The Raazi director used a podcast appearance to argue that loud action and quiet espionage can carry the same national feeling, just told differently.
Meghna Gulzar isn't having it. The idea that Raazi's hushed spycraft counts for less patriotism than Dhurandhar's guns-blazing heroics got a pointed pushback from the director this week, on the podcast Learn By KK Create.
Asked directly whether her own take on patriotism sits at odds with the more muscular version audiences have been debating around Dhurandhar, Gulzar didn't hedge.
"The difference is in the story. I don't think Raazi's characters aren't any less patriotic than Dhurandhar's characters. It is their actions because of the way the story is. That is how they are depicted. One does not have to be right, and the other has to be wrong. Patriotism and prayers don't need volume. And they aren't expressed in one particular way. Every individual has their own way of expression," she said.
Fair point, and one worth sitting with given how differently the two films actually work. Raazi, released in 2018, followed Alia Bhatt's Sehmat, an Indian woman planted across the border during the 1971 war, her mission unfolding through marriage, deception and a slow moral unravelling rather than gunfire. It's a film built on restraint, on what Sehmat can't say out loud.
Gulzar was also asked if there's a ceiling to how far she'd let patriotism push a character on screen, morally or otherwise. Her answer stayed with the character, not the genre.
"There is no limit. If the character does not have a limit, how will I have a limit? And there was no limit of Raazi's character's patriotism. She had a limit when it came to her moral compass," she said.
That distinction, patriotism without a ceiling but conscience with one, is basically the engine of Sehmat's arc. It's also, arguably, the quieter argument Gulzar is making here. Loud and restrained aren't opposites on some scale of national feeling. They're just different scripts doing different jobs.
Worth remembering that Gulzar has never really made films that shout. Raazi, Talvar, Chhapaak, even Samjhauta, all of them lean into ambiguity over spectacle. So the comparison to a film like Dhurandhar, which trades in exactly the kind of scale and volume Gulzar tends to avoid, was probably inevitable the moment both started circulating in the same conversation.
Gulzar isn't sitting still, though. She's currently deep into Daayra, her next directorial, which brings together Kareena Kapoor Khan and Prithviraj Sukumaran for what sounds like another character-first drama going by early reactions from the set. No release date yet. But pairing a Malayalam heavyweight with Kapoor Khan under Gulzar's direction is already the kind of casting that gets people talking well before a trailer shows up.
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