The untold story of Dhurandhar's Lyari

India Today

Aditya Dhar's spy thriller Dhurandhar is set in Pakistan's Lyari of the 2000s.

Transcript

00:00This is the iconic place where Dhurandar roots from,

00:06Lyari.

00:07And trust me, Lyari is not just any neighbourhood,

00:09it's literally called a mother of Karachi.

00:11Barely twice the size of Mumbai's Dharavi,

00:14but carrying centuries of stories.

00:16So let's tell you why it's always been way bigger

00:18than just a backdrop in this Aditya Dhar film.

00:21Lyari started in the early 1700s as a tiny fishing village.

00:24Baloch families from the Makran coast,

00:26people who worked with boats, nets in the Arabian Sea,

00:29settle there.

00:30This was long before Karachi became the Karachi of today.

00:33Cut to the 1830s, the British defeat the local Baloch rulers

00:37and start shaping Karachi into a modern trading port.

00:40By the 1850s, Karachi's port was booming

00:43and Lyari turned into a labour hub.

00:46The lanes got tighter, homes became denser.

00:48Researchers say the rich Hindu trading families

00:51who built early Karachi did not invest much in Lyari

00:54and the British were not too concerned either.

00:56So Lyari grew in a chaotic, squeezed together way.

00:59Before independence, Lyari was already a mashup of communities.

01:02Baloch, Punjabis, Kachis, Sindhis, Siddhis, Pashtuns then came 1947.

01:09Harchers, Urdu speaking families from India arrived in huge numbers.

01:13Lyari already struggling became even more cramped.

01:16Now comes the part that shaped Lyari's dangerous reputation.

01:20After partition, the place got overcrowded and was ignored by the Pakistani state.

01:25More Pashtuns arrived after the Afghan-Soviet war.

01:27Gun culture and drug routes enter the neighbourhood.

01:30In the 70s, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto campaigned here.

01:33Benazir's Walima, or a post wedding feast, was held at Lyari's Kakri ground.

01:37And since then, Lyari has become a Pakistan People's Party stronghold.

01:40By 1979, things started changing.

01:42Zia-ul-Haq, the Afghan war.

01:44More guns, more drug networks.

01:45This is the Lyari you see glimpses of in Dhorandhar.

01:48The place, Ranveer Singh's character stands outside in the trailer.

01:52Gangs got linked to political parties.

01:54PPP backed groups versus MQM backed groups.

01:57MQM being the Mutahid Haqami movement, representing the city's Urdu-speaking Mohanjir population.

02:02Names like Uzair Baloch, Rahman Dakait, and Arshad Pappu shaped the streets.

02:08The wars did not stay in Lyari.

02:10This spilled across Karachi.

02:11From 2001 to 2013, over 3200 people had been killed in gang violence.

02:16Then came the clean-up.

02:18Rangers, police, raids, arrests, more than 1,000 gang members gone.

02:22Slowly, the fires died down.

02:24So, if you think that Aditya Dhar picked up Lyari for drama, then you are absolutely wrong.

02:29He picked it because the place is loaded with history, pain, culture and survival.

02:33I'm Manishabhikari.

02:34Thank you for watching The Culture Project on Mohan.

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