In Gangs of Wasseypur, Sardar Khan sits across from a man he is about to kill, and before the killing, he laughs, a laugh that demonstrates that joy and menace can occupy the same square footage here. Manoj Bajpayee plays this moment the way jazz musicians play silence, the pause before the note is where everything lives. The scene asks you to recognise Sardar, his actions are a way into his persona much like when we see him commit adultery and also demonstrate paternal care for his son from first wife. He is complicated and his actions like actions of complex humans are not drawn in a straight line, but zigzags. This recognition is the uncomfortable gift Anurag Kashyap keeps pressing into your hands throughout five and a half hours.Now place yourself inside Dhurandhar. Akshaye Khanna’s Rahman Dakait gets a slow-motion entry, a nameplate, a cape of authority. The film lavishes on him the visual grammar of the main character. Close-up. Tilt. Score swells. And then, scene by scene, it proceeds to hollow him out, to strip every interesting thing about him the moment it threatens to suggest that he might be human in any way that complicates the mission of stereotyping his violence. He is given the form of depth while being denied the substance of it. It is like receiving an elaborately wrapped gift box that contains, inside, a smaller box, and inside that, nothing.This is the central divergence in both films. Both live in the same moral neighbourhood, where violence is currency. But Kashyap wants to understand the neighbourhood. Aditya Dhar wants to exploit it for other purposes.The grammar of gangstersGangster film has always been capitalism’s self-portrait, Michael Corleone does not become monstrous by abandoning the American Dream; he becomes monstrous by pursuing it too faithfully. Coppola and Scorsese understood that the gangster’s arc only matters if there is somewhere to fall from. Kashyap, working in the coal-belt politics of Dhanbad, understands this with particular ferocity.Gangs of Wasseypur opens with the humiliation of Shahid Khan, erased from his own village, his dignity reduced to a grievance that will calcify across generations into something catastrophic. The violence that follows is then not random or meaningless, it is inherited, it is also understood, in the way that poverty is inherited, in the way that caste is understood. Kashyap is in conversation with a real tradition. The Jharkhand-Bihar coal belt is one of India’s most comprehensively looted geographies. Characters of Wasseypur are not romanticised, they are contextualised. There’s a difference.Also read: ‘Dhurandhar: The Revenge’ is a Masterstroke in Pandering to a Nation that Wants to be MisledDhurandhar, by contrast, opens in 1999, during the Kandahar hijacking, a genuine national trauma, and frames it with an IB chief who yells Bharat Mata Ki Jai into a silence no one will complete. Within twenty minutes, the film tells you what it wants you to feel, who to feel it for, and crucially who to feel it about. The Pakistani characters, no matter how flamboyantly rendered, are never offered the same originating wound, they are evil for evil’s sake. They do not have a Shahid Khan. They do not begin with comprehensible grievance. They begin, already guilty.Violence as a medium of instructionWhen Faizal Khan, strung out and twitching, finally gets the revenge he has spent his entire life rehearsing, it feels less like triumph and more like someone using the only word they were ever taught. The violence in Kashyap’s world is the last mother tongue of dispossession.In Dhurandhar, violence is a different kind of language. It is the language of proof. Hamza bleeds so that India’s righteousness can be demonstrated. Every punch, every chase, every inventive action sequence exists less as character revelation than as evidence submitted to an ongoing trial in which the verdict was decided before the opening credits. The action is beautifully staged, the reviews are right about that, but beautiful staging in the service of a closed argument is just expensive rhetoric. Much like Triumph of the Will, the formal choices of propaganda and the formal choices of art are not always different; it’s the openness of the question that separates them.Nagma and the women who were allowed to want thingsWasseypur’s women are not the story’s center, but they are its conscience, and more than that, they are its hunger. Nagma who begins as a woman in a marriage that oscillates between tenderness and terror and ends as a widow burning with a specific fury that has nowhere to go is perhaps the most fully realized portrait of female rage in recent Indian cinema. It is the hot, messy, completely human rage of a woman who wanted things, pleasure, security, recognition, to be seen and was given instead an inheritance of grief.Kashyap lets Nagma be contradictory. She loves Faizal and resents him. She is shrewd about survival and occasionally reckless about pride. She performs softness when it serves her and abandons it without apology when it doesn’t. She is not noble. She is not decorative. She is the kind of woman that most popular Hindi cinema has always been slightly afraid of one who might desire without asking permission for the desire.The women of Dhurandhar, exist as props. The most significant female character is a 19-year-old who is honey-trapped by the hero, a transaction the film frames as professional necessity, acceptable collateral in the accounting of patriotism. This is not a minor detail. It is the film’s values made flesh. When you reduce a young woman to a plot mechanism in a scene designed to make your hero look effectively ruthless, and when the film doesn’t pause to register what has been done to her, you have not just made a narrative choice. You have revealed a hierarchy. Her suffering is just furniture.Nagma, even in grief, is always her own sentence’s subject.Deceits at the centreGangs of Wasseypur is often celebrated for its moral complexity, its refusal to judge, its sprawling, novelistic embrace of human contradictions. And much of that praise is deserved. But Kashyap’s film also aestheticises a great deal of brutality; it makes violence beautiful often enough that a viewer could leave the cinema having enjoyed the carnage without once interrogating the structures that produced it. A film can have moral complexity in its characterisation while still delivering, structurally, the pleasures of a thriller. Complexity is not the same as critique.Dhurandhar, meanwhile, is accused of propaganda, and the accusation lands. Aditya Dhar found certain pre-existing fears that exists in the culture and decided to amplify them rather than interrogate. Problem isn’t that he made a nationalistic film, problem is that nationalism, deployed as cinema, tends to do to people what Dhurandhar does to its Pakistani characters, gives them form while denying them any interiority.Both films are about the same thing. The violent claiming of space. The transmission of trauma across generations or, in Dhurandhar’s case, across geography. Protagonists who perform loyalty because they have been taught of it as opposed to any other form of devotion. In Wasseypur, this same loyalty belongs to a family, in Dhurandhar, it belongs to a nation and the nation, unlike the family, does not permit grief without justification. Sardar Khan can mourn badly, love badly, live in contradiction. Hamza Ali cannot. The nation requires a clean wound.What we ask of cinemaCinema has always been a technology of empathy, or its suppression. We decide, frame by frame, whose pain is real, whose blood counts, whose death the camera dwells on and whose it dispatches in a cut. These decisions accumulate. They form a portrait not of the world as it should be, but of the world as we believe we deserve, the world we are asking for, without ever having to say it out loud.Characters of Gangs of Wasseypur are not good or bad but their humanity is undeniable, and that undeniability is a form of respect that the film extends without having to like what it sees. Dhurandhar stands on the other side of the border and refuses to cross. It is a film deeply in love with its own righteousness, and that love, however cinematically dressed, is the thing that finally makes it smaller than its ambitions.Also read: ‘Dhurandhar’: Aditya Dhar’s Spy Saga Is as Subtle as a TrollDhurandhar asks for a world where the enemy is clear, the hero is clean despite the blood, and the violence is always pointing in the right direction. It is, in this way, a deeply comforting film. Comfort has always been cinema’s most profitable product and its most corrupting one. Saadat Hasan Manto, who lived through Partition and wrote about it with a precision that bordered, in his own words, on ‘unbearable’, said that he could not tell who was mad – him, or the world around him. His stories contain Pakistani and Indian characters with equal ferocity, equal tenderness, equal capacity for monstrousness. Toba Tek Singh ends with a man dying in the no-man’s land between borders. That no-man’s land is where truth lives if you’re willing to lie down in it. It is not comfortable territory, certainly not box office territory. But it is where cinema becomes art rather than anthology or worse propaganda.The gangster was supposed to show us the back room of the house we live in. When he becomes a patriot, the back room gets locked. It doesn’t smell fine in there. It never did.Raj Shekhar is based out of San Francisco and works in the area of data privacy regulations. He also occasionally contributes as a freelancer writing on politics and runs a podcast on politics called the Bharatiya Junta Podcast.