentary, that its characters are composites and dramatizations instead of transcriptions, and that all historical fiction, from the war novel to the period biopic, borrows genuine lives and actual places to build invented stories. The film’s own framing, they note, treats its setting and its figures as inspired-by instead of identical-to, which is the standard and long-accepted contract of the genre. If we forbade artists from dramatizing the recently living, defenders argue, we would lose most of the political cinema worth having, because the recently real is exactly what political cinema exists to wrestle with. There is also a free-expression principle at stake that cuts in the filmmakers’ favor: the right to make art about contested history cannot be conditioned on the approval of everyone the history touches, or no contested history could ever be filmed at all.

The legal dimension sharpened all of this into something concrete. Representatives connected to individuals depicted in the saga raised the possibility of action over personality rights and defamation, the cluster of protections that govern when and how a person’s identity can be used without permission. Indian courts have, in recent years, grown more willing to recognize that a living person retains some control over the commercial use of their name and likeness, and the threat of litigation hung over the release in a way that shaped how the production discussed its own characters in interviews. Whether any claim could succeed is a genuinely open question that turns on jurisdiction, on the precise degree of resemblance, and on the always-difficult line between protected artistic speech and actionable harm. This piece is not legal advice and the writer is not a lawyer; what matters for our purposes is that the mere availability of the legal frame changed the conversation. It forced the question of borrowed lives out of the realm of pure aesthetics and into the realm of rights, where it belongs.

What makes the Baloch objection harder than the propaganda dispute is that it does not dissolve into interpretive symmetry. The propaganda question has two readings of the same footage. This question has a genuine asymmetry of power. The production is a large commercial enterprise with global distribution; the people whose names and region it borrows have, by comparison, almost no ability to shape how those borrowings land. Even a viewer who fully accepts the artist’s right to dramatize the real should be able to recognize that the right is exercised across a gap of power, and that exercising a right across such a gap carries responsibilities that the law may not enforce but ethics still names. The defenders are correct that the genre permits the borrowing. The objectors are correct that permission is not the same as care.

The honest position, again, is to refuse the easy resolution. You can hold that Dhar had every right to make the saga he made and that the Baloch diaspora had every right to be angry about how their reality was used, and that both of those things being true is precisely the unresolved condition of political art in a connected world. The franchise’s relationship to the real is not incidental to its meaning; it is central, which is why we devote a full study to the real events and figures the duology reorganizes. The Baloch objection is the moment when that reorganization stopped being an aesthetic strategy and started being a question of whose pain gets to be whose story. There is no clean answer. There is only the obligation to notice the question is real.

The Censor’s Cut: How Certification Shaped the Final Production

The Central Board of Film Certification handed Dhurandhar an A rating, restricting it to adult viewers, and that single decision reshaped the project in ways that the public debate almost entirely misunderstood. The popular assumption was that the board had wounded the picture, forcing trims that diluted its impact. The reality was closer to the opposite. The certification, and the negotiation that produced it, ended up serving the franchise’s commercial and reputational interests so well that one could almost suspect the production of welcoming the friction. Almost, but not quite, and the gap between those is where the interesting analysis lives.

Start with what an adult rating actually does to a Hindi release of this scale. The conventional wisdom in the trade is that an A certificate caps a film’s earning ceiling, because it locks out the family audience and the under-eighteen crowd that drive repeat viewing for the biggest tentpoles. For a song-and-dance romance or a broad comedy, that logic holds. For a violent, morally serious spy saga aimed squarely at adults from the first frame, the logic inverts. The rating did not exclude Dhurandhar’s audience; it described it. The people who wanted this picture were never the family-matinee crowd. They were the very viewers an adult certificate signals to: people who want their cinema unsoftened, who read the rating as a promise that the violence will have weight and the moral world will not be sanitized for children. The certificate became a marketing asset, a badge that told the target viewer the saga would not flinch.

Now the harder question of what was actually altered. The negotiation between a major production and the board is rarely a public document, and the franchise’s case was no exception, so some of what follows is reconstructed from the pattern of how such processes typically unfold rather than from a published ledger of cuts. What is clear is that the discussions centered on the intensity of specific violent sequences and on the handling of certain real-world references that the board treats with particular caution. The most demanding stretch, by most accounts, involved a sustained interrogation sequence in Part 1 whose original cut lingered on physical brutality in a way that pushed past even an adult threshold. The version that reached theaters retains the scene’s force while compressing its dwelling, and the compression, interestingly, improved it. A torture scene that shows less and implies more is almost always more disturbing than one that shows everything, because the imagination supplies horrors more tailored than any prosthetic. If the board pressed for that trim, the board accidentally made the sequence better.

This is the uncomfortable truth that the censorship debate kept avoiding. Constraint is not always the enemy of art, and the franchise is a case study in how a certification process can sharpen rather than blunt. The same principle governs the way the saga handles its most charged real-world references. Where the board’s caution forced the screenplay to gesture rather than state, to imply a connection rather than spell it out, the result was frequently more powerful, because implication invites the viewer to complete the thought and a thought you complete yourself binds tighter than one handed to you. The restraint that certification demanded converged, often, with the restraint that good dramatic writing demands anyway, a convergence we explore in our analysis of how the duology builds meaning through what it withholds.

But it would be too neat, and untrue to the controversy, to conclude that the certification was simply a hidden blessing. There is a real cost, and the serious critics of the board’s role located it correctly. The cost is not in any single trimmed frame. The cost is in the chilling logic that an opaque certification process imposes on what gets written in the first place. When a production knows that certain references will trigger demands, it begins to pre-edit at the script stage, steering away from the riskiest material before a single frame is shot. The most dangerous censorship is the kind that never appears in a ledger of cuts because it happened in the writer’s head months earlier. We cannot know what the duology might have said if its makers had not been operating inside a system that rewards caution about certain subjects and punishes boldness about others. The film we have is shaped not only by what the board removed but by what the board’s existence persuaded the makers never to attempt. That invisible shaping is the genuine censorship story, and it is far harder to dramatize in a news cycle than a list of deleted scenes.

There is also a class dimension that the debate mostly ignored. An adult rating in a market with uneven enforcement does not actually keep the content from younger viewers; it keeps it from younger viewers whose households obey the rating, which correlates with particular social positions. The certificate functions less as a wall than as a sorting mechanism, and the moral weight people assign to it often exceeds its real protective power. None of this is unique to Dhurandhar, but the franchise’s scale made it a useful lens for noticing how the certification system actually behaves as opposed to how it imagines itself behaving.

Weigh it all and the fair conclusion is layered rather than flat. The certification did not damage the franchise; on the visible level it arguably helped, both by sharpening individual sequences and by branding the picture for its true audience. But the certification process, considered as a system rather than a single decision, exacts a price that no box office figure can show, the price of the bolder version that was never written because the writer already knew it would not pass. The board gave Dhurandhar an adult rating and, in doing so, did the franchise a commercial favor while quietly demonstrating the limits the franchise had already internalized. Both of those are true. The controversy was loudest about the wrong one.

The Map of Bans: Where the Saga Could Not Be Seen

A film’s distribution map is a political document, and Dhurandhar’s map told a story that the collection figures alone could never tell. Several territories across the Gulf region either declined to certify the duology, restricted it heavily, or pulled it after limited runs, and the pattern of where the movie could and could not screen reveals more about the surrounding geopolitics than any single scene inside it. To read the ban map honestly, we have to set aside the reflexive interpretations on both sides and look at what the restrictions actually reflected.

The first thing to understand is that Gulf certification regimes operate on a different logic from the Indian one. Where the Indian board negotiates over violence and the handling of domestic political references, the Gulf regulators are attentive above all to content that touches regional sensitivities, religious representation, and the political relationships among neighboring states. A spy saga set substantially across the border, dealing in militancy, sectarian geography, and the machinery of cross-border conflict, was always going to face a harder path through those regimes than a domestic romance would. The restrictions, in other words, were not a verdict on the film’s quality or even primarily on its alleged ideology. They were a verdict on its subject matter colliding with the particular things each regulator is mandated to protect.

The commercial impact was real but easy to overstate. The Gulf has become one of the most lucrative overseas markets for Hindi cinema, driven by a large South Asian expatriate population with high disposable income and strong appetite for event releases. Losing or curtailing access to parts of that market costs real money, and the franchise’s overseas total, strong as it was, almost certainly carried an asterisk representing the territories it could not fully reach. Yet the loss was partial rather than total. Some Gulf markets screened the saga with modifications; others restricted it; the picture’s overseas strength held up because gains in North America, the United Kingdom, Australia, and other South Asian diaspora centers absorbed much of the shortfall. Anyone who wants to see how the overseas pattern actually distributed across territories can trace the franchise’s market-by-market box office journey through the interactive explorer, where the regional splits make the impact of the restrictions legible in a way prose cannot.

The geopolitics underneath the ban map is where the analysis gets genuinely interesting, and where it most demands even-handedness. One reading holds that the restrictions were straightforward content regulation, regulators doing what regulators do when a picture touches sensitive material, no different in kind from how the same bodies treat dozens of releases a year. A competing reading holds that the restrictions reflected the delicate diplomatic balance the Gulf states maintain among various regional partners, and that a high-profile Indian production foregrounding cross-border conflict was caught in the crosswinds of relationships that have nothing to do with cinema. A third reading, advanced by the franchise’s defenders, holds that the bans were a backhanded compliment, evidence that the project struck close enough to real nerves to be treated as more than entertainment. Each of these readings explains part of the pattern, and the truth almost certainly braids all three rather than selecting one.

What the ban map definitely was not, despite the loudest claims, is a coordinated suppression aimed at silencing a particular point of view. The territories that restricted the duology restrict many works for many reasons, and reading a single ideological intention into a patchwork of separate regulatory decisions imposes more coherence on the map than the map actually has. The opposite overclaim, that the bans were purely neutral technical certifications with no political dimension whatsoever, is equally unconvincing, because the subject matter and the regional relationships it touches are inescapably political. The fair description sits in the middle: a set of independent regulatory decisions, each shaped by local rules and local diplomatic considerations, that together produced a map whose contours happened to trace the geography of the conflict the saga dramatizes.

There is a final irony in the ban story that deserves attention. Restrictions in the streaming era do not function the way restrictions in the theatrical-only era did. A territory can keep a film out of its cinemas and off its licensed platforms, but the cultural conversation about the movie crosses every border instantly, carried by social media, by diaspora networks, by the simple fact that a banned object becomes more interesting precisely because it is banned. The restrictions may have dented the theatrical take in specific markets while amplifying the global awareness of the franchise, converting a commercial loss into a publicity gain that is impossible to price. A regulator can withhold the screen. No regulator can withhold the talk about what is on the screen, and in the attention economy the talk is frequently worth more than the screen.

The ban map, then, is best read as the international extension of this piece’s central theme. Inside India the franchise sits on the fault line between entertainment and ideology and forces a choice; across borders it sits on the fault line between art and diplomacy and forces a different choice, with regulators rather than viewers doing the choosing. In both cases the work’s refusal to be merely entertaining is what generates the friction. A picture that wanted nothing but to be enjoyed would have sailed through every market. Dhurandhar wanted to mean something, and meaning, unlike spectacle, does not travel freely. The places it could not go are part of what it is.

The “Hindu Nationalist Cinema” Frame and the Critics Who Built It

Among the most consequential disputes was not about a scene or a ban but about a phrase. A cluster of international outlets, and a smaller cluster of domestic commentators, settled on a single category for Dhurandhar: it was, they wrote, an exemplar of a new “Hindu nationalist cinema,” a wave of muscular, majoritarian filmmaking aligned with a particular political ascendancy. The phrase did enormous work. It told readers, in three words, how to feel about the franchise before they had seen a frame. Examining how that frame was built, what it captures, and what it distorts is essential to understanding the controversy, because the frame became, for many viewers abroad, the entire story.

Take seriously what the frame gets right, because dismissing it would be intellectually lazy. There is a recognizable tendency in recent big-budget Hindi cinema toward narratives that center the security state, valorize the soldier and the spy, treat the nation as a moral absolute, and locate threat reliably across a particular border. Dhurandhar sits inside that tendency; pretending it floats free of its moment would be naive. The franchise’s emotional architecture does ask the viewer to feel the nation’s cause as the protagonist’s cause, and that fusion is exactly the kind of thing the “nationalist cinema” frame was built to name. A critic deploying the phrase is pointing at something that genuinely exists, a current in the culture that produced this picture and that the saga, in turn, feeds.

Now take seriously what the frame distorts, with equal rigor. The first distortion is reductive completeness. To call the duology “Hindu nationalist cinema” and stop there is to claim that the political reading exhausts the production, that once you have named the ideology you have understood the object. But a fourteen-hour saga that spends most of its length on the psychic disintegration of a man living a lie is not exhausted by its politics any more than a cathedral is exhausted by the religion that built it. The frame, used as a full stop rather than a starting point, performs a kind of critical malpractice: it lets the commentator skip the actual work of watching. Many of the harshest international notices read as though their authors had encountered a summary rather than a screening, because the frame supplied the verdict in advance and the screening became a formality.

The second distortion is geographic condescension, and this is where the domestic rebuttal sharpened into something fierce. A number of Indian critics, including some with no sympathy for the politics the frame attributes to the film, objected that the international coverage treated Indian audiences as dupes, as a credulous mass being programmed by majoritarian spectacle, incapable of the ironic distance and critical engagement that Western viewers are assumed to bring to their own jingoistic blockbusters. When an American action franchise glorifies the American military, the rebuttal noted, it is read as entertainment with a point of view; when an Indian one foregrounds the Indian security state, it is read as propaganda corrupting a vulnerable populace. The asymmetry, these critics argued, reveals less about the films than about the lingering habit of treating non-Western audiences as objects of concern rather than agents of judgment. This is a serious charge and it lands, because the same critics who would never call a Hollywood war film “Christian nationalist cinema” reached easily for the equivalent label here.

The auteur-intent question complicates everything further. How much should a saga be read through the known political views of the people who made it? One school says intent is decisive: if the filmmakers hold particular convictions, the picture is best understood as the expression of those convictions, and pretending otherwise is willful blindness. The opposing school, with deep roots in twentieth-century criticism, says the movie means what it does on screen regardless of who made it, and that reading every film through its makers’ biographies reduces art to autobiography and forecloses the surprising things art does in spite of its makers. Dhurandhar is a strong test case because the two schools produce genuinely different readings. Through the intent lens it is an ideological project by ideologically committed artists. Through the text lens it is a morally ambivalent tragedy that frequently undercuts the very triumphalism the frame accuses it of, since its protagonist ends not glorified but hollowed out. Both lenses are legitimate critical tools. Neither has the authority to declare the other illegitimate.

What gets lost in the framing war is the possibility that the saga is genuinely ambivalent rather than secretly committed. The most interesting reading, and the one the loud frame makes hardest to reach, is that Dhar built a saga whose surface flatters the nationalist mood while its depths quietly mourn the cost of that mood, and that this internal tension is the source of its power rather than a flaw to be resolved. A purely nationalist film would not leave its hero so ruined. A purely critical film would not stage its action with such evident relish. The duology is both at once, and the “Hindu nationalist cinema” frame, by demanding that it be only one thing, makes the most accurate reading the hardest to articulate. We develop this argument about the franchise’s double character at length in our examination of how Dhurandhar changed what Bollywood believes a blockbuster can be, because the doubleness is not incidental to the franchise’s influence; it is the influence.

The fair conclusion about the framing controversy is that the frame is a real tool that was used badly. There is such a thing as nationalist cinema, Dhurandhar shares features with it, and a critic is entitled to say so. But a label is the beginning of analysis, not the end, and the international coverage too often treated it as the end, mistaking the naming of a tendency for the understanding of a picture. The domestic rebuttal was right that this involved an implicit condescension toward Indian viewers. The international framing was right that the project is not innocent of the politics of its moment. The two truths do not cancel; they coexist, and the viewer who holds both will understand the film better than the partisan on either side who holds only one.

The Outrage Dividend: How Disputes Became Distribution

The most cynical reading of everything above is also, inconveniently, the best supported by the numbers. Across the franchise’s theatrical life, every fresh dispute correlated not with a dip but with a surge. The propaganda accusations, the diaspora objections, the certification drama, the foreign bans, the framing wars in the international press: each new flashpoint arrived, dominated a news cycle, and was followed by a measurable uptick in interest, in advance bookings, in the velocity of conversation that converts attention into ticket sales. The franchise did not merely survive its controversies. It fed on them. Understanding why requires looking honestly at the economics of outrage in the contemporary attention market.

The mechanism is not mysterious once you stop moralizing about it. A modern release lives or dies on the speed and volume of conversation in the days around it. The enemy of a blockbuster is not bad press; it is silence, the failure to become an event that people feel they must witness in order to participate in the discussion. Controversy is, from this angle, simply the most efficient generator of unmissable-event status that exists. When a film is merely good, people might see it eventually. When a film is the thing everyone is arguing about, people see it now, because to wait is to be left out of the argument. Every op-ed denouncing the duology, every furious thread, every official restriction was a free advertisement that money could not have bought, because authentic conflict carries a credibility that paid promotion never will. The franchise’s opponents, by attacking it loudly, became its most effective marketing department.

The polarization itself was monetizable in a way that simple acclaim is not. A film that everyone mildly likes generates one viewing per interested person. A film that half the conversation loves and half the conversation loathes generates viewings from both camps, the admirers who want to celebrate and the skeptics who want to confirm their suspicions with their own eyes, plus the vast middle who simply want to understand what the fuss is about. Outrage triples the addressable audience by giving three different groups three different reasons to buy the same ticket. The day-by-day pattern of the franchise’s collections, which you can examine alongside other recent blockbusters in the box office explorer, shows exactly this signature: the sustained legs of a movie whose conversation refused to die because the conversation was a fight, and fights, unlike praise, do not get boring.

This raises an uncomfortable question that the franchise’s defenders and detractors both prefer to dodge. If controversy reliably sells, does the controversy mean anything, or is it merely a product feature? The cynical answer is that the disputes are manufactured kayfabe, a wrestling match in which both sides know their roles and the only real winner is the box office. The cynical answer is too clever. The objections from the Baloch diaspora were not performances; real people felt real harm. The propaganda concerns came from critics arguing in good faith about a genuine ambiguity in the text. The bans were imposed by regulators with their own constraints, not by a publicity department. The controversies were authentic. What the franchise did was not manufacture them but harvest them, position itself so that authentic conflict, when it inevitably arose around such charged material, would flow toward the box office rather than away from it. That is a subtler and more troubling thing than fakery. It is the conversion of real disagreement into revenue without the disagreement ceasing to be real.

What does this say about the audience that made the harvest possible? The flattering reading is that Indian viewers have a robust appetite for cinema that engages the political directly, that they do not want their entertainment sealed off from the questions that animate their public life, and that the franchise’s success reflects a healthy refusal to treat the multiplex as an escape from reality. The unflattering reading is that polarization has colonized leisure, that the same dynamics that turn news into tribal sport have turned moviegoing into a way of declaring allegiance, and that buying a ticket became, for many, less an aesthetic choice than a political one. Both readings describe the same ticket-buyer from different angles. The viewer who went to affirm the nation and the viewer who went to scrutinize the ideology were both treating the cinema as an arena for something larger than the movie, and the franchise was happy to be that arena for anyone willing to pay admission.

There is a structural lesson here that extends far beyond one franchise, and it connects directly to this piece’s argument. If controversy sells, and if the most reliable controversy comes from sitting on the fault line between entertainment and ideology, then the market is quietly incentivizing exactly the kind of fault-line cinema that Dhurandhar represents. The franchise did not just exploit the outrage economy; it demonstrated a repeatable formula, and formulas that work get copied. The danger the duology’s success reveals is not that one film made money from disputes but that the industry now has a proven template for making money from disputes, which means more fault-line films, more manufactured-feeling conflict around authentic nerves, more cinema designed from the script stage to generate the arguments that sell it. The outrage dividend, paid once, becomes a strategy. That is the part of the controversy story that should worry people who care about the future of the form, far more than any single scene the board asked to trim.

The honest summary is that the franchise’s relationship to its own controversies was neither innocent nor fraudulent. It was opportunistic in the precise sense that it recognized real conflict as a resource and built itself to extract value from it. You can admire the strategic intelligence of that and still find it corrosive. You can find it corrosive and still concede that the alternative, a cinema so careful it generates no conflict at all, would be a duller and more cowardly art. The outrage dividend is the price the culture pays for having a popular cinema brave enough, or reckless enough, to mean something. Whether that price is worth paying is the kind of question this piece exists to pose rather than answer.

Where the Franchise Falls Short

Honest criticism requires turning the lens back on the picture itself and asking where its handling of its own charged material is genuinely weak, not merely contested. The controversies discussed above are debates with two defensible sides. What follows are places where, by the saga’s own standards, the duology simply does not do its job well, and naming them is what separates analysis from advocacy.

The clearest failure is the asymmetry of interiority. The franchise grants its protagonist and his handlers rich inner lives, full of doubt, cost, and moral texture, while granting almost none to the figures on the other side of the conflict whose deaths the plot requires. Major Iqbal is a magnetic antagonist, but he is an antagonist’s antagonist, a force of menace rather than a person with a coherent worldview the film is willing to inhabit. The saga that spends hours making us feel the weight of Hamza’s deception spends almost no time making us feel the weight of the lives on the receiving end of his operations. This is not a political objection; it is a craft objection. A saga this committed to moral seriousness about its hero owes the same seriousness to the people he destroys, and the duology repeatedly declines to pay that debt. The result is that its much-praised moral complexity is real but one-sided, a depth that runs in only one direction.

The second shortfall is the briefing-scene problem we flagged earlier, considered now as a recurring structural weakness rather than a single lapse. Several times across the two parts, the screenplay reaches a point where it needs the viewer to accept a piece of historical or political framing, and rather than dramatizing that framing it simply has a character state it, usually a senior figure addressing subordinates who would not need the explanation. These passages are where the craft visibly drops, where the confident filmmaker who trusts images and silences elsewhere suddenly distrusts the audience and spells things out. They are also, not coincidentally, the passages that most fuel the propaganda reading, because assertion-disguised-as-dialogue is the texture of persuasion. A franchise this skilled should not need them, and the fact that it keeps reaching for them suggests a failure of nerve precisely where nerve mattered most.

A third inconsistency concerns the franchise’s posture toward its real-world sources. The duology wants the credibility that comes from being torn-from-reality and the freedom that comes from being pure invention, and it switches between these claims depending on which is convenient. In its marketing and its texture it leans hard on authenticity, on the sense that this happened or nearly happened, because authenticity sells and lends gravity. When challenged about its treatment of real people and a real region, it retreats to the it-is-only-a-story defense. A production cannot fully have both. The duology never resolves this tension; it exploits it, claiming documentary weight when weight serves it and fictional license when license protects it. This is not a fatal flaw, but it is an intellectual dishonesty woven into the project’s relationship with the world, and the Baloch objection landed as hard as it did partly because the franchise had spent so much effort insisting on its own reality.

There is a fourth weakness that the controversy machine actually obscured. Because so much energy went into arguing about the saga’s politics, very little went into noticing where it is simply uneven as drama. Part 2, in its determination to deliver the catharsis the franchise had promised, occasionally lets spectacle override the psychological precision that made Part 1 extraordinary. Some of the late-saga set-pieces are magnificent as staging and hollow as story, moments where the duology becomes the very thing its admirers claim it transcends, a well-shot action movie reaching for a feeling it has not earned in that particular scene. The political controversy gave both defenders and detractors a reason to ignore these ordinary craft lapses, the defenders because admitting them felt like conceding ground and the detractors because they were busy with bigger game. A franchise deserves to be measured against its own best saga, and by that measure its weakest stretches are weak in conventional, non-ideological ways that the noise drowned out.

The deepest shortfall, though, is one of courage rather than craft. For all its reputation as a provocation, the duology is finally quite careful about which provocations it commits to. It will provoke in directions that align with the prevailing mood and flinch from provocations that would cost it that mood’s support. A genuinely fearless political film would risk alienating the very audience most inclined to embrace it; it would find the uncomfortable truth that its own side does not want to hear and say it anyway. Dhurandhar rarely does this. Its boldness is real but bounded, aimed outward at safe targets and softened wherever it might trouble the viewers cheering it on. The franchise that markets itself as uncompromising is, in the one place that would have tested the claim, quietly compromised. That is the gap between the provocation it performs and the provocation it actually risks, and it is the most important thing its admirers refuse to see.

The Bigger Argument

Step back from the individual disputes and a larger pattern emerges, one that reaches well beyond a single franchise into the condition of popular cinema in a polarized age. The controversies around Dhurandhar are not, finally, about Dhurandhar. They are about a structural shift in what mass entertainment is for, and the duology happens to be the clearest specimen of that shift yet produced in Hindi cinema. Reading the controversies as the work’s most honest critical reception, as this piece has argued throughout, leads to a conclusion about the medium itself.

For most of its history, mainstream Indian cinema operated on a tacit treaty with its audience: the screen was a place to feel, not to decide. Films carried ideology, of course, often heavy-handed ideology, but they carried it the way water carries minerals, dissolved and tasteless, absorbed without being noticed. The patriotic war film let you cheer the nation without forcing you to defend the cheering. The spy thriller let you thrill to the agent’s exploits without auditing the politics that sent him. This dissolved ideology was comfortable precisely because it never asked for consent; it simply flowed in while you were busy being entertained. The treaty held because both sides pretended the minerals were not there.

Dhurandhar broke the treaty by making the minerals visible. Its great formal achievement, and the source of all its controversy, is that it fused its emotional machinery and its ideological machinery so completely that the audience could no longer absorb the one without noticing the other. You cannot be moved by Hamza’s sacrifice without registering what the sacrifice is for; the feeling and the argument arrive as a single sensation. This is why the franchise generates disputes that comparable films do not. Earlier works let you keep your politics in one pocket and your pleasure in another. This one sews the pockets together, and a significant portion of the audience, feeling the seam, recoiled at being made to notice what they were consenting to. The controversy is the sound of a treaty breaking.

That breakage has consequences that run in two directions, and a fair assessment has to hold both. In one direction, the visibility is a gain for the culture. A cinema that hides its ideology infantilizes its audience, treating them as vessels to be filled rather than minds to be engaged. A cinema that makes its ideology visible, even aggressively, at least respects the audience enough to let them see what they are being offered and to refuse it if they choose. The fierce arguments around the duology are, in this light, a sign of health: people are noticing, debating, declining, affirming, doing the work of citizens rather than the passivity of consumers. The franchise, whatever its own politics, dragged the political content of popular cinema into the daylight where it can be examined, and examination is always better than the comfortable dark.

In the other direction, the visibility is a danger, because what the market learned from the duology’s success is not that audiences want honest engagement but that conflict sells. The lesson the industry will draw is the lesson the box office taught: build on the fault line, harvest the outrage, convert the disagreement into revenue. This points toward a future of cinema engineered for division, works designed from conception to generate the maximum sustainable conflict, art as a delivery system for the polarization that already saturates every other corner of public life. If that future arrives, Dhurandhar will be remembered not as the film that respected its audience but as the film that proved you could monetize their divisions, and the difference between those two legacies is the difference between a cinema that elevates and one that exploits.

Which legacy the franchise earns is not yet decided, and that undecidedness is the honest place to end. The same picture can be, simultaneously, a brave refusal of the old dishonest treaty and a cynical demonstration of the new profitable formula. It can respect its audience by showing them what they are consenting to and disrespect them by engineering the consent for profit. These are not contradictory verdicts to be resolved; they are the dual nature of an object that sits, as this piece has insisted from the first paragraph, exactly on the fault line. A thing on a fault line participates in both sides of the fault. That is what it means to be on a fault line rather than safely on one side of it.

The broadest argument, then, is this. Dhurandhar matters not because it settled any question about the relationship between entertainment and ideology but because it made the question impossible to ignore. Every film that follows it into the fault-line territory it mapped will have to reckon with what the duology revealed: that the old separation of pleasure and politics was always a comfortable fiction, that fusing them produces both the most powerful and the most dangerous popular art, and that an audience forced to notice what it consumes will fight about it in ways that an audience kept comfortable never would. The controversies were not noise around the movie. They were the saga, completing itself in the only place a fault-line film can be completed, which is the argument it starts in the people who see it. The franchise’s lasting legacy will not be its box office or its records, impressive as both are. It will be that it changed the terms on which Indian popular cinema and its audience negotiate the difference between being moved and being persuaded, and once those terms have changed, no subsequent film gets to pretend the minerals are not in the water.

The Streaming Afterlife: When the Disputes Returned

A theatrical controversy has a natural lifespan. It peaks around release, burns through its news cycles, and subsides as the picture leaves cinemas. The streaming era abolished that lifespan, and Dhurandhar’s second life on a major platform reignited every dispute it had already weathered, often with greater intensity, because the conditions of home viewing changed who was watching and how. The digital afterlife of the franchise is its own chapter in the controversy story, and it reveals something about how disputes mutate when a picture moves from the shared darkness of the theater to the private screens of the world.

The streaming acquisition itself, reportedly a substantial sum, was an early flashpoint. Critics of the franchise argued that a platform monetizing the project was endorsing its politics, and a quieter pressure campaign urged the platform to reconsider or to contextualize the duology with framing material. Defenders countered that a distribution platform is not a publisher of opinion, that carrying a film is not the same as agreeing with it, and that demanding platforms curate by ideology leads quickly to a world where only the inoffensive survives. This is a live argument across the entire streaming landscape, far larger than one franchise, and the duology became a convenient battlefield for it precisely because its politics were already so visible. The platform, predictably, carried the movie and weathered the noise, because the economics of a proven blockbuster overwhelm the cost of a contained protest.

What streaming changed most was the demographic of the dispute. In theaters the audience self-selected; people who suspected they would hate the franchise mostly stayed away. On a subscription platform the picture appears in the recommendation feed of millions who never chose it, and a portion of those accidental viewers encountered the saga’s politics cold, without the framing that theatrical marketing had provided. This produced a second wave of reaction from people for whom the duology was not an event they had opted into but a thing that arrived in their living rooms, and the reactions were correspondingly more raw. The streaming context stripped away the consent that buying a ticket implies, and a saga that asks for consent, as we have argued this one does, generates a sharper response when it arrives unconsented-to.

The pause-and-rewind capacity of home viewing also intensified the textual disputes. In a theater the briefing scenes that fuel the propaganda reading flow past at the pace the editor set. At home a skeptical viewer can stop, rewind, screenshot, and circulate the exact frame that proves their point, and a defender can do the same with the countervailing scene. The duology became a quarry for clips, each side mining it for the seconds that supported their reading, and the resulting collage of decontextualized fragments hardened both positions. A scene that means one thing in the flow of a fourteen-hour saga means something cruder as a fifteen-second clip stripped of everything around it, and the streaming afterlife turned the franchise into a thousand such clips, each more polarizing than the whole from which it was cut.

There is a final irony in the streaming chapter that completes this piece’s argument about the outrage dividend. Every renewed dispute on the platform functioned as a renewed advertisement, and the algorithmic logic of recommendation rewards exactly the engagement that controversy generates. A production that people argue about gets surfaced to more people, who argue about it, which surfaces it further. The streaming environment did not merely host the franchise’s second wave of controversy; it was structurally designed to amplify it, because the platform’s own incentives align perfectly with the franchise’s. Outrage drives engagement, engagement drives recommendation, recommendation drives more viewing, more viewing drives more outrage. The duology entered a machine built to feed on precisely the disputes it was built to generate, and the two fed each other in a loop that no theatrical release could ever have sustained. The fault-line film found, in the streaming algorithm, its perfect amplifier, and the controversy that began in cinemas may never fully end, because the machine that now carries the saga has no off-season and no incentive to let the argument die.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why is Dhurandhar considered the most controversial Bollywood franchise of the decade?

The short answer is that it refused the disguise other films wore. Patriotic and espionage pictures have always carried a point of view, but they tucked it inside spectacle so that viewers could enjoy the action without consciously endorsing the ideology underneath. Dhurandhar fused its emotional pull and its political argument so tightly that one could not be felt without the other being noticed, and a large portion of the audience reacted to being made to notice. On top of that structural provocation, the duology stacked several discrete flashpoints: accusations that it functioned as state-friendly messaging, objections from the Baloch diaspora over its use of real names and a real region, an adult certification and the negotiation behind it, restrictions across several overseas territories, and a war of framing in the international press over whether it belonged to a new wave of majoritarian cinema. Any one of these would have generated debate. Arriving together, around a picture whose very form invites political reading, they compounded into something larger than the sum of its disputes. The franchise became a proxy battle for arguments far bigger than itself, about the relationship between art and ideology, about who gets to dramatize whose history, and about whether popular cinema should engage politics directly or stay safely in the realm of pure entertainment. That is why the noise around it dwarfed the noise around comparable hits.

Q: Is Dhurandhar actually propaganda or not?

This is the question that cannot be settled, and anyone who answers it with confidence is telling you about themselves rather than about the movie. The strongest case for the propaganda reading points to several briefing-style passages where the screenplay stops dramatizing and starts asserting, having characters explain political framings to listeners who would already know them, which is the mechanics of persuasion in dramatic costume. It also notes that the saga keeps its own side morally clean, never forcing the protagonist or his nation to sit inside genuine guilt. The strongest case against points out that the duology spends most of its enormous length on the human cost of deception, that it makes the people the hero betrays genuinely lovable, and that a true propaganda saga has no incentive to do either. The decisive fact is that the same footage supports both readings: the briefing scene is a lecture to one viewer and characterization to another, and neither can prove the other wrong. The honest conclusion is that the picture does both things at once, fusing inquiry and advocacy so completely that you cannot separate them. It is a flawed work of art with propagandistic seams, not a work of propaganda with artistic decoration, but reasonable people who watch carefully will continue to disagree about where exactly that line falls, because the line is genuinely blurry rather than merely contested.

Q: Why did some Gulf countries ban or restrict Dhurandhar?

Several Gulf-region regulators declined to certify the duology, restricted it heavily, or curtailed its run, and the reasons braid together more than one factor. Gulf certification regimes are especially attentive to content touching regional sensitivities, religious representation, and the diplomatic relationships among neighboring states. A spy saga set substantially across the border, dealing in militancy, sectarian geography, and cross-border conflict, was always going to face a harder regulatory path than a domestic romance. Beyond pure content rules, the Gulf states maintain a delicate balance among various regional partners, and a high-profile production foregrounding cross-border conflict can be caught in diplomatic crosswinds that have nothing to do with the film’s quality. It would be a mistake to read the restrictions as a coordinated ideological suppression; they were a patchwork of independent decisions, each shaped by local rules and local considerations. It would equally be a mistake to call them purely neutral technical certifications with no political dimension, because the subject matter is inescapably political. The commercial impact was real, since the Gulf is a lucrative market for Hindi cinema driven by a large expatriate audience, but it was partial rather than total, and strength in North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia absorbed much of the shortfall. The bans may even have amplified global awareness of the franchise, since a restricted object becomes more interesting precisely because it is restricted.

Q: What certificate did Dhurandhar receive and how did it shape the film?

The Central Board of Film Certification issued an A certificate, restricting the project to adult viewers, and the popular assumption that this wounded the project gets the story backward. For a violent, morally serious spy saga aimed at adults from the first frame, the adult rating did not exclude the target audience; it described and branded it, signaling to the very viewers who wanted unsoftened cinema that the work would not flinch. The negotiation behind the certificate reportedly centered on the intensity of certain violent sequences, most notably a sustained interrogation passage in the first part whose original cut lingered on brutality past even an adult threshold. The trimmed version that reached theaters arguably improved on the original, because a torture scene that shows less and implies more is usually more disturbing than one that shows everything. The genuine cost of certification, however, lies not in any visible trim but in the invisible self-editing it encourages at the script stage, where writers steer away from the riskiest material before a single frame is shot. The most consequential censorship is the kind that never appears in a ledger of cuts because it happened in the writer’s head months earlier. So the honest verdict is layered: the certificate helped the franchise commercially and even sharpened individual sequences, while the certification system as a whole exacts a price in boldness that no box office figure can reveal.

Q: Did the controversies help or hurt Dhurandhar at the box office?

The evidence points strongly toward help, which is the uncomfortable conclusion most commentators preferred to avoid. Across the franchise’s theatrical life, each fresh dispute correlated with a surge rather than a dip, because controversy is the most efficient generator of must-see-now status that exists. The enemy of a blockbuster is not bad press; it is silence, the failure to become the event everyone feels compelled to witness in order to join the conversation. Every denunciation, every furious thread, every official restriction functioned as a free advertisement carrying a credibility that paid promotion never achieves. Polarization itself proved monetizable: a work half the conversation loved and half loathed drew viewings from both camps, the admirers wanting to celebrate and the skeptics wanting to confirm their suspicions, plus the large middle simply wanting to understand the fuss. This tripled the addressable audience by giving three groups three different reasons to buy the same ticket. The day-by-day collection pattern, which interested readers can study against other recent hits in the box office explorer, shows the sustained legs of a work whose conversation refused to die because the conversation was a fight, and fights do not get boring the way praise does. The franchise did not manufacture its controversies, which were authentic, but it positioned itself to harvest them, converting real disagreement into revenue without the disagreement ceasing to be real.

Q: Who is Uzair Baloch in the film and why was the portrayal controversial?

The character carrying that name, played by Danish Pandor, sits among several figures in the duology whose names echo real and in some cases still-living individuals, and the controversy around the portrayal turns on the ethics of borrowing real lives for a fictional revenge narrative. The objection from sections of the Baloch community and its diaspora came in two distinct strands that commentators kept collapsing. The first concerns consent and accuracy: when a mass-market entertainment assigns motives, words, and deeds to a person who actually exists, viewers absorb the portrait as something close to fact, and that portrait travels farther and lasts longer than any correction the real person could issue. The second concerns a whole people rather than one man, the argument that the saga folds a complex regional reality with its own long history into mere scenery for an outsider’s journey, reducing a living political landscape to a backdrop of menace. Defenders respond that the work never claims to be documentary, that its figures are composites and dramatizations, and that all historical fiction borrows real lives to build invented stories. What makes this dispute harder than the propaganda debate is that it does not dissolve into interpretive symmetry; it involves a genuine asymmetry of power between a global commercial enterprise and the people whose names and region it borrows. Permission, the genre may grant. Care is a separate question the law does not always reach.

Q: What does “Hindu nationalist cinema” mean and is Dhurandhar an example of it?

The phrase names a recognizable tendency in recent big-budget Hindi cinema toward narratives that center the security state, valorize the soldier and the spy, treat the nation as a moral absolute, and locate threat reliably across a particular border. Dhurandhar shares features with that tendency, and pretending it floats free of its political moment would be naive. The frame captures something real. The trouble is how it gets used. Deployed as a full stop rather than a starting point, the label claims that the political reading exhausts the work, that once you have named the ideology you have understood the object, which lets the commentator skip the actual labor of watching a fourteen-hour saga that spends most of its length on its hero’s psychic disintegration. There is also a distortion of geographic condescension embedded in much of the framing, the implicit assumption that Indian audiences are dupes being programmed by spectacle while Western audiences bring ironic distance to their own jingoistic blockbusters. The same critics who would never call a Hollywood war film “Christian nationalist cinema” reached easily for the equivalent here. So the fair answer is yes and no: the duology belongs to the tendency the phrase describes, a critic is entitled to say so, but the label is the beginning of analysis rather than its conclusion, and the international coverage too often mistook naming the tendency for understanding the work.

Q: How did international critics react differently from Indian critics?

The split was sharp and revealing. A cluster of international outlets settled quickly on the “nationalist cinema” frame, reading the duology primarily through the politics of its moment and frequently writing as though they had encountered a summary rather than sat through a screening, since the frame supplied the verdict in advance. A number of Indian critics, including some with no sympathy for the politics the frame attributed to the work, pushed back hard, and their objection was not that the foreign coverage was wrong about the politics but that it was condescending about the audience. When an American action franchise glorifies its own military it is read as entertainment with a viewpoint; when an Indian one foregrounds its own security state it is read as propaganda corrupting a vulnerable populace. That asymmetry, the domestic critics argued, reveals a lingering habit of treating non-Western audiences as objects of concern rather than agents of judgment. The charge lands, because the double standard is real. At the same time, the international framing was not simply wrong; the work genuinely is not innocent of the politics of its moment, and the domestic rebuttal sometimes slid into defending the film’s ideology while pretending only to defend its audience. The most accurate position holds both truths: the foreign coverage carried a condescension worth naming, and the work carried a political charge worth examining, and the reader who keeps both in view understands the film better than either camp.

Q: Was anything actually cut from Dhurandhar by the censor board?

The exact ledger of changes is not a public document, as is typical for negotiations between a major production and the certification board, so some of what is known comes from the pattern of how such processes unfold rather than from a published list. What is reasonably clear is that the discussions centered on the intensity of specific violent sequences and on the handling of certain charged real-world references that the board treats with particular caution. The most demanding stretch, by most accounts, involved a sustained interrogation sequence in the first part whose original cut dwelt on physical brutality in a way that pushed past even an adult threshold; the released version retains the force while compressing the dwelling. There were also likely adjustments to how the most sensitive real-world references were stated versus implied, with the board’s caution pushing the screenplay toward gesture rather than statement. Interestingly, several of these changes appear to have improved the work, because implication frequently disturbs more than explicit depiction and restraint often converges with good dramatic writing. The more significant censorship story, however, is invisible: the self-editing that a production performs at the script stage when it already knows certain material will trigger demands. We cannot know what the duology might have said had its makers not been operating inside a system that rewards caution about certain subjects, and that unwritten bolder version is the real cost that no list of trims can capture.

Q: Did Dhurandhar face any legal challenges?

The threat of litigation hung over the release, primarily in the territory of personality rights and defamation, the cluster of protections that govern when and how a living person’s name and likeness can be used without permission. Representatives connected to individuals depicted in the saga raised the possibility of action, and Indian courts have in recent years grown more willing to recognize that a living person retains some control over the commercial use of their identity. Whether any specific claim could succeed is a genuinely open legal question that turns on jurisdiction, on the precise degree of resemblance between character and real person, and on the always-difficult line between protected artistic speech and actionable harm. This piece is not legal advice and the writer is not a lawyer, so nothing here should be taken as a prediction of any outcome. What matters for understanding the controversy is that the mere availability of the legal frame changed the conversation, forcing the question of borrowed lives out of pure aesthetics and into the realm of rights, where the stakes are concrete. The production’s careful language about its characters in interviews, emphasizing that figures were inspired-by rather than identical-to real people, reflects exactly this legal pressure. The franchise wanted the credibility of authenticity and the protection of fiction simultaneously, and the legal threat is what forced it to keep insisting on the fiction even while its marketing leaned on the reality.

Q: How does Dhurandhar handle politics differently from other patriotic Bollywood films?

The difference is one of visibility rather than presence. Earlier patriotic and espionage films carried ideology the way water carries dissolved minerals, present but tasteless, absorbed without being noticed, which let audiences cheer the nation without consciously defending the cheering. The genre’s older treaty with its viewers was that the screen was a place to feel, not to decide. Dhurandhar broke that treaty by making the minerals visible, fusing its emotional machinery and its ideological machinery so completely that you cannot be moved by the hero’s sacrifice without registering what the sacrifice is for. The feeling and the argument arrive as a single sensation. This is precisely why the franchise generates disputes that comparable films do not: earlier works let you keep your politics in one pocket and your pleasure in another, while this one sews the pockets together. A film like the lean war drama that launched the same director worked partly because it kept its ideology relatively dissolved; the duology represents an escalation in which the ideology becomes inseparable from the drama. Whether this is a gain or a loss depends on your values. A cinema that hides its ideology arguably infantilizes its audience; a cinema that makes it visible respects them enough to let them see and refuse what they are offered. But visible ideology also generates the polarization that sells tickets, which means the market now has an incentive to produce more of exactly this fault-line cinema.

Q: Did the controversies follow Dhurandhar to its streaming release?

Yes, and the streaming afterlife reignited every dispute with greater intensity, because home viewing changed who was watching and how. The acquisition by a major platform was itself a flashpoint, with critics arguing that monetizing the work amounted to endorsing its politics and defenders countering that carrying a film is not the same as agreeing with it, a live argument across the entire streaming landscape. More importantly, streaming changed the demographic of the dispute. In theaters the audience self-selected, with skeptics largely staying away, but on a subscription platform the saga appeared in the feeds of millions who never chose it, and accidental viewers encountered its politics cold, producing a rawer second wave of reaction. The pause-and-rewind capacity of home viewing also intensified the textual disputes, since a skeptical viewer could stop, screenshot, and circulate the exact frame that proved their point while defenders did the same with countervailing scenes, turning the work into a quarry for decontextualized clips that hardened both positions. The deepest irony is that the streaming algorithm is structurally designed to amplify exactly the engagement that controversy generates: outrage drives engagement, engagement drives recommendation, recommendation drives more viewing, more viewing drives more outrage. The fault-line film found in the recommendation algorithm its perfect amplifier, and because the machine has no off-season, the argument the franchise started may never fully end.

Q: Is it ethical to use real, living people as characters in a film like this?

This is one of the genuinely hard questions the franchise raises, and it does not resolve cleanly. The case for the artist’s freedom is strong: all historical fiction borrows real lives and real places to build invented stories, the right to make art about contested history cannot be conditioned on the approval of everyone the history touches, and forbidding the dramatization of the recently real would cost us most of the political cinema worth having. The case for restraint is equally serious: a photoreal blockbuster marketed as torn from reality blurs the line between the borrowed life and the invented one until ordinary viewers cannot tell which is which, and the portrait it circulates travels farther and lasts longer than any correction the real person could ever issue. The asymmetry of power sharpens the ethical question. A large commercial enterprise with global distribution borrows the names and region of people who have, by comparison, almost no ability to shape how those borrowings land, and exercising a right across such a gap carries responsibilities that ethics names even where the law does not enforce them. The honest position holds both truths at once: the filmmakers had every right to make the saga they made, and the people whose reality they borrowed had every right to be angry about how it was used. Both being true is simply the unresolved condition of political art in a connected world, and pretending one side erases the other is the easy evasion this question does not permit.

Q: Did the filmmakers engage with the criticism, and how?

Productions of this scale typically manage controversy rather than debate it, and the pattern around the franchise fit that mold. The public posture leaned on a familiar and legally prudent set of moves: emphasizing that the work is a dramatization rather than a documentary, that its figures are composites inspired-by rather than identical-to real people, and that the duology should be received as entertainment with a point of view rather than as a factual account. This framing served two purposes at once, defusing the legal exposure around personality rights and giving the work room to claim the credibility of reality when convenient while retreating to the shelter of fiction when challenged. That very flexibility was itself a target of criticism, since a project cannot fully claim documentary weight and pure fictional license at the same time, and the franchise was frequently accused of wanting both. Rather than entering the propaganda debate directly, which no commercial production benefits from doing, the team mostly let the controversy run, aware that the disputes were generating attention that money could not buy. This is not evasion so much as strategy: engaging the critics on their terms would have legitimized the harshest framings and prolonged the unfavorable cycles, while staying above the fray let the box office answer the critics more persuasively than any statement could. The silence, in other words, was a position, and arguably the most effective one available.

Q: Will the Dhurandhar controversies change how Bollywood makes films?

Almost certainly, though not in the direction its admirers might hope. The lesson the industry will draw from the franchise is not primarily that audiences crave honest political engagement; it is that conflict sells, reliably and at scale. The duology demonstrated a repeatable formula: build on the fault line between entertainment and ideology, let authentic controversy gather around genuinely charged material, and position the work so that the outrage flows toward the box office rather than away from it. Formulas that work get copied, which points toward a future of more fault-line cinema, more films engineered from the script stage to generate the maximum sustainable conflict, art increasingly functioning as a delivery system for the polarization that already saturates public life. This is the part of the franchise’s legacy that should worry people who care about the form, far more than any single trimmed scene. There is a more hopeful possibility worth holding alongside the grim one: that the duology also proved audiences will turn out in record numbers for cinema that takes ideas seriously and refuses to condescend, and that some filmmakers will draw the braver lesson rather than the cynical one. Which lesson dominates is not yet decided. The franchise opened a door, and what walks through it depends on whether the industry sees a template for monetizing division or a license to make popular cinema that actually means something. Both futures are now possible because of what this work proved.

Q: Why do some viewers feel manipulated by Dhurandhar even when they enjoy it?

The sensation of manipulation is the direct result of the franchise’s defining technique, the fusion of emotional and ideological machinery into a single mechanism. When a film moves you and its argument and its feeling are separable, you can enjoy the feeling and hold the argument at arm’s length. When they are fused, as they are here, the emotion you feel is already carrying the argument, so that being moved is itself a kind of consent to the worldview the emotion serves. Perceptive viewers register this fusion as a faint discomfort even in the midst of enjoyment, the sense that their own response is being conscripted, that the lump in the throat is also a vote. This is not a flaw in the viewer’s perception; it is an accurate detection of what the work is doing. The briefing-style passages sharpen the feeling, because in those moments the persuasion surfaces from beneath the drama and becomes briefly visible, reminding the viewer that the machine has designs on them. The discomfort is, in a sense, the most honest relationship a viewer can have with the duology, more honest than either uncritical enjoyment or reflexive rejection. A viewer who feels manipulated and enjoys the work anyway has understood it correctly: it is a powerful piece of political art that earns real emotion while bending that emotion toward a purpose, and noticing the bend without either surrendering to it or pretending immunity to it is exactly the alert, ambivalent posture the work both invites and resists.

Q: Did the controversy affect Dhurandhar’s awards and critical standing?

Controversy cuts both ways in the awards landscape, and the franchise’s case illustrates the tension. On one side, the technical and performance achievements were difficult for any serious body to ignore; the craft of the direction, the scale of the action, and the central performance operated at a level that demands recognition independent of politics. On the other side, the ideological disputes gave hesitant juries and committees a reason to keep their distance, since honoring a work that a vocal portion of the conversation reads as majoritarian messaging carries reputational risk that purely apolitical hits do not. This produces a familiar pattern in which a controversial work tends to be rewarded in the categories that can be defended as purely technical, where the achievement is undeniable, while being passed over in the categories that read as endorsements of the whole, where the politics intrude. The critical standing follows a similar split: the franchise will likely be remembered as technically landmark and politically divisive, a work whose place in the craft history of the medium is secure even as its place in the cultural and moral conversation remains contested. Time tends to clarify these splits in unpredictable ways, sometimes elevating works that were politically toxic on release once the heat fades and the craft endures, sometimes the reverse. What is certain is that the controversy guaranteed the franchise will be discussed for years, and sustained discussion is itself a form of canonization, regardless of which trophies the work did or did not collect.

Q: Is Dhurandhar available to watch in Pakistan?

Indian films have for years generally not received theatrical release in Pakistan owing to the broader freeze in cultural exchange between the two countries, so the duology’s absence from Pakistani cinemas is less a specific verdict on this franchise than a continuation of a long-standing pattern that affects nearly all Indian releases. A work so explicitly built around cross-border conflict and set substantially across that border would, in any case, have faced the steepest possible path to any official screening there. The more interesting reality is that formal unavailability has limited meaning in the streaming and social-media era. Conversation about the franchise crossed every border instantly, carried by online platforms, diaspora networks, and the simple human impulse to discuss a thing precisely because it is forbidden. The work became, in this sense, present in the very places that could not officially show it, existing as an object of argument even where it could not exist as a ticketed experience. This is part of the broader pattern in which restriction in the contemporary environment frequently amplifies awareness rather than suppressing it, since a banned object acquires an interest that an freely available one lacks. The franchise’s reception across the border, to whatever extent it occurred through unofficial channels, would inevitably have been shaped by the same political charge that defined its reception everywhere else, read by some as provocation and by others as exactly the distorted mirror they expected.

Q: How should a first-time viewer approach Dhurandhar given everything around it?

The most rewarding approach is to watch the work twice, or at least to watch it once with deliberate self-awareness about the two things happening simultaneously. On the first pass, let it work on you as the spy saga it is, follow the protagonist’s deception and its cost, feel the relationships he builds and betrays, experience the craft of the staging and the weight of the central performance. The duology earns genuine emotion, and refusing to feel it in order to maintain political distance produces a sterile, defensive viewing that misses what the work actually achieves. Then, either on a second pass or in reflection afterward, attend to the seam, the places where the feeling you are having is also carrying an argument, the briefing passages where persuasion surfaces, the moral arithmetic that keeps one side clean. The goal is not to catch the film cheating but to notice the fusion that is its defining technique, so that you can hold both your genuine response and your awareness of what that response is being asked to endorse. A viewer who arrives determined to hate the work will find ammunition and miss the art; a viewer who arrives determined to love it will be moved and miss the manipulation. The richest experience belongs to the viewer willing to be both moved and watchful at once, which is, not coincidentally, exactly the alert and ambivalent posture this piece has argued the work most rewards and most resists.

Q: What is the single most misunderstood thing about the Dhurandhar controversies?

The most widespread misunderstanding is the belief that the controversies are something separate from the films, a layer of noise to be cleared away so the work underneath can be evaluated cleanly. They are not separate. The disputes are the work completing itself in the only place a fault-line film can be completed, which is the argument it ignites in the people who see it. A movie designed to sit exactly on the line between entertainment and ideology does not finish on the screen; it finishes in the disagreement it produces, and that disagreement is therefore part of the text rather than a distraction from it. The second misunderstanding, closely related, is the assumption that the controversies must resolve, that careful enough analysis will eventually reveal whether the franchise is propaganda or art, ethical or exploitative, brave or cynical. The whole argument of any honest examination is that these questions do not resolve because the work genuinely participates in both sides of each. It is brave and cynical, respectful and manipulative, inquiry and advocacy, simultaneously and irreducibly. Demanding a single verdict is the error. The franchise’s lasting achievement, and the reason it will be studied long after its records are broken, is that it made the relationship between being moved and being persuaded impossible to ignore, and forced an entire film culture to argue about a line it had spent decades pretending was not there. The controversies are not the misunderstanding. Treating them as noise is.