Mapping Muslimness in Hindi Cinema

Headnote

Abstract

This essay reviews two books: 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. As scholarly and public debate over the place of Muslims in India has intensified, so too has the need for a careful, historically informed appraisal of how Hindi films have constructed, circulated, and contested "Muslimness."

Both books share a diagnostic impulse to take stock of what Hindi films have done with "Muslimness" across the long post-Independence era and the accelerated twenty-first century. Each author writes with a pedagogic generosity that will be useful to students and non-specialists, but both books are also pulled (in different ways) between coverage and argument. For instance, when read together one can sense a tantalising proposition emerging from both: "Muslimness" in Hindi cinema is not simply a textual motif; it is an institutionalised resource that moves between cycles and genres as industrial conditions and political conjunctures change. Yet neither makes such an argument fully, which means that it remains dormant underneath the catalogue of films they consider and the historical details they provide. What they do offer, however, is helpful: Siddiqui offers a clearer catalogue-an organised filmography and a brisk period map-while Khatun adds a qualitative layer, bringing in interviews with filmmakers, critics, and audiences to situate film texts in lived discourse.

The strongest chapters of Siddiqui's book showcase his curatorial strengths and his eye for emblematic scenes. The early surveys of "diversity" and "national integration" narratives distinguish helpfully between characters whose Muslim identity is highly marked-through Urdu diction, qawwali (devotional music performance), mosque iconography, color palettes, and costume-and those for whom it is incidental, signaled mainly through a taxonomy of names. That binary will not satisfy every theorist, but it gives the non-specialist reader a concrete way to begin coding films and noticing how "Muslimness" is signposted within mainstream idioms. Likewise, the extended discussions of Amar Akbar Anthony (1977) and Coolie (1983) are effective reminders that Hindi cinema has long sugar-coated messages of communal harmony in spectacular song, color, and slapstick (to paraphrase Manmohan Desai, whom Siddiqui quotes). 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).

The mid-book arc on riots and Partition likewise provides a usable map. A reader new to the subject will appreciate the brisk periodisation from early post-Independence nationbuilding melodramas, through the new-wave realism of Garam Hawa (Scorching Winds) (1973) and Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro (Do Not Cry for Salim the Lame) (1989), to more recent works that exhibit either liberal-humanist convictions or offer unambiguous majoritarian framings. Siddiqui's close reading of Dharmputra (Son of Dharma) (1961) demonstrates his sensitivity to how mise-en-scène, montage and sloganeering dialogue can dramatise ideological capture. There is also, to his credit, a recurring attentiveness to asymmetry. Instead of slipping into a comfortable "both sides" rhetoric, Siddiqui does name and critique films whose balancing act obscures the distribution of harm, and he signals when sympathetic portrayals are rare outliers rather than a norm.

Khatun's book complements and complicates this map. It shares the survey style with Siddiqui, but what she adds are two important elements, first of which is that she is explicit about method in a way that Siddiqui is not. Khatun sets out a mixed approach of critical discourse analysis of films and interview-based fieldwork in Mumbai (readers will no doubt appreciate her candor about sampling, ethics, and access which she discusses in her introduction to the volume). Secondly, she puts on record a number of practitioner and audience voices that humanise and complicate familiar claims: 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." These are small but telling contributions that shiftthe analysis away from exclusively textual diagnoses and give greater texture to discourse analysis. Indeed, Khatun's reflections on her own experience of conducting her research is sobering and bridges the gap between representational practices on screen and the politics of identity that play out off-screen.

Each book, then, has something the other lacks. Siddiqui's case studies concentrate the mind and are a useful resource for teaching; Khatun's qualitative layer is sociologically informed. Yet the limits of one point directly to the limits of the other. Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema places genre central to its project of studying Muslim identity on screen, but the book never quite specifies what work "genre" is meant to do here. Rick Altman is referenced, yet his core insights-semantic/syntactic modelling, the pragmatics of genre as an industrial and interpretive contract, the historical plasticity of cycles-are not carried through into a method. When Siddiqui describes a "terrorist film" or a "gangster film," for instance, he relies on commonsense cues rather than on a defined set of necessary or sufficient conditions; when he points to the overlap between gangster and terrorist figures in the present century, the observation is apt, but it is not formalised as a claim about how genres bleed, hybridise, or rekey their semantics. In the early chapters, "tokenism" is invoked to explain positive but marginal Muslim roles, but tokenism is not operationalised with criteria (e.g., screen time, narrative agency, diegetic consequence), and if there is a criterion to determine a particular portrayal as tokenism, it remains implicit and is not drawn out such as would allow the category to travel or to be tested across a corpus. Similarly, the assertion that many riot films perform a "balancing act" is intuitively right, but without a typology (for example, of equivalence strategies, narrational focalisation, or moral framings), it remains an evaluative stance rather than a model. 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.

Khatun also draws on genre, and like Siddiqui also fails to theorise it sufficiently. Her fourfold typology-Historical, Social, Political, Modern-helps a reader find the right "neighbourhood," but within each neighbourhood the sub-headings multiply, the effect of which is that her prose becomes bitty. Categories proliferate without a useable analytic framework that could allow a reader to code a new film quickly and predict something about it. For example, the work Khatun does on the Muslim Social genre in chapter three draws attention to a conceptual incoherence precisely because the term genre is not fully operationalised. The chapter declares the "Muslim courtesan genre" to be an "independent genre" then treats it as a sub-genre "of Muslim Socials because tawaif (courtesan) characters are frequently found in Muslim Historical and Muslim Social films" (120). That move may be pragmatically sensible, but without any criteria for when a courtesan film is independent rather than in a sub-genre (or when it belongs to Social rather than Historical), the classification is confusing rather than informative.

It is not that classification is inherently a problem, either in Khatun's book or Siddiqui's; it becomes one when it substitutes for argument. Chapters four and five, for example, in Muslim Identity in Hindi Films showcase Siddiqui's curatorial strength as he traces how, from the 1970s, Muslim dons, henchmen, and sidekicks populated crime films that relocated the dacoit's rural economy of violence to the urban underworld. His readings of Sher Khan in Zanjeer (Fetters) (1973), Lotiya Pathan in Tezaab (Acid) (1988), Jahangir Khan in Angaar (Embers) (1992), and Rahim Lala in Gangubai Kathiawadi (2022) show powerfully how accents, codes of conduct, sartorial detail, and devotional soundscapes do the work of characterology. These are effective, concrete observations. His account of Aamir (2008) in chapter five shows how a web of props and spaces-ghetto interiors, wall hangings inscribed in Arabic, a transnational phone call-builds an atmosphere of suspicion around an ordinary Muslim protagonist; his reading of Kurbaan (Sacrifice) (2009) is especially sharp in demonstrating how a modern, Anglophone exterior co-exists with ritualised invocations and how the film leans on the good Muslim/bad Muslim binary as it displaces culpability from states to individuals. But again, there is description here, not a clear argument. For instance, an argument could be made, as indeed I have in "Entering the Fold" (2013), 1 that films like Kurbaan, New York (2009), and My Name Is Khan (2010) help crafta national imaginary of India as a Western-facing global power, and in that imaginary, 'the Muslim' functions as a device which enables the narrative to cohere.

This tension that exists in both books, which I referred to earlier as the fact that both books are pulled in different ways between coverage and argument, is best illustrated by the question of caste. Siddiqui notes (in an overly generalised way) that aside from Achhut Kanya (Untouchable Girl) (1936), caste is largely invisible in mainstream Hindi cinema. He treats this as an aside and fails to see how it could strengthen the arguments in his book. It could be said that the screen's preoccupation with the "Muslim question" often functions as a displacement device, allowing Hindi cinema-and, by extension, the national imaginary it services-to stage difference and reconciliation while leaving the more obstinate antagonism of caste unexamined. Following this line of thought, the Muslim becomes (ironically) the manageable Other through whom the industry can narrate secular harmony or national security precisely because caste is harder to visualise, harder to resolve narratively, and more threatening to the social order from which most commercial films emerge.

Read this way, several of Siddiqui's chapters could be reframed: the "national integration" films that celebrate composite culture typically revolve around unmarked, upper-caste protagonists; the "Muslim social" draws on ashraf (patrician/elite) aesthetics and Urdu refinement that flatter elite sensibilities while keeping labor off-screen; the gangster and terror cycles recruit Muslimness as the visible sign of danger while the cop-hero's caste location remains normatively invisible; even in the gendered corpus, the courtesan and the "new Muslim woman" are read religiously rather than through the caste relations that organise space, work, and mobility. Khatun, for her part, does name "Brahmanical supremacy" as a theme in her chapter on historicals and briefly nods to pasmanda (lower caste) concerns in newer films (as does Siddiqui, to be fair, but all too briefly), but she too lets caste drop once the analysis moves beyond the historical discussion of Bajirao Mastani (2015) in chapter two. One can see, from within her interview archive, exactly the variables that would bring caste into view-speech registers and accents, occupations and workplaces, who speaks for the nation in voice-over and who is spoken for-but the book never sets them to work consistently. Had either Siddiqui or Khatun taken their own observation about caste invisibility or Brahmanical supremacy more critically, they might have asked how genres in Hindi cinema secure their narrative resolutions by substituting a religious problem for a caste one, or how often "secular harmony" scripts work as caste-erasure machines.

This criticism does not, however, negate what the books do accomplish. They usefully recenter films that too often fall out of contemporary syllabi. Siddiqui's reminds us that Dharmputra exists in the same tradition as Garam Hawa and Firaaq (Absence) (2008), and that Zanjeer's Sher Khan and Gangubai Kathiawadi's Rahim Lala are two points on a long continuum of cinematic Pathans2 (although one might ask why Balraj Sahni and Hemen Gupta's Kabuliwala [The Man From Kabul] [1961] are omitted). Siddiqui also shows how the "new Muslim woman"-professional, mobile, sometimes veiled, often angry-does not replace so much as sit alongside the courtesan, the tragic wife, or the sacrificial lover. Khatun's primary sources remain a rare feature of studies focused on Bollywood and Hindi cinema, with some notable exceptions.3 Other insights are found across the two books, regarding the politics of the veil as a plot device, the uses of qawwali and ghazals (a form of ode originating in Arabic Literature) in secular melodrama, and the work done by the color green as well as the recurrence of the crescent, the dome, and calligraphy as shorthand for the Muslim community. For classroom use, the filmographies and case studies both books provide can of course act as concrete starting points. For others, the period maps, particularly the careful charting of the post-9/11 "terror" cycle in Siddiqui and the emergence of a so-called Modern Muslim genre in Khatun's work will be genuinely useful.

Where, then, does this leave a prospective reader? If your primary need is orientation, a guided tour through familiar and not-so-familiar titles, with enough detail to trigger memory and enough interpretation to spark debate-then these books do that job. While Siddiqui's book provides a clearer map of cycles and tropes, and Khatun's incorporates the voices around the screen (so that films feel embedded in production choices, exhibition pressures, and the talk of practitioners, critics, and audiences), both are equally generous with examples. Taken together, they make the archive visible again and remind us how much of the conversation has lately been displaced by headlines. They remind us that India has the third largest Muslim population in the world and the challenges of Muslims as a minority community in India are writ large on the Hindi screen. They follow in the footsteps of other important contributors (Jasbir Jain, Roshni Sengupta, Ira Bhaskar and Richard Allen, Rachel Dwyer, and Mukul Kesavan) but signal the fact that more work in this area is still needed.

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Recommended Citation

Haider, Syed (2025) "Mapping Muslimness in Hindi Cinema," Journal of Religion & Film: Vol. 29: Iss. 2, Article 8.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.32873/uno.dc.jrf.29.02.08

Available at: https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol29/iss2/8

Author Notes

Syed Haider is Lecturer in World Cinemas at the University of East Anglia, UK. His research focuses on Muslim representation and the construction and uses of Islam in Hindi cinema. He is currently working on developing a theory of aesthetic identities - a concept of how the aesthetics of film offer ways to relate to alterity. He has published articles in journals and edited volumes and is presently working on his first monograph.

This book review is available in Journal of Religion & Film: https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol29/iss2/8

References

References

Banaji, S., 2006, Reading Bollywood: The Young Audience and Hindi films, New York: Palgrave Macmillian.

Bhaskar, I. and Allen, R., 2009, Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema, New Delhi: Tulika Books.

Dwyer, R., 2010, 'I am crazy about the lord: The Muslim devotional genre in Hindi films', Third Text, 24(1), 123-134.

Ganti, T., 2012, Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Haider, S., 2013, 'Entering the fold: India's Entry into a Global Modernity' in, Dwivedi, O. P. (ed.), The Other India: Narratives of Terrorism, Communalism and Violence, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 51-74.

Jain, J. (ed.), 2011, Muslim Culture in Indian Cinema, Jaipur: Rawat Publications.

Joshi, P., 2015, Bollywood's India: A Public Fantasy, New York: Columbia University Press.

Kesavan, M., 1994, 'Urdu, Awadh and the Tawaif: The Islamicate roots of Hindi cinema' in, Hasan, Z., Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State in India, Boulder, CO: Westview, 244-257.

Thomas, R., 2013, 'Thieves of the Orient: The Arabian Nights Early Indian Cinema' in, Kennedy, P. F. and Warner M. (eds.), Scheherazade's Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights, London: New York University Press.

Segupta, R., 2020, Reading the Muslim on Celluloid: Bollywood, Representation and Politics, New Delhi: Primus Books.

Footnote

1 Haider, S., 2013, "Entering the fold: India's entry into a global modernity" in, Dwivedi, O. (ed.), The Other India: Narratives of Terror, Communalism and Violence, Newcastle-upon-Thyme: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

2 A Hindi/Urdu word used to describe those of Pashtun ethnicity in South Asia originating from eastern Afghanistan and present-day northwest Pakistan.

3 Banaji, S., 2006, Reading Bollywood: The Young Audience and Hindi films, New York: Palgrave Macmillan; Ganti, T., 2012, Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry, Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Joshi, P., 2015, Bollywood's India: A Public Fantasy, New York: Columbia University Press.