“Dhurandhar Is India’s Overdue Entry Into the Business of National Myth”, Swarajya, March 21, 2026
“There is a line in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance that has become perhaps the most quoted sentence in the history of American cinema: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” This is what nations do. It is what they have always done. America printed the legend of the frontier through a hundred John Wayne westerns that bore no resemblance to the actual, genocidal settlement of the continent. Britain printed the legend of imperial stoicism through films that treated Dunkirk as a triumph rather than a catastrophe. France printed the legend of universal Resistance, conveniently omitting the enthusiasms of Vichy. These myths were not harmless. But they were constitutive. They built the psychic infrastructure upon which national confidence rests.
India, for the better part of its independent existence, has declined to print its own legends. When it was not consuming Hollywood’s version of American exceptionalism, it was producing cinema that—as Gautam Adani recently put it with characteristic bluntness—showed Dharavi’s poverty for Western applause. There is nothing dishonourable about depicting poverty or suffering; India’s realistic cinema is among the finest in the world. But a national culture that produces only victimhood narratives teaches its people that the only stories worth telling about themselves are stories of suffering, and that the only audience worth impressing is one that pities them.
This is the context in which Dhurandhar arrives—and it is the context its critics refuse to acknowledge. Aditya Dhar’s two-part spy thriller, in which a fictional RAW agent infiltrates Karachi’s underworld across a decade of India-Pakistan conflict, referencing the IC-814 hijacking, the Parliament attack, and 26/11, has now grossed over thirteen hundred crore rupees in its first instalment and shattered records with Part 2 opening at a hundred crore on day one. Audiences gave Part 1 a ninety-six per cent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. And the critical establishment—that narrow, English-language guild of aesthetic commissars—has pronounced it “jingoistic,” “propaganda masquerading as cinema,” and guilty of the apparently unforgivable sin of “freely mixing truth with fiction……..”
Read full article at swarajyamag.com
