Pakistan’s Lyari defies Bollywood’s gangland label to rise as boxing haven

Food, football and history mingle in Karachi’s oldest settlement. And a boxing coach teaches girls to defy stereotypes.

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

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’s Pak-Shaheen boxing club mask the din on the street.

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’s land area.

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’s highest grossing film of all time, Dhurandhar and its recently released sequel, Dhurandhar The Revenge are set.

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

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 for being Pakistan’s mecca of football.

To be sure, Lyari has had a past rife with gang violence and unrest. Armed groups held significant influence from the mid‑2000s 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 – both depicted in the Dhurandhar film and its sequel – turned parts of the neighbourhood into a mi