Why Aditya Dhar Chose 'Oye Oye' for Dawood Ibrahim's Near-Death Scene in Dhurandhar — And Why It's A 'Revenge'

In the climax of Dhurandhar: The Revenge, the audience gets to know the most wanted terrorist in India, Dawood Ibrahim dies, almost. Not with a bullet. Not in an airstrike. Jameel Jamali, the Shakespearean FOOL played by Rakesh Bedi, a man nobody suspected of being anything other than furniture - reveals that he poisoned the don years ago with dimethyl mercury, slipped through a bandaged thumb. Dawood is already dead. He just doesn’t know it yet. And as the revelation unfolds in a stylish flashback montage, the song that plays is “Oye Oye Tirchi Topiwale” — reimagined from the 1989 Bollywood hit Tridev.Every review noted the swagger. The disco beat. The irony of celebrating invincibility while watching it disintegrate. But what most may have

missed is the deeper connection. Because “Oye Oye” was not chosen for its energy. It was chosen for its history. That song does not merely come from Dawood’s era. It comes from Dawood’s world. And probably Aditya Dhar did his homework on this.

The Song That D-Company Built

Tridev was released in 1989. Its producer was Gulshan Rai, then one of the most powerful names in Hindi cinema. The late 1980s were the peak of D-Company’s control over Bollywood. The Indian film industry was, at that time, ineligible for legitimate bank financing — a government regulation that had been in place for decades. Producers who needed money to make films had one place to go: the underworld. And the underworld, in Mumbai in 1989, meant Dawood Ibrahim. Journalist and author Hussain Zaidi, the most authoritative chronicler of Mumbai’s organised crime, described the mechanics in a Pinkvilla interview: Dawood didn’t want to make money from films. He simply loved Hindi cinema. He admired all the heroines. But the financial architecture was transactional. Filmmakers would borrow money from Dawood and invest it in their films. Once the film was released, they would return the money as white money. That was how Dawood Ibrahim laundered black money through the film industry. Former cop Shivanandhan told ANI that iconic 80s and 90s films were among projects funded by underworld dons, with stars regularly flown to Dubai for parties hosted by D-Company.This was not a marginal phenomenon. The Belfer Center at Harvard documented the symbiosis: the link between Bollywood and Indian organised crime was the worst-kept secret. Film producers, directors, and actors were forced to find alternate revenue streams from sources with strong links to criminal organisations. In some cases, filmmakers were forced to accept underworld financing whether they wanted to or not. A WikiLeaks State Department cable confirmed that the industry “welcomed funds from gangsters and politicians looking for ways to launder ill-gotten gains.”

Tridev was made inside this ecosystem. Its songs — composed by Kalyanji-Anandji, sung by Amit Kumar and Sapna Mukherjee — were the sound of an industry whose finances ran (mostly forced to run) through D-Company’s ledgers. When “Oye Oye” played in 1989, Dawood Ibrahim was sitting in Bombay (now Mumbai), at the height of his power, watching the films his money helped make. The song was, in a very real sense, a product of his D-empire..

The Four Layers of Aditya Dhar’s Choice

Layer one is era. “Oye Oye” is the sonic signature of Bombay dominated by Dawood Ibrahim — the dreaded gangster in late 80s, gold smuggling fortunes, cricket match-fixing, star-studded Dubai parties, D-Company’s peak. By scoring Dawood’s apparent ‘death’ to this sound, the Dhurandhar maker turns the don’s golden age into his funeral music. The beat that once celebrated untouchability now mocks it.Layer two is irony. Dawood almost certainly heard this song. It was a massive hit in 1989 — the year he was consolidating power, the year before he was rumoured to be dating known actresses, four years before the 1993 Mumbai blasts that would make him India’s most wanted terrorist. A song from the world he owned is now the soundtrack to the revelation that Jameel Jamali - being referred to as “real Dhurandhar” by many - with a bandaged thumb killed him from the inside. The swagger of the song is the same. The meaning for Dawood Ibrahim sure has inverted.Layer three is the lyric itself. “Ae tirchi topi wale, babu bhole bhale." In Tridev, the song was picturised on Naseeruddin Shah, playing a cop fighting the underworld. The “tirchi topi wale” was the hero in disguise. In Dhurandhar 2, the tirchi topi wale is Jameel Jamali — the unassuming, harmless-looking man who infiltrated Dawood’s inner circle and poisoned him without anyone noticing. The lyric is not just a callback. It is a character description. Dhar is telling you who the real tirchi topi wale is: not the swagger king, but the quiet killer who walked past every guard with a smile and did the real job.Layer four is the meta-commentary. By using a song from the D-Company era to score D-Company’s death, Aditya Dhar is saying something about Bollywood itself. The industry that was once held hostage by Dawood — whose stars danced at his parties (even when they wanted to stay at a distance from the underworld), whose producers borrowed his money (even when they did not want to), and whose heroines were pressured into films by his phone calls — is now the industry making a ₹1,000 crore film about his assassination. The music Dawood Ibrahim once controlled is now the music playing over his corpse-in-making.

The Full Circle - The Real 'Revenge'

Sapna Mukherjee, the original singer of “Oye Oye,” told DNA that just before the film’s release, she performed the song for CISF and NSG jawans. She described it as a “full circle moment — from jawans to cinema screens.” She thanked Aditya Dhar for “maintaining the identity and dignity” of the original, noting that her voice was “respected, not replaced” — a rarity in an era where vintage songs are routinely re-recorded with new voices.But the real full circle is not hers. It is the song’s. In 1989, “Oye Oye” was a product of Dawood’s Bombay — made inside an industry his money financed, played at parties his men organised, heard by a don who loved Hindi cinema. In 2026, the same melody, the same voice, the same hook — “ae tirchi topi wale, babu bhole bhale” — plays over the scene that reveals how that same don was destroyed.Aditya Dhar did not pick a catchy 80s song. He picked the artefact of a specific moment in Indian history — when D-Company owned Bollywood — and turned it into the instrument of its destruction. Every beat of “Oye Oye” in Dhurandhar 2 carries a message that no dialogue could deliver: the empire is over, the don is dead, and the industry he once owned is the one telling the story.“Oye Oye” is not nostalgia. It is revenge via Dhurandhar - The Revenge.