{"id":622147,"date":"2026-06-05T06:39:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T06:39:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/622147\/"},"modified":"2026-06-05T06:39:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T06:39:09","slug":"pakistans-lyari-defies-bollywoods-gangland-label-to-rise-as-boxing-haven-media-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/622147\/","title":{"rendered":"Pakistan\u2019s Lyari defies Bollywood\u2019s gangland label to rise as boxing haven | Media News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Karachi, Pakistan \u2013 Over a few breezy winter weeks in Karachi, boxing coach Younus Qambrani sent a steady stream of WhatsApp messages from his neighbourhood of Lyari \u2013 videos, photos, old newspaper clippings that together formed an extensive archive of how he teaches girls to throw a punch.<\/p>\n

In one of the videos, the bearded and skullcap-clad Qambrani, 60, uses the palms of his hands and ducks as his young students practice throwing their punches. The thuds of the colliding boxing gloves and the scuff of the sneakers against the concrete floor of Qambrani\u2019s Pak-Shaheen boxing club mask the din on the street.<\/p>\n

Outside, motorcycles speed and sputter on narrow, labyrinthine roads, past omelettes sizzling on outdoor skillets in the many kebab bun stalls that pepper the neighbourhood of nearly 950,000 people: that is the population of Amsterdam packed into about three percent of the Dutch city\u2019s land area.<\/p>\n

To millions of followers of Bollywood, the Indian film industry across the border, Lyari is synonymous with brutal gang warfare waged against a perpetually grey background. It is where Bollywood\u2019s highest grossing film of all time, Dhurandhar and its recently released sequel, Dhurandhar The Revenge are set.<\/p>\n

The films \u2014 about a fictionalised covert mission conducted by India\u2019s Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) on Pakistani soil \u2014 have each earned more than $100m. In the first film, an Indian spy infiltrates Lyari\u2019s criminal underworld and neutralises threats to India\u2019s national security. In the sequel, the same agent continues his deep-cover operation inside Pakistan\u2019s crime networks, again moving through Lyari\u2019s streets.<\/p>\n

But to Lyari locals, the neighbourhood is much more than the backdrop to blood and gore: It is a melting pot of cultures and tradition, rooted in history far deeper than Bollywood has dared to explore. It has an emerging rap and hip-hop scene, launching acts such as hip hop group, Lyari Underground, and masked rapper, Eva B, onto the national stage. The neighbourhood has also earned the nickname of Mini Brazil<\/a> for being Pakistan\u2019s mecca of football.<\/p>\n

To be sure, Lyari has had a past rife with gang violence and unrest. Armed groups held significant influence from the mid\u20112000s into the early 2010s, when battles between rival syndicates were at their peak. Gangs led by figures such as Rehman Dakait and, later, Uzair Baloch \u2013 both depicted in the Dhurandhar film and its sequel \u2013 turned parts of the neighbourhood into a militarised conflict zone. At the height of the violence, human rights groups reported about 800 people killed in Karachi in a single year, many of them in and around Lyari.<\/p>\n

In 2012, the government launched what became known as Operation Lyari, a major crackdown in which police, backed by the Sindh Rangers paramilitary force, moved against armed groups in the area. The operation, and subsequent security campaigns, dismantled the main gang hierarchies and largely ended the era of open, large\u2011scale gang warfare in Lyari, even if other forms of crime persisted.<\/p>\n

But Lyari, said social anthropologist Adeem Suhail, has always been about much more than that period of violence.<\/p>\n

\u201cThink of Naples or Sicily in Italy, which are among the major cultural hubs of the country (food, literature, music, etc) despite having long been associated with Mafia violence,\u201d Suhail, an assistant professor at Pennsylvania-based Franklin and Marshall College, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

\"qambrani\"An undated picture of Qambrani\u2019s membership card for Pak National Boxing Club. [Courtesy of Younus Qambrani]\u2018Preparing for war\u2019 \u2014 of a different kind<\/p>\n

Qambrani has been boxing alongside his brothers for as long as he can remember. He began when he was five years old, and was introduced to the sport by his father, uncles and brothers \u2014 all boxers. Throughout his childhood, Qambrani says he was a sick and frail child. But he was determined to build muscle and throw punches like the men who had inspired him as he was growing up.<\/p>\n

Boxing is so popular in Lyari that in 1989 boxing legend Muhammad Ali visited the neighbourhood, when he was a special guest at the Asian Games in the capital, Islamabad.<\/p>\n

Qambrani\u2019s high school, Haji Abdullah Haroon Government College, opened its own boxing club while he was there. He joined, but the club shut down in a few years. So he found another club a little further away and began cycling there to train.<\/p>\n

After honing his skills there, Qambrani founded Pak Shaheen Boxing Club in 1992. \u201cI wanted to open a club in my own area,\u201d Qambrani said. At Pak Shaheen, he started out by teaching young boys, aged seven to 16, how to box.<\/p>\n

\"Qambrani\"A recent photo at his boxing club. [Courtesy of Younus Qambrani]<\/p>\n

A sports enthusiast, Qambrani built friendships with coaches across the city, often visiting their training centres. At a friend\u2019s karate classes at the YMCA (Young Men\u2019s Christian Association) in central Karachi, he noticed young girls practicing kicks and elbow strikes shoulder-to-shoulder with boys. \u201cIf girls can do karate, why not boxing?\u201d he wondered.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_7530\"Qambrani\u2019s students train to spar [Wania Farhan\/Al Jazeera]<\/p>\n

Soon he began voicing this question to his peers in the local boxing community, saying he wanted to start training young girls. One of them told him that \u201clittle girls have weak brains\u201d \u2014 a remark that left Qambrani silent.<\/p>\n

Then he went home and began looking through news reports featuring stories of girls and women boxing internationally. He would cut out the news clippings and paste them into a notebook. \u201cMy eyes were on the whole world,\u201d he recalled. \u201cGirls are boxing in the outside world, why not here?\u201d he would wonder.<\/p>\n

So he started at home: when his daughter Anum turned three, he began playfully sparring with her. She would gaze at the many photos of her father and uncles at boxing championships, slip on his medals, and traipse into the living room, mimicking the victorious poses he struck in those pictures. \u201cShe couldn\u2019t even run properly, but she would box,\u201d Qambrani said.<\/p>\n

Then, in 2013, he opened the doors of his club to young girls. Anum was 16 at the time, and became its first female member.<\/p>\n

In 2015, several of Qambrani\u2019s students participated in the South Asian Games, the biennial multi-sport event where athletes from Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka compete against each other.<\/p>\n

A year later, Anum won a district level championship called the Jinnah First Ever Karachi Women Boxing Championship held at a Lyari stadium. In the same year, she attended a training camp for women organised by the Sindh Boxing Association. Local media reports described this camp as the country\u2019s first government-supported boxing event held for women.<\/p>\n

It was Qambrani\u2019s club where Aliya Soomro, Pakistan\u2019s first woman to win a world boxing title, began her training. Last year, Soomro took a mere 45 seconds to knock out her opponent from Thailand to win the WBA (World Boxing Association) Asia 105-pound category.<\/p>\n

For Qambrani, though, boxing is about more than medals and trophies. To him, it\u2019s a vital defensive skill.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhoever is prepared for war is prepared for peace,\u201d he told Al Jazeera, adding that the defenceless are the ones most likely to be attacked.<\/p>\n

With its legion of young boxers, Lyari\u2019s not defenceless. As its reputation and image are mangled by Bollywood, those who know the neighbourhood also turn to its history for support.<\/p>\n

\"anamAn undated childhood photo of son, Munir (L) and daughter Anam [Courtesy of Younus Qambrani]Lyari\u2019s colonial history<\/p>\n

It is not just the Dhurandhar films and Bollywood that Suhail, the social anthropologist, blames for what he describes as \u201cterrible and exploitative\u201d representations of Lyari. Journalistic and scholarly literature have been guilty too, he said.<\/p>\n

Lyari is Karachi\u2019s oldest recorded settlement \u2014 the earliest inhabitants of the neighbourhood came in 1728. The neighbourhood has survived British colonialism, the partition of the subcontinent, and nearly eight decades in independent Pakistan.<\/p>\n

Suhail said Lyari had been a diverse working-class cultural hub since before the 1947 partition<\/a> of British India.<\/p>\n

Some of those working class communities were Baloch and Sindhi, because Karachi is at the tip of the southern Sindh province, which neighbours Balochistan province. Others were Marathi, Gujarati, Afghan and Siraiki migrants from labouring and artisan classes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was because the British required labourers and artisans to develop Karachi into a burgeoning Indian Ocean port city.\u201d<\/p>\n

Suhail said that most of these labourers settled on the unplanned sides of the Lyari river, a small 50km-long seasonal river originating in the hills of Sindh, which flows through Lyari before emptying into the Arabian Sea.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese cosmopolitan working class populations brought with them culinary traditions, dances, religious practices (multi-religious, multi-caste), songs, sports and more,\u201d Suhail said.<\/p>\n

He added that Lyari has a \u201cstrong cultural memory of East Africa and the Arabian Gulf, which adds to its uniqueness.\u201d The neighbourhood is home to both Baloch and Afro-Baloch communities\u2014people of African ancestry living in Balochistan.<\/p>\n

Suhail explained that Lyari\u2019s long history as a cultural hub of Karachi is often forgotten \u201cbecause, after partition, the city\u2019s demographics shifted drastically and Karachi became an Urdu-speaking Muhajir-majority city.\u201d Muhajirs are Urdu\u2011speaking Muslims who migrated to Pakistan from India during and after the 1947 partition.<\/p>\n

Sarwat Viqar, a professor of humanities at John Abbott College in Montreal, Canada, echoed Suhail\u2019s views.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause Lyari has been represented one-dimensionally in the media as only a hotbed of criminality, drugs and the gang wars, what has been overlooked are the rich cultural practices that have always been part of life here,\u201d Viqar told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

Suhail added that Lyari had also consistently been at the heart of labour movements, and a base of support for reformers, anti-colonial activists and later campaigns for the rights of Pakistan\u2019s various ethnic groups, including the Baloch, Sindhi and Pashtun communities.<\/p>\n

\u201cLyari \u2014 because it was the first, most diverse, and most vibrant working-class zone as Karachi was becoming a city \u2014 also became the hub of working-class politics,\u201d he told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

But the neighbourhood\u2019s own fortunes have also oscillated over the years.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe degree of \u2018development\u2019 in Lyari has always been a function of how strong the working-class movement in Karachi was,\u201d Suhail said. \u201cWhen it was strong\u2014such as in the 1930s and again in the 1970s\u2014Lyari saw development. When ruling elites were strong, it did not.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Dhurandhar gets wrong<\/p>\n

In the film, Lyari first comes into focus when a long-haired Ranveer Singh, playing undercover Indian RAW [Research and Analysis Wing] agent Jaskirat Singh Rangi, eyes the \u201cWelcome to Lyari town\u201d gate.<\/p>\n

The gate looks very similar to the real one in Karachi. Other elements on screen ring familiar too: juice shop owners chanting idiosyncrasies to cajole customers; quick and garbled salams; and the somewhat unkempt colonial era architecture of old Karachi.<\/p>\n

But then, the three-hour film\u2019s dusty colour grading seems to wash out Lyari\u2019s cultural depth and its vibrant subcultures.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can see how the obscene fetishisation of Lyari and the Baloch with violence and criminality is evident\u201d in the film, Suhail said.<\/p>\n

Describing Dhurandhar as \u201cmediocre\u201d, he said it lacks the depth of other Indian gangster films.<\/p>\n

For example, in Ram Gopal Varma\u2019s Satya 1998 and Anurag Kashyap\u2019s Gangs of Wasseypur 2012, we see \u201cculturally dense but non-apologetic depictions of Mumbaikar or Bihari gangs that understand the political economy of colonial and post-colonial state formation and how it crystallises in the gangsters portrayed,\u201d Suhail opined.<\/p>\n

Satya unpacks the criminal underworld of India\u2019s metropolis Mumbai, following the titular character who arrives in Mumbai seeking a job but is falsely imprisoned and subsequently introduced to the underworld. Gangs of Wasseypur is set in a time before India\u2019s independence in 1947 and follows power struggles, mafias and generational cycles of revenge in India\u2019s eastern state of Jharkand.<\/p>\n

In contrast to these films, Dhurandhar, has \u201cheavy-handed homophobic, Islamophobic, hyper-masculine jingoism\u201d and \u201cthe characters themselves appear to have no history at all,\u201d Suhail added.<\/p>\n

Unlike Lyari<\/p>\n

Back at Qambrani\u2019s club, 10 girls aged eight to 16 gather for an hour of sparring every day except Sunday, training for city tournaments that they compete in every two months.<\/p>\n

Qambrani is looking to buy a folding, portable boxing ring to take school to school. His dream: to make boxing accessible to as many girls in the neighbourhood as possible. His challenge: he is struggling to find a portable ring in Pakistan and needs funding.<\/p>\n

Dhurandhar and Bollywood do not matter at his Lyari club. Qambrani has a new generation of girl boxers to train.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Karachi, Pakistan \u2013 Over a few breezy winter weeks in Karachi, boxing coach Younus Qambrani sent a steady…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":622148,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[1487,2560,3714,50,2321,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-622147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-asia","tag-boxing","tag-media","tag-news","tag-pakistan","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=622147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622147\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/622148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=622147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=622147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=622147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}