I HAVE no memory of ever watching a Rambo movie though one did enjoy wrestler-actor Dara Singh taking on the ferocious dragon with bare hands to save the delicate Mumtaz from becoming its meal. Likewise, one couldn’t progress beyond the first 10 minutes of what may be called the poor man’s version of Hollywood’s Rambo, the Indian movie Dhurandhar . What one could figure out about Sylvester Stallone’s legend of Rambo was that wherever the sullen hulk travelled to upstage or bomb America’s enemies, in truth America lost that war. Rambo travelled to Vietnam and Afghanistan, for example, to carry out his now clichéd and much copied daredevil missions. In both countries the US military suffered humbling defeats. Rambo, according to write-ups from the 1970s, also went to Burma with similar outcomes. Burma threw itself in a tighter embrace of America’s leading rival, China. Dhurandhar , too, comes across as the product of a nationalist reverie being thwarted.
The brooding Indian Rambo exudes a similarly cultivated aloofness as he goes about single-handedly wrecking his nation’s enemies in Karachi’s feuding districts. My instinct is that the compliment is mutual. Pakistanis have their own genre of movies and narratives diminishing India military like Hollywood movies did with Germans.
It was on Aug 14, 1997, one remembers clearly, when a documentary on a TV set in a Lahore hotel showed Pakistan’s freedom struggle against the twin challenge of predominantly Hindu Congress Party and British colonialism, the former being the steeper climb. In 1945 in the documentary, the Muslim League was pleased with its cause. America had just dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A villainous looking Congress worker was sharing his desire with party colleagues to drop a similar bomb on Indian Muslims. The storyline thus depicted Gandhi’s and Nehru’s Congress as vile enough to think in terms of horrendously annihilating Indian Muslims. A similar toxic farce revealed itself upon my return to Delhi. A propaganda film on Kashmir was showing a young Kashmiri woman reassuring her suitor that it was a great idea that he gave up the gun and his drug addiction with it. The Indian government had offered loans with which they could happily grow walnut and apple orchards. The idyllic theme suggested the Kashmir struggle was one of misled drug addicts.
The targets in Dhurandhar are said to have been identified for the hero by Indian intelligence. As such, the movie could be a cover-up for notable Indian failures in its cloak-and-dagger tête-à-tête with Pakistan. One unforgivable disaster occurred with the 1999 Christmas Eve hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane from Kathmandu. The pilots had cleverly tricked their armed tormentors into letting them land for some 45 crucial minutes at Amritsar. Amid reports of commotion running up and down the political and intelligence hierarchies, the delay resulted in the plane flying away to finally land in Taliban-ruled Kandahar. Dhurandhar opens with the Indian surrender to the hijackers and the freeing of a clutch of Kashmiri prisoners from Indian jails, one of whom would go on to brutally behead American journalist Daniel Pearl. A bunch of fanatics killed him in their Karachi hideout. The entire sequence of events has been conveniently airbrushed from the movie, but these things have happened before.
Muslim actors and film writers have contributed considerably to the rise of a genre of Indian war cinema naming Pakistan as the enemy.
Hollywood’s award-winning movie Gandhi by Richard Attenborough carefully excised Bhimrao Ambedkar from the storyline even though the Gandhi story could never be complete without the Dalit icon. Ambedkar’s memory remains the most significant challenge to the Hindu caste system to which Gandhi avowedly subscribed. The Poona pact between Gandhi and Ambedkar, which the latter always said he was emotionally blackmailed into signing, resulted in the Dalits being legally co-opted into the Hindu fold, a system of beliefs that Ambedkar had rejected with his conversion to Buddhism. The oath he administered to his followers against worshipping Hindu deities is still repeated by his followers every year. Ambedkar had a lesson for the communists too whose ideology he otherwise rejected. When Gandhi asked him to join his ‘temple entry movement’ that would allow Dalits to be welcomed into Hindu temples from where they were barred, Ambedkar declined the offer, saying he was not interested in anything other than the economic and intellectual advancement of his people. That prescription the left could have used in dealing with the Sabarimala dispute about menstruating women being allowed or not allowed into Kerala’s jungle shrine at Sabarimala. But pressured by the rise of Hindu right in the state, the communists waded into the realm of religious disputes which they were ill-equipped to handle.
Unsurprisingly in some ways, Muslim actors and film writers have contributed considerably to the rise of a genre of Indian war cinema naming Pakistan as the enemy. Naseeruddin Shah was asked by his brother at the release of the actor’s reminiscences in Delhi, why all the terrorists in his movie A Wednesday were Muslims. He replied he was following the script. Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan and Aamir Khan have all joined the duck shoot, probably to keep India’s current jingoistic regime in good humour. They made films to broach a friendly India-Pakistan theme but they “balanced it”, so to speak, with scurrilous Rambo-like movies with Pakistan in the crosshairs.
There was a time when one couldn’t think of India’s movie legends like Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand and Raj Kapoor even remotely contributing to a theme that would polarise the Hindu right by conflating Pakistan with Indian Muslims. Dilip Kumar’s Shabnam and Dev Anand’s Hum Dono were, in fact, celebrated anti-war movies. Lyricist Pradeep was partial to religious nationalist motifs, but even he put together a song in the 1950s movie Jagriti that became an anthem against nuclear weapons. “ Atom bamo’n ke zor pe ainthi hai ye duniya/ Barood ke ik dher pe bhaiti hai duniya ,” the school teacher sang to his cheering students in the movie. That was then.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, April 28th, 2026
