Imagining Muslims as the ‘Other’ in Muslim political films

Nadira Khatun

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South Asian Cinema and Culture South Asian Studies and Diaspora Cultural Identity and Representation

Abstract

Abstract Though secularism is an integral part of India’s democratic framework, its uses and limits have been questioned in the recent decades by scholars such as Sunil Khilnani, Gyanendra Pandey, Partha Chatterjee, Arvind Rajagopal, etc. Similar concerns have been raised by filmmakers such as Shyam Benegal, etc. According to Benegal, , while representing Muslims as a homogenous entity steeped in pre-modern sensibilities, Hindi films also contain Muslims within the dominant narrative of a normative upper-caste Hindu identity. This article explores the construction of communalism and nationalism by studying the position of Muslims in the complex representational scheme in popular Hindi films released in the 1990s and after. While analysing films such as Bombay (Ratnam, 1995), Fiza (Mohamed, 2000), Roja (Ratnam, 1992), Sarfarosh (Matthan, 1999), Mission Kashmir (Chopra, 2000), Black Friday (Kashyap, 2004), Fanaa (Kohli, 2006), Mumbai Meri Jaan (Kamath, 2008), Mission Istanbul (Lakhia, 2008), A Wednesday (Pandey, 2008), Kurbaan (D’Silva, 2009), Sikandar (Jha, 2009), New York (Khan, 2009) and The Attacks on 26/11 (Varma, 2013), this article deploys Edward Said’s notion of representation and knowledge as imbricated in issues of power, class and materiality. This paper adopts both a textual (that is, reading the films as texts) as well as a qualitative approach by way of conducting in-depth unstructured interviews with filmmakers and film-critics. This paper illustrates that popular Hindi cinema has dealt with the liminality of the Muslim ‘Other’ in the nation-space by representing Muslims either in stereotypical ways or by appropriating them into the normative Hindu self. Four key themes dominate the representational scheme in Muslim political cinema: the Muslim ‘Other’ as an enemy of the nation; an imaginary notion of monolithic ‘Hindu-ized nation’; Muslims as a source of terror within the nation-state; a conflation of Muslim-terrorist-Pakistani.

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