Aditya Dhar’s spy thriller Dhurandhar has drawn global attention to Lyari, a dense Karachi neighbourhood once infamous for drug cartels, gang wars and political patronage networks. The film, set in the early 2000s, revisits an era when Lyari — a six-square-kilometre borough barely twice the size of Mumbai’s Dharavi — became synonymous with violence. But the story of Lyari stretches far beyond its darkest years, beginning as a small dock-worker settlement in the 1700s and slowly transforming, through waves of migration and state neglect, into both a battleground and a cradle of cultural resilience.
Lyari’s origins lie in a tiny fishing village that grew as Karachi’s port expanded under British rule in the 1850s. The area became home to Baloch labourers from Iran’s Makran coast and Pakistan’s Balochistan province, followed by Punjabis, Sindhis, Kutchhis, Siddis and Pashtuns. Narrow lanes and cramped dwellings formed organically, without formal urban planning. As refugee waves of Urdu-speaking Muhajirs arrived after Partition in 1947, the neighbourhood became even more congested, its infrastructure–– sewage, roads, water, housing–– chronically ignored by both local elites and colonial authorities before them.
By the 1960s, poverty and overcrowding prepared the ground for Lyari’s earliest gangs, small outfits such as Kaala Naag and Dalaal, which brought narcotics into the neighbourhood but largely avoided harming residents. The 1970s marked a political shift when Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto campaigned in Lyari and cemented its loyalty to the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), a relationship later strengthened when Benazir Bhutto held her wedding reception at Kakri Ground. But by the 1980s, regional geopolitics reshaped Lyari again. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan spurred a flow of Pashtuns—many experienced in handling weapons—into Karachi, and Lyari became a major base for the city’s expanding drug and gun markets. What had been low-level criminality erupted into full-blown gang warfare.
This backdrop sets the stage for Dhurandhar. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, Lyari was no longer just a slum; it had become the epicentre of Karachi’s violence. Population density soared from 250 people per hectare in 1973 to more than 1,500 by 2023. Gangs morphed into powerful political actors. The PPP-aligned Uzair Baloch and Rehman Dakait (portrayed by Akshaye Khanna in the film) fought bitter turf wars against MQM-backed Arshad Pappu. The People’s Aman Committee operated as both a militia and a political tool, pushing back against state repression while reinforcing its own grip on the area. Violence spilled out into the rest of Karachi — by 2013, more than 3,200 people had been killed in gang-related incidents. Under growing national and international pressure, the government eventually deployed the Pakistan Rangers, dismantling much of the PAC’s influence and arresting over a thousand gang members.
Yet Lyari, despite its violent reputation, has also produced remarkable figures who shaped Pakistani culture and sports: Olympic boxer Hussain Shah, footballers Umar Baloch and Ustaad Qasim, scholar Waja Khair Mohammad Nadvi, former Chief Justice Syed Sajjad Ali Shah and Mr Pakistan bodybuilder Sikandar Baloch. This coexistence of turmoil and talent defines Lyari’s complexity — a neighbourhood scarred by decades of conflict yet never stripped of its creative spirit.
Today, Lyari is in a period of slow but visible transformation. Violence has sharply declined since 2015, and residents are pushing for improved infrastructure, education and social services. A new cultural movement has taken root: football clubs, boxing gyms, performance groups and rap collectives are giving young people outlets beyond the shadows of their past. Musicians like 29-year-old Kaifi Khalil — whose Coke Studio hit “Kana Yaari” and its depictions of heartbreak and longing captured Lyari’s emotional landscape — and artists like Eva B, Pakistan’s first niqab-wearing female rapper, have brought national attention to the area’s creative renaissance.
Lyari is no longer the war zone it once was, but its history lingers in its streets, its art and its identity. Dhurandhar portrays only one chapter of its past — the blood-soaked years shaped by politics and ganglords — but the real Lyari continues to evolve, moving from survival to expression, from notoriety to renewal.
