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Ranveer Singh is back with Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar, speculated to be the longest film of Singh’s career, and the recently released trailer has left us with a lot of questions. The trailer, which dropped on Tuesday, introduced an ultra-intense, spy action saga about an Indian spy, played by Singh, deployed in Pakistan. And not just anywhere in Pakistan — in Karachi’s Lyari.

Yes, Lyari. If you’re confused, don’t worry, because so are we.

The star-studded cast includes Arjun Rampal, R Madhavan, Sanjay Dutt, and Akshay Khanna. The trailer paints Rampal’s Major Iqbal as the “Angel of Death”, with a personal obsession for “making India bleed”. Inexplicably, the trailer says, “inki marzi ke baghair Pakistani siasat ka aik patta bhi nahi hil sakta (not even a single leaf moves in Pakistani politics without Major Iqbal’s approval).“

We are then introduced to Ajay Sanyal (modelled on India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval), the “Charioteer of Karma”, who is convinced that Pakistan — more specifically Lyari— “must be infiltrated” to end terrorism, with Lyari labelled as the “very core of terrorism in Pakistan”.

Then comes Abdul Rehman Baloch, better known as Rehman Dakait, rebranded here as the “Apex Predator”. Khanna plays him delivering the ominous line, “Bus jo waada kiya tha usse bhoolne ki gustakhi mat karna (Don’t even try to forget the promise you made).” The trailer doesn’t tell us whom he’s threatening, though it hints at an invented partnership with Indian intelligence.

The late SP Chaudhry Aslam Khan — a real-life Karachi counter-terror officer — appears as “The Jinn” and is portrayed by Sanjay Dutt. And at the centre of it all is Singh as “The Wrath of God”, sent in to “wipe out terrorism” supposedly rooted in Lyari.

If you’ve made it this far, know that we are as puzzled as you. When exactly did Lyari become the global terror HQ? How are Rehman Dakait and Chaudhry Aslam suddenly tied to India? Which history book did we miss?

Rehman “Dakait” Baloch was a notorious Lyari gang leader who, according to his widow, was gunned down in a staged police encounter ordered by SSP Chaudhry Aslam. The case sparked controversy and legal battles, with the Sindh High Court ordering the registration of an FIR against Aslam for the alleged extrajudicial killing. Neither man had any publicly documented connection to India, cross-border terrorism, or espionage. Their roles were rooted entirely in Karachi’s local gang wars and policing.

The trailer also shows a flash of a suspiciously familiar aircraft in a barren landscape — one that looks a lot like the Indian Airlines plane hijacked in Afghanistan’s Kandahar in 1999 — suggesting the film may be planning to fold that narrative in too, under its ever-elastic “inspired by true events” banner, though this time it adds the word ‘incredible’.

And that’s the real issue. India’s recent wave of films “inspired by true events” increasingly seems inspired more by hyper-nationalist imagination than documented fact. It’s a great box-office formula — but also a worrying one, when cinema starts rewriting history (and geography) faster than textbooks can correct it. Take Fighter or The Taj Story for example, both films “inspired by true events”.

The Taj Story was based on a claim that labelled the Taj Mahal a site of “atrocity”, a theory that has been debunked repeatedly by historians and the Archaeological Survey of India.

Similarly, Fighter was a movie about Shamsher “Patty” Pathania who becomes a member of the Indian Air Force and then has to come to terms with the 2019 Pulwama attack. The movie was entirely based on the belief that Pakistan was behind the attack, a charge that Pakistan has vigorously denied. In fact, in August 2021, the main accused along with six others had been killed.

Dhurandhar’s team might just have perfected the set design for the film, but the storyline? Not so much. This is likely another film that twists history, veering into fantasy all while claiming to be ‘inspired by true events’. That said, we’ll give them this: casting Sanjay Dutt as Chaudhry Aslam? Excellent choice.