Bollywood's Muslim stereotypes

Recently, I read a book on how Muslims have been portrayed in Bollywood films. But before I tell you about it, a brief personal digression.

Although I grew up entirely in north India — Bhopal and Delhi mostly — it was only when I was 32 years old that I interacted with my first Pakistanis, also in their 30s. They were a couple of civil servants from the equivalent of the Pakistani IAS.

My first thought was how the Pakistanis were no different from anyone I had known in Delhi and Bhopal. The latter, after all, was full of Muslims, and Delhi was full of Punjabis, at least till the mid-1980s. These Pakistani guys were Muslims and Punjabis.

Ergo, to me they looked like everyone I had grown up and worked with till then. It was a very pleasant surprise.

But it was Pakistan that changed how we all, including Bollywood, started viewing Muslims differently after the Pakistani government embarked on its murderous policy of encouraging terrorism in Punjab. Gradually, because Pakistan kept talking jihad and sending across terrorists, Muslim Indians became an object of suspicion, even hatred.

It was only a matter of time before Bollywood also started depicting, first the Pakistanis, and then Muslims generally, in this light. It has now become the stereotype.

Thus, Pakistani = Muslim = terrorists. Many Indians today also believe that terrorists = Muslims = Pakistanis.

So back to the book that I mentioned above. It is called Reading the Muslim on Celluloid. It was published just before the lockdown of March 2020.

That’s perhaps why it’s gone somewhat unnoticed. This is a fate that befell thousands of authors the world over, including me.

The author is Roshni Sengupta who teaches at a university in Poland. She has written extensively on what we in India call “communal issues”. In this book, as the title suggests, she focuses on the image of the Muslim as portrayed in films since the 1930s and the associated politics.

Bollywood, to be fair, has tried hard to keep the balance. Thus, to begin with, Muslims were generally portrayed in a good light, you know, the  Chacha image of Hangal in Sholay or the Lakhnavi tehzeeb motif of Guru Dutt in Chaudvi ka Chand. Villains were never Muslims.

The Pakistani-inspired terrorism of the 1980s and 1990s changed all that. Muslims became criminals and terrorists, with only the occasional decent fellows who choose India over Pakistan and Islam.

Rang de Basanti is a case in point, says the author, where there is general agreement between the two Muslims in it that India is the country of their birth and they are totally and utterly loyal to it. Assimilation, says the author, was crucial.

There were also those historical films that showed Mughal emperors as benign despots, whereas actually they were a pretty malevolent lot. Thus Aurangzeb was singled out as the villain. But, truth be told, the other fellows weren’t much better. Akbar, particularly, and quite contrary to his carefully crafted public image, was quite a nasty piece of work.

Bollywood chose to ignore this aspect. The book explains this only in passing.

The author has covered enormous ground. She discusses a huge range of issues, that too in a readable way. At no point do you get bored. And the research is comprehensive.

If you ignore the disagreements over details — and considering its vast canvas, there are bound to be several — the book’s central message is clear and important: Bollywood is an important contributor to the image of Muslims but it is not the only contributor. The Muslims themselves are important, too, even the Indian ones mostly in a positive way. They are Indians, no better or worse than members of other communities.

One of the missing elements in Bollywood films is the middle class Muslim — doctor, teacher, architect, bureaucrat and so on. For Bollywood, the Muslim has always been the wealthy aristocrat or the tinker, tailor, soldier, cop. This omission should have been commented upon by the author. As sociology goes, it is quite a major miss.

The book has two other flaws. One, it mentions politics in the title but mostly skirts the issues. Two, it relies to a larger extent than seems necessary on western categories of analysis. Those are okay but, in the Indian context, pretty incomplete.

Nonetheless it’s a book well worth reading because it combines two Indian passions — Bollywood and religion.