Content area
Nadira Khatun, Postcolonial Bollywood and Muslim Identity: Production, Representation, and Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), and Mohammed Asim Siddiqui, Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2025). Khatun, Nadira, Postcolonial Bollywood and Muslim Identity: Production, Representation, and Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024) Siddiqui, Mohammad Asim, Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2025) By happy accident, Mohammad Asim Siddiqui's Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema and Nadira Khatun's Postcolonial Bollywood and Muslim Identity arrive at an urgent cultural moment. The book is at its best when it sticks close to the screen, observing how specific visual and sonic choices make ideology palatable (the green-white palette of Eid sequences, the staging of brotherhood in syncretic shrines, the throwaway joke that carries an entire politics of belonging). Javed Akhtar on liberalisation and the decline of melodramatic heroes; Shyam Benegal on why the burqa becomes a handy comic prop as much as a religious sign; individuals involved in production, distribution and/or exhibition of Hindi films and how they practice "automatic [-self-] censorship" because "twenty goons" can shut down a show; a viewer who finds Padmaavat (She Who Is Like the Lotus) (2018) pleasurable precisely because Alauddin Khalji's barbarity in the film matches schoolbook stereotypes; and another who reads Iqbal (2005) as a radical film because you "don't realise the guy is Muslim until the end." The result is a study that is often informative and sometimes incisive at the level of individual readings, but that stops short of articulating a robust genre account or of demonstrating why a genre approach, rather than some other film-studies framework, is most valuable.