t an international workshop a few months ago, some Pakistani colleagues asked me – not without a touch of sarcasm – whether Bollywood was still producing movies worth watching or was it all the same old anti-Pakistan propaganda. Dhurandhar had been mentioned. Having presented myself as a movie aficionado, I was stumped for once. Since then, I am happy to report, at least two movies have appeared that have restored my faith in the Indian cinema. Let’s take a look at both.

Three films released in an 18-month window — Dhurandhar, its sequel Dhurandhar: The Revenge and Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga— offer a revealing map of how contemporary Bollywood negotiates memory, trauma and the place of religious minorities in the national imagination. So does the censorship saga of Satluj. Read together, they suggest that the mainstream Indian cinema is currently fighting a battle over whose grief gets to be history and whose grief gets treated as a security threat.

The aesthetics of

enmity

Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar franchise dramatises a covert Indian intelligence operation against terror networks, weaving together the 1999 IC-814 hijacking, the 2001 Parliament House attack and the 2008 Mumbai attacks into a single continuous narrative of Indian retribution against Pakistan. The film opens with a disclaimer describing itself as fiction. However, it repeatedly signals to the audience that it is inspired by real events. The device lets it claim the protection of fiction while banking on the emotional charge of a realistic documentary. Some critics have zeroed in on precisely this strategy.

A “butcher” aesthetic is applied to an entire Karachi neighbourhood, seemingly equating the subcontinent’s Muslims with “barbarians.“ All Pakistani characters are depicted as rejoicing in India’s suffering, chanting religious phrases in an explicitly Islamophobic manner. One reviewer has described the project as a work wherein fictional and factual registers stay deliberately blurred. The audiences can generally ‘recognise’ the characters.

This is not a fringe reading. Another journalist told Al Jazeera, the film’s storytelling mode had the effect of reducing Muslims across India’s borders — and within India — to terrorists. This further marginalises Muslims in India culturally, a pattern she and others place alongside earlier “based on true events” hits like The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story, both championed by Prime Minister Modi even as critics accused them of distorting history. The commercial trajectory of these films reinforces the point: Dhurandhar: The Revenge became the first Hindi film to cross INR 10 billion in net domestic collections. Together, the two films surpassed INR 32 billion worldwide, making it arguably the most commercially successful Hindutva nationalist franchise in Bollywood history. Dhurandhar is, in this sense, not simply a film but a successful template: a repeatable, monetisable formula for narrating cross-border terrorism in which the Muslim figure — whether Pakistani state, gangster or crowd — is rendered as the site onto which ‘national anxiety’ is imagined and constructed. It is then resolved through spectacular violence.

Melodrama as

counter-memory

Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga works from an entirely different register, though in Diljit Dosanjh it shares a lead actor with the Satluj controversy. The film follows a grandson caring for his dementia-stricken dying grandfather as the old man revisits a tragic romance from the 1947 Partition, using AR Rahman’s score and the structure of romantic melodrama to carry the weight of a historical wound that Bollywood has rarely allowed to breathe on its own terms. Where Dhurandhar externalises violence, Main Vaapas Aaunga internalises it as inherited, unresolved grief. Reviewers have noted how the film is fundamentally about the Punjab’s buried trauma, refugee memory and the way pain curdles into patriarchy across generations. The reading locates the film’s politics not in an external villain but in the psychic residue the partition left on Punjabi families - Sikh and Muslim alike.

The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story were championed by Prime Minister Modi even as critics accused them of distorting history.

This is where the comparison sharpens. Dhurandhar produces and imposes a clarity and catharsis: a clean line between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ resolved through spectacular violence and box-office triumph. Main Vaapas Aaunga produces ambiguity and ache: an old man’s memory, not a nation’s verdict, becomes the vessel for reckoning with the Partition violence. It refuses to assign a singular villain to the tragedy, choosing instead to sit with loss as something that implicates everyone and redeems no one. In doing so, it makes room, however melodramatically, however commercially cushioned by a major mainstream director and composer — for Sikh and Punjabi memory to exist as tragedy rather than as either menace or footnote.

Memory becomes a

security threat

The Satluj controversy makes visible exactly what happens when this kind of minority memory-work refuses melodrama’s softening and instead directly names the state. Based on Jaswant Singh Khalra’s investigation into Punjab Police’s mass extrajudicial killings during the anti-insurgency campaign, the film was subject to three years of CBFC scrutiny, accumulating more than 120 requested cuts, before its release on ZEE 5 was withdrawn within 48 hours under government pressure. Some of the films alleging similar villainy by non-state or minority-community actors have circulated freely. The asymmetry is instructive: a biopic implicating state security forces in the deaths of thousands faced years of delay and eventual suppression, while franchises blaming the underworld in a neighbouring Muslim-majority nation broke box-office records with active propaganda and support from the political establishment. Sikh memory of state violence, when it points inward at India rather than outward at Pakistan, becomes classified as a security risk rather than a legitimate historical claim.

Politics of memory

Taken together, these three works chart the terms on which religious and regional minorities are allowed into India’s cinematic memory these days. Muslims largely appear as the demonised outsiders — Karachi gangsters, jubilant terrorists — whose suffering is never itself the subject, only the occasion for someone else’s vengeance. Sikhs fare somewhat better, but conditionally: Partition-era Sikh grief is embraced when it arrives as romantic melodrama backed by a star composer. It is resisted and censored when it insists on naming the post-colonial Indian state as perpetrator of oppression, as Satluj does. In both cases, the minority functions less as a full subject of history than as a signpost — either the threat against which the majoritarian nation defines itself or the picturesque wound the nation can grieve so long as no one currently in power is blamed. The genuine battle, then, isn’t over which films get made or banned, but over who gets to be a protagonist of ‘Indian memory’ rather than its symbol.

It’s worth noting that this is a contested reading, not a settled one: defenders of Dhurandhar, insist the film is a realistic engagement with documented terrorism rather than propaganda. They argue that fictionalised geopolitics is a long-standing Bollywood tradition rather than a uniquely majoritarian project. Yet, the political climate in which this franchise gets its currency doesn’t make it yet another innocent venture.

I am happy to report to my friends across the South Asian region that the battle over sanity of memory continues, even in today’s Bollywood cinema.

The author has been in the development sector for more than a decade. He currently works with an international non-governmental organisation based in Delhi. He may be reached at: [email protected].