Dhurandhar has already raked in over 10 billion rupees at the box office. - ADITYADHARFILMS/X
NEW DELHI: A gripping Bollywood spy thriller set in Pakistan has become the highest-grossing Hindi film in India in just eight weeks and counting.
Dhurandhar tells the story of an Indian agent who infiltrates the nefarious world of Pakistan state-supported terror groups, exacting revenge for attacks launched in India.
The film revels in violence. Bullets zip across the screen and heads fly off torsos in a gory display of choreography set to the soundtrack of yesteryear Bollywood hits.
It ends with an ominous warning to terrorists and their sympathisers: “This is a New India. It enters homes and kills too.” In essence, the country will not hesitate to strike its enemies, even across the border.
The closing line is taken word-for-word from a slogan oft-spouted by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders to highlight India’s retaliatory attacks on terrorists in Pakistan, including the February 2019 air strikes and the May 2025 operation after terror attacks in Kashmir.
Released on Dec 5, 2025, Dhurandhar is headlined by top actors including Ranveer Singh and has already raked in over 10 billion rupees (US$108.7 million) at the box office.
The film is among several Bollywood war films and spy thrillers that have hit the screens in the past two years, a phenomenon driven both by domestic audience demand for high-octane patriotic entertainment and the Hindi film industry’s desire to cash in on this craze.
This wave of nationalistic films does not just valourise the Indian defence forces but also – as is the case with Dhurandhar – amplify the ruling BJP’s political narrative of muscular nationalism directed at archrival Pakistan, which depicts the government as capable of bold military action as needed.
Bollywood’s recent slew of war films and spy thrillers – often featuring Pakistan-linked adversaries – includes Border 2, a hit sequel to the 1997 crowd-puller Border, that opened in cinemas on Jan 23.
“How far should our cry reach?” shouts the main character, an Indian army officer, in one of the defining scenes. “Until Lahore,” scream back his soldiers.
Even the Chinese war front has found screen time. 120 Bahadur, which tells the story of Indian soldiers who fought off Chinese aggression in Ladakh during the 1962 Sino-Indian War, was released on Nov 21, 2025.
The more recent clash in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley in 2020 will also be portrayed in the Battle Of Galwan, a film starring the country’s well-known actor Salman Khan and scheduled for release on April 17.
A sequel to Dhurandhar is expected to roll out in March too.
Mayank Shekhar, a Mumbai-based film critic, told The Straits Times, that overall media consumption in India today, whether on news channels or social media, “revels in hyper-nationalism”.
“It’s the same audience that goes to watch movies in theatres. The spillover is complete, and it appears that these movies merely match that mood,” he said.
Bollywood, he added, seems to have gravitated towards the crowd-pulling action genre since 2023, after being “caught unawares, once the loud, over-the-top ‘actioners’ from South India began to briefly dominate the pan-India box office”.
For many, this shift was defined by Pathaan, a 2023 Bollywood big-ticket spy thriller starring Shah Rukh Khan and featuring international locations and slick graphics.
The craze has been so intense that days after Operation Sindoor – the targeted military response India launched on Pakistan in May 2025, following the April terror attack in Pahalgam that year – there was a scramble by entertainment entities to secure film titles inspired by the event.
Within just two days, over 30 title applications, including names like Operation Sindoor, Mission Sindoor and Sindoor: The Revenge, were submitted to various industry bodies, including the Indian Motion Picture Producers’ Association.
“The sentiment of the (Indian) public certainly seems to be one where they see their country as a great entity, and these films are catering to that emotion,” said Komal Nahta, a film trade analyst based in Mumbai.
Yet, making a Pakistan-bashing action film does not always guarantee commercial success. For instance, the 2025 Bollywood action drama War 2, with a Pakistan-linked terror network as the antagonist, failed to recoup its production costs estimated at around four billion rupees.
This phenomenon of film plots aligning neatly with government narratives coincides with mounting concerns about film censorship in India. The pressure stems not only from regulators, but also right-wing trolls and vigilantes making online and offline attacks on film-makers.
The country “has changed dramatically” since the Hindu nationalist BJP came to power in 2014, noted Dr Ranjani Mazumdar, a professor of cinema studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s School of Arts and Aesthetics.
“We have only gone from bad to worse,” she added, referring to growing government control of institutions including the Indian film industry, which is the world’s largest producer of films.
The long-time mass appeal of Bollywood has been built on films that depict utopian solutions to social conflicts related to class, caste, religion and region.
Many of its biggest stars happen to be Muslims, and their abiding widespread popularity, noted Dr Mazumdar, reflects the audience’s as well as the industry’s acceptance of such a utopian multi-religious world view.
“So when you have a film industry that keeps the memory and experiences of a cosmopolitan, liberal and secular world view still alive, it does not bode well for right-wing Hindu narratives,” she told ST. “And that’s why Bombay cinema has been a target.”
Since 2014, a wave of right-wing, pro-government and Islamophobic messaging has coursed through Bollywood.
Several BJP-led state governments have even offered support through tax incentives that lower cinema ticket prices for Bollywood films whose plot lines the party finds appealing, in recent years.
These include Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019), a film that glorifies India’s air strikes on Pakistan, and The Kashmir Files (2022), a film centred around the 1990 exodus of Kashmiri Hindus from Kashmir due to Islamic terrorism.
But Nahta dismissed the idea of Dhurandhar and its ilk being government “propaganda films”, ascribing them instead more to film-makers’ strategy to benefit from popular sentiments. “Who doesn’t want to make money?” he said. “And is making money a crime?”
“I’m making the film for it to succeed, and if there are certain dialogues that will bring in claps, I would be a fool not to use them, especially if they fit in well with the story.”
More Indian film-makers are tapping domestic demand for hyper-nationalistic storytelling at the expense of important markets abroad.
Dhurandhar, like several other recent anti-Pakistan Bollywood action films, has been banned from cinemas in Arab countries in West Asia that are home not just to a large Indian diaspora but also a Pakistani one.
The film is also not expected to hit cinemas in China, which strictly regulates the release of foreign films.
Neither will Battle Of Galwan; Chinese state media have already argued, based on the film’s teaser, that the show “does not align with the facts” of the June 2020 clash.
Meanwhile, amid all this Bollywood chest-thumping war cinema, there are few films that spotlight the human cost of conflict. Ikkis, a 2026 film based on the 1971 India-Pakistan war, took such a boldly different narrative, not celebrating war but cautioning against it.
One of the key figures in the film is Pakistani brigadier Jaan Mohammad Nisar, who is based on a real-life character.
He witnesses a young Indian tank commander’s heroism on the battlefield first-hand before killing him. It is a heavy emotional toll he lives with, something he finally reveals to the Indian tank commander’s father, whom he hosts personally during a visit to Pakistan.
The father, while emotional, does not fly into a rage, and says that wars will continue to inflict wounds until humans decide to put an end to them. He even forgives his son’s killer and asks the Pakistani brigadier to visit his home in India.
A different takeaway, however, is superimposed in a post credits disclaimer, which describes Brigadier Nisar’s behaviour as an “exceptional incident” and states that “our neighbouring country (Pakistan) is not trustworthy at all”.
“Pakistan’s armies, both during war and in times of peace, have behaved very cruelly and inhumanely with our soldiers and citizens,” it adds.
It is not known if the film-maker was forced to add the disclaimer, but Dr Mazumdar surmised: “The disclaimer is there because they (the government) don’t want films to send out a very different kind of message than theirs.
“Ikkis does that. It is an anti-war war film with a subterranean message that questions what these wars are actually for, and how we can keep the bonds destroyed by them alive.” - The Straits Times/ANN
