Metonymies of Fear: Islamophobia and the Making of Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema

Introduction

The social spaces of minorities and issues concerning their identity have emerged as critical components in the contemporary discourses on the linkages between culture and politics. Culture has invariably influenced the course of politics since a long time and similarly politicisation of cultural issues has also become an inevitable part of our public life. The debate between majority versus the minority, assertions of the cultural superiority of the majority, demonisation of the minority culture, crisis of identity encountered by the minorities and the political use of cultural symbols to differentiate between we versus others and define the concept of nationhood in terms of majoritarian ideology. All this forms part of the reciprocative process of interaction that involve the influence of culture on the trajectory of politics and the politicisation of the contours of cultural space itself. This brings to the fore, the understanding of culture as a supreme motivational force that operates in various spheres of people’s life. Clipped to this, the necessity of deconstructing the role of politics, defined in terms of a process wherein human beings regulate their group activities, assumes primacy. What is crucial here is the necessity to interrogate as to whether politics acts as a tool of fractious intervention in tailoring the subtle nuances of cultural trajectories in favour of a particular group.

In this regard, it may be stated that such interventions happen through complex processes of political mobilisation that has been facilitated by the massification of cultural forms leading to the emergence of diverse patterns of popular culture which tend to create fertile grounds for this purpose. Popular culture represents a synonymous interpretation of mass culture wherein a large section of people of a society, cutting across class barriers, go through a collective experience. The sources of this experience emanate from different directions, but there is a kind of intermingling of multiple sources of origin that happens in a complementary manner. This brings into the collective experience, a symmetrical feeling of common tastes that tends to intertwine together the members of the collectivity into a form of an organic ensemble and create a sense of coeval among them. Mass media, especially the electronic ones, with their transnational sweep and influence have emerged as crucial agents in structuring this entire process (Kumar 2013: 458). This gets reflected through creative art and literature, performing arts, folk forms, food/drink, dress and cinema. Despite such diversified images, popular culture acquires a nature of pervasiveness and interconnectedness. It is this type of a feature that seems to have made popular culture as the most effective turf upon which intense interplay of culture and politics is being staged.

Particularly, in this regard, cinema has assumed a crucial role by virtue of its pervasive mass appeal and its ability to deeply push itself into the popular psyche and create a penetrative impact upon the thinking and imagination of people (ibid.). With the technological boom and widespread commercialisation of the film industry, cinema has been rapidly acquiring a central position in the realm of studies relating to popular culture. This is because it has proved to be one of the best mechanisms that not only reflects the contemporary trends in popular culture, but also plays a critical role in shaping the same. Due to such an overbearing influence, cinema also acts as capacious cultural space for politicians, reactionary ideologues and the defenders of a particular social belief system to reconstruct and reinterpret the archaeologies of the imaginary world built in the celluloid, in a manner that suits their own agenda. While engaging in such reconstruction, they peep through the cinematic world and establish linkages between the filmic world created by cinematography and the broader historical and socio-political meanings that largely remain contested in the public sphere.

In doing this, their attempt is to situate the subtext of socio-political and ideological contests within the deep spaces vacant between the lines of a film’s story. The cultural boundaries between communities is one such fertile ground for inviting intrusive practices of interpretations of the subtle nuances that criss-cross through the map of a film’s setting. In India, such intrusions take place in circumstances wherein the question of defining the cultural boundaries of the Hindu majority and its protection from alien interventions are involved. Here, the definition of that alien and the non-Hindu other has been categorical, with Muslims being visualised as the distinct other and as being outside the dominant cultural cartography, defined as the Hindu society. The term Hindu society itself here becomes a synecdoche to indicate the notion of the Hindu nation (a geopolitical space marked only for the Hindus) which parochialises the very idea of India by subverting the secular, tolerant and pluralistic conception of our polity (ibid.).

This has been done dexterously by a section of the Bollywood film industry which has engaged in producing a set of Hindi films that project in their settings, an overt delineation of the Hindu majoritarian cultural space and discreetly construct its Muslim outsider. It would be crucial here to understand whether the history of Hindi cinema itself has been a monolithic tale of hostility against the Muslims? Or, is there any other side to this entire narrative. Unlike the category of films that merely tend to foment a sense of Muslim evil demonology, there have been films that are embedded in secular liberal values which have presented mannerly Musalmans who behave as ideal members of the society. These films, through the representation of socio-cultural interactions between Hindus and Muslims, have also portrayed the tolerant and eclectic character of Indian society. The movie Amar Akbar Anthony (1977, Manmohan Desai) emerges as a classic case that epitomises this phenomenon and the character of Akbar (Rishi Kapoor) represents the good Muslim who assimilates into the Indian pluralistic polity with an eclectic bent of mind.2

However, it would be interesting to understand as to how all this changed and the discourse regarding the Muslim ‘other’ became the dominant narrative in films such as those that would be examined in this article. Such a shift itself must be understood from the perspective of the increased marginalisation of Muslims in the 1990s, largely as a product of the radicalisation of Hindutva ideology. Propelled by the dispute with the Muslims over Ram janambhumi (birth place of Hindu deity Lord Ram), coupled with the large-scale mobilisation of the powerful higher caste Hindu middle class on the issue of reservation of jobs for the lower castes, Hindutva was able to create a wider canvas for its anti-Muslim campaign. Simultaneously, the Kashmir rebellion that emerged with these events in a temporary parallel also contributed significantly to this entire process. Thus, with the rise of the political temperature that was tinged with an anti-Muslim agenda, the space for secular liberal films that located themselves on an apolitical pedestal and presented a balanced picture of a syncretic Indian polity also tended to become shallow and thin. Yet another probable outcome of this particular political climate may be seen in the constriction of Muslim social space and the subsequent decline in the number of films which were made with a purely Muslim ambiance as its setting. Henna (‘Henna’, 1991, Randhir Kapoor), Sanam Bewafa (‘Unfaithful Beloved’, 1991, Saawan Kumar Tak) and Khuda Gawah (‘God as Witness’, 1993, Mukul S. Anand) remain as last manifestations of this genre.

What has followed since is a dogmatic construction of Muslims as aliens which is deeply injected into the demotic consciousness through a large number of films that picture a stereotyped image of Muslims, mirrored in traditional Islamic attire, reflecting highly religious overtures even in their actions in the secular premises of the public sphere. This has happened especially in the case of those films that seem to have overtly attempted to concur with the predominant political climate. Such category of films which has been examined in this article have projected the metaphoric figure of a Muslim, who is painted in the colour of Islamophobia by showing Muslims as indulged in terrorism, organised crime and treason. In this way, culture in its various forms serves as a primary arena of contestation for national, religious and ethnic identity (Lieber and Weisberg 2002: 273).

Films, in this regard, emerge as a crucial functionalist variable that facilitates the examination of the complex interactions that take place between culture and politics. In the light of all this, the present article thus aims at understanding the ways in which Hindi cinema has portrayed minority Muslims as a metonymy of fear and in a subtle manner have tended to substantiate the linguistic and ideological lexicography of Hindu majoritarianism. To demonstrate this, the article has selected those movies which through their narratives have engaged in substantiating two popular Hindu majoritarian platitudes. First one being, ‘all Muslims are not terrorists but, all terrorists are Muslims’ which has been advocated by films, such as Fanaa (‘Destroyed in love’, 2006, Kunal Kohli), Kurbaan (‘Sacrificed’, 2009, Rensil D’Silva) and New York (2009, Kabir Khan). The other platitude reads somewhat in these lines, ‘the identity of Muslims is entirely determined by their religion (qaum), their religion is the source of violence’ and it is this particular identity of Muslims that makes them prone to become terrorists, dangerous criminals or traitors. Such a notion has been championed by films, such as Sarfarosh (‘Fervour’, 1999, John Matthew Matthan), Charas (‘cannabis’, 2004, Tigmanshu Dhulia) and Shaurya (Valour, 2008, Samar Khan). The underlying agenda beneath the two distinct genres of cinematic performances, represented by their endorsement of these two different platitudes, is simple and patent. A Muslim is the most prominent source of threat against whom we need to have a constant national vigil and it is this very ontology of fear that these two categories of films have sought to conjure up through their cinematic performances.

Hindu Majoritarianism and the Construction of Minority Muslim Identity

Hindi cinema and the subject of minority cultures have entered into a complex interactive mode, wherein minority behaviour and the nature of the filmic world are increasingly getting intertwined with each other. Situating this phenomenon into the framework of agent-structure discourse, it may be argued that cinema plays a vital role in not only portraying the agent-structure question, but also critically engages in shaping its contours. This is because the social world is a product of human consciousness and is made up of thoughts, beliefs, concepts, ideas, languages, discourses, narratives and patterns of inter-group communications. The social world gains meaning through ideas and beliefs of human agents and films, with their profound influence, are in a position to manifest this connection between the objective material world and the subjective world of ideas in a forceful way. The agent-structure framework, thus, must be applied in a manner that would facilitate our analysis of the collective identity and shared beliefs of groups of people. Here, agent denotes human actions, contextualised in the multiple folds of substructures that form the society which in turn denotes a structure. For the purposes of our analysis, cultural minorities are considered as the agents, the society which they inhabit is regarded as the structure and films, by virtue of their pervasive appeal and being the dominant form of popular culture and a kind of lingua franca of contemporary times, have been viewed as the best source for the manifestation of the interactions between the two (Barnett and Allen 2000: 145).

Further, it has been argued here that Hindi cinema’s portrayal of the agent-structure discourse is heavily loaded in favour of the structure, as it endeavours towards the advancement of the dominant ideas inbuilt in the core of the structure. When we situate this tilt in the context of one of the most vulnerable sections of the society, that is the Muslim minority in India, the need for deconstructing the role of cinema as promoter of dominant culture assumes paramountcy. One key approach from which the nature of such interactions must be understood is by examining the sources of vulnerability of minorities emerging out of the hegemonic tendency of the majority community of their homeland and the structured way of ghettoisation done on the basis of a majoritarian agenda. Such an endeavour is directed towards promoting a hegemonic culture that would always keep the minorities at bay, beleaguered and in an inferior position. Considering the conceptualisation of majoritarianism and hegemonic culture, it can be noted here that they may be understood from the prism of Italian neomarxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s conception of hegemony, who was mainly concerned with the question of the political functioning of ideology. For him:

the idea of hegemony was the means by which the ruling class gains the ascent of those it rules. Hegemony is achieved in large part through the use of ideology, by defining a reality in which the ruling class seems to have some natural or inevitable right to be in charge. (Gramsci 1971: 45)

He further states:

The cohesion of the modern capitalist order stem primarily from hegemony, the spiritual and cultural supremacy of the ruling classes. Through the manipulation of the mechanisms of socialisation such as the media, the churches, the schools, they had managed to foist their own values and beliefs on an unsuspecting populace. (ibid.: 169–70)

The manifestation of such a kind of hegemony may be found in the attempts of the majority ethno-religious groups who are also in control of the institutions of governance to establish their hegemony through various means like those of favourable legislations, judicial verdicts, propaganda through State-run media institutions and the manipulation of school textbooks. This hegemonic endeavour requires a systematic othering of minority cultures by visualising them as aliens. In view of such attempts at the bracketing of one group by the other, the question of the legitimate rights of the members of minority culture as citizens, their due share in the socio-cultural space and the issue of their identity becomes critical.

As regards identities themselves, they are neither simply inherited nor are they the ‘givens’ of a social set-up. Shaped and crystallised in a specific political context, they are contextual and not essentialist (Kazmi and Kumar 2011: 173). All identities are defined in relation, reference and opposition to those who are performing the task of defining it. Identity is not something that one is born-with; and something which is natural, innate and in-built. Instead, it is constructed, imposed from outside. There are those who are constructing, defining or imagining, and there are those who are being constructed, defined or imagined. Those who define are the ME, WE or US, whereas those who are the defined are the YOU, THEM or OTHERS. More often than not, the dominant discourse in any society is the majoritarian one, but this does not imply that there is a homogenised majoritarianism in operation. It also cannot be preconceived that there will be unanimity in the viewpoint of all the members belonging to the majority community. Far from it, it is only the dominant fraction or the fringe which appropriates to itself the honour of representing the entire community. Thus, the sectarian voice of the few supposedly becomes the voice of the entire community, which in turn then seamlessly blends into the voice of the nation. It is from this majoritarian perspective that the minorities are defined and imagined (ibid.: 177).

Situating the issue of the cultural space and identity of India’s Muslim minority in this context, it may be observed that it is the dominant discourse embedded in the ideological framework of Hindu majoritarian fringe that has largely contributed in constructing, defining and the imagination of Muslim identity. This means that their identity is forged in accordance to the nature of political consciousness of the dominant majority, and hence, the very concept of cultural space for them is not the one which they imagine, rather it is the one which is being imagined on their behalf by the majority.4

Such sectarianism tends to cleave the cohesive multicultural edifice of the Indian society and has led to the growing Hindu backlash in the name of nationhood against the perceived Muslim enemy. Thus, modern India has witnessed intense anti-Muslim political ideologies, discrimination, marginalisation and violence that have implicitly or explicitly challenged the place of its Muslims as full citizens of the polity (Metcalf 2007: 99). In recent times, the metastatic impact of the vicious campaign against the Muslim minorities that was unleashed by the Hindutva forces in the name of love jihad, ghar wapsi (home coming) and the political acrimony over beef eating is being witnessed in the growing intolerance in the country. Such intolerance went to grave extents resulting in the lynching of an innocent Muslim man, Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri village of Uttar Pradesh by a frenzied mob.5

Islamophobia and the Making of Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema

A category of Hindi cinema has exhibited an overt majoritarian bias and latent exclusionary symbolism towards the Muslims. This particular set of films that constitute the key component of our analysis here have sought to nurture the grand strategy of fomenting the cultural agenda of Hindu majoritarianism. To accomplish this, these movies have attempted at promoting discourses concerning the dominant culture, entirely relegating the minorities into a state of oblivion. In this regard, the role of these films in fabricating the past by creating disjunctive images of Muslims and misrepresenting their actions as anti-national forms a significant component of what has been called by Lichtner and Bandyopadhyay (2008: 435) as a history war. In pursuit of its divisive engagement in this history war, this section of Bollywood cinema has constantly perpetuated the cliché of the inherently arrogant Muslims and the supposedly tolerant Hindus.7

Kamal Haasan’s film Hey Ram (‘Oh God’, 2000, Kamal Haasan) is one such instance which ingenuously projects a bold narrative of Muslim bloodlust and Hindu trauma, juxtaposed with the notion of Mahatma Gandhi’s politics of Muslim appeasement (Vasudevan 2002: 2918). In the same way, another film, Pinjar (‘The Cage’, 2003, Chandra Prakash Dwivedi) also attempts at glorifying in a latent manner the dominant majoritarian notion in India that the Muslims are vindictive and barbaric (Lichtner and Bandyopadhyay 2008: 452).

Apart from this, there is the category of films that provide a wider canvas to this discourse and here, the debate shifts towards focus on a good Muslim and a bad Muslim embedded within the closed domain of the Hindutva majoritarian mindset. The use of the category of good Muslims and bad Muslims must be visualised here from the perspective of the two Hindu majoritarian platitudes mentioned at the beginning of this article. First being the contention that all terrorists are Muslims and the second being the argument that a Muslim’s qaum is the source of his/her violent behaviour. The accentuation of these two platitudes and the de-emphasising of the plural character of the Indian society, in its narratives by a set of Hindi films, reflect upon the agenda of these movies to create the binary classification of Muslim community into the good Muslim who is supposedly a covert threat and the bad Muslim who is by and large an overt threat.8

Such a threat is weaved succinctly around the metaphor of religiously fanatic medieval-minded Muslims, who are visually represented to embody in them, the figure of terrorists that are being driven by a sense of theological and monocultural paranoia. The pictorial narrative of such a figure involves Muslims who wear the traditional attire (salwar kameez), sport beards, carry AK-47 rifles and use Arab scarves. With such projections, these films want to make sure that the religious identity of the terrorist is doubted not at all by the audience (Deshpande 2007: 99). Starting from films like Roja (‘Rose’, 1992, Mani Ratnam) till My Name is Khan (2010, Karan Johar) in film after film, irrespective of the genre, the recurring image of the Muslim is that of a terrorist. In fact, there is an overkill of them so that in common consciousness Islam and terrorism overlap. This is facilitated through the process of framing the terrorist in a singularly religious idiom. It is his Muslimness—the mandatory salwar kameez, the beard, reading the namaz, et cetera,—which is fore grounded. At the other extreme, there are the suave, successful, urbane, corporate executive types who are even more vicious (in films such as Fanaa, New York and Kurbaan). So like the devil, beware of the Muslim who can take any form (Kazmi and Kumar 2011: 184). By assigning such an intense sense of threat to the image of a Muslim, Hindi films have sociologically broadened the definition of Islamic terrorism. They have reduced the discursive space accorded to Muslims, making them more vulnerable to social ostracism, State violence and mob fury (Deshpande 2007: 98).

Further, let us consider this. In the film Fanaa, Zooni, a Kashmiri Muslim girl played by Kajol, is pictured as a patriot and a passionate Indian when she is shown killing her husband Rehan, member of a Kashmiri militant outfit played by Aamir Khan to prevent him from completing the mission of assembling of a Missile that would be used by the terrorists against India.9

The movie New York is yet another story of two good Muslims attempting and succeeding in preventing a bad Muslim from carrying forward his terror plans to a fruition point. The film begins in the United States in 2008, with the arrest by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of Omar Aijaz (Neil Nitin Mukesh) after guns were found in the trunk of a taxi cab he owned. Omar, a young Muslim man originally from Delhi, is then taken into custody and interrogated by FBI Agent Roshan (Irrfan Khan), also a Muslim man originally from South Asia, living in the United States for 20 years. Omar then discovers that he was set up by the FBI in order to force him to spy on a former college friend, Samir Sheikh (John Abraham), whom he has not seen in seven years and who the FBI believes is a terrorist. Omar agrees to help Roshan, rather reluctantly, only to prove that both he and Sam are innocent. He begins to stay with Sam and his wife Maya (Katrina Kaif) in their house, all the while spying for the FBI.12

In the process, Omar learns from Sam that 10 days after 9/11, Sam was arrested and detained for a period of 9 months as a suspected terrorist, a charge which everyone including the FBI and Roshan, now agree was incorrect. Though he was eventually released due to lack of evidence, the impact of being detained and tortured permanently changed Sam in ways which are difficult for those surrounding him to understand, leaving him with feelings of deep resentment towards the FBI. Omar thus finds that Sam ultimately resorted to plans for terrorism as a means of revenge. The climax of the film rests upon the attempts of Maya, Omar and Roshan to prevent Sam from committing an act of terrorism by telling him that if he perpetuates towards terrorism, others will suffer as he has.13

Owing to this, it may be stated that Muslims, for almost last three decades, drastically intensifying after 11 September 2001, are faced with a task of living against themselves and have been persistently experiencing a kind of misrecognition and alienation. This phenomenon exists and is variously constitutive of the question of Muslim identity (Luxon 2008: 377–78). Such a situation has been engendered by the negative interface that has been constructed between Islam and violence. It is evident in instances such as the deep-rooted fetishism of the US security and defense establishment, with the idea of the Muslim name itself being tantamount to a case for germinating suspicions regarding an individual’s potential terror connections. This is demonstrated in New York through the character of one of Sam’s employees, Zilgai (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) who is a former 9/11 detainee. Zilgai was eventually released due to lack of evidence and has been having difficulty adjusting back to ‘normal’ life. Zilgai emerges as the classic case where the connection between a Muslim name and terrorism naturally gets constructed in the public imagination.

Hence, it may be stated here that the Muslim world has been imbricated into a complex situation wherein the Muslims are engaged in a visceral psychological battle. The phenomenon of a Muslim being the ultimate source of all kinds of existential threats pushed the average Muslims to restructure their life and practices in a manner to cope up with the vagaries of Western imagination and the megalomaniacal fantasies of a fringe group of extremists. A kind of battle within, created by the intellectual confusion of the West, has put the Muslims in a perplexed predicament regarding the definition of their identity. Such precariousness deepens, as Muslims find themselves being defined from outside and are forced to define themselves in accordance to others’ caprice.

All this has happened because of the false contention that Islam and violence are inextricably intertwined with each other; Islamic fundamentalism is synonymous to terrorism and is a crime and this liaison can be untied by separating the good or moderate Muslims from the bad or extremist Muslims. Such a separation is fundamental for this contention because of its argument that the sources of apocalyptical terrorism are rooted in Islam and it is from there that it has to be purged. In this way, the global understanding of Islam has been imprisoned within the dyadic categorisation of the moderate and extremist Muslims, enmeshing it within an internal Manichean strife (Mamdani 2002: 766). Following this, the link between Islam and terrorism has thus become a central media concern, resulting in new rounds of culture talks. This talk has turned religious experience into a political category, differentiating good Muslims from bad Muslims, rather than terrorists from civilians. The implication has been undisguised: whether in Afghanistan, Palestine or Pakistan, Islam must be quarantined and the devil must be exorcised from it by a civil war between the good Muslims and the bad Muslims (ibid.).

In India, which is a home to the largest Muslim population in South Asia, this necessity of quarantining has assumed broader connotations and has aptly fitted into the political agenda of a section of the majority Hindu community, who have sought to radicalise a fascist idea of ‘Hindu nation’ and associated its achievement to the exorcising of the stated devil. This radical cultural theorising of the Islamic evil demonology has pulverised the plural character of our society and has led to grievous consequences in the form of the pogrom of Gujarat (2002) and the Muzaffarnagar communal riots (2013). So owing to all this, scholars across the disciplines have struggled to understand the religious nationalism of South Asia, one of whose tragic outcomes has been an accelerating violence against the Muslim minority. As regards India, a striking character of recent public life has been the intensive use of historical narratives to define the nature of India’s people and draw the boundaries of citizenship (Metcalf 1995: 951).

Since 11 September 2001, questions—such as who is the legitimate Indian citizen? What is Indian culture and who belong to it? Who are aliens and the nation’s enemies?—have all become the dominant national narratives. This is reflected in the attitude of Hindus towards Muslims that appears to have adversely changed from one of accommodation to that of a preposterous sense of veto. Epitomising this is the attitudinal change from the popularity of Muslim artists to a bizarre repugnance towards Muslims in toto. This tendency, braced by nationalist overtones, has become a significant feature of public mood in the Indian society. A section of the Bollywood film industry which is a significant agent in shaping popular culture in India has dexterously reflected this psyche, with a clear penchant towards being apologetic to the prevalent popular nationalist sentiment. In this regard, it has dispassionately endeavoured at producing nationalist cinema with an unflinching commitment towards the ideology of Hindu majoritarianism. The notion of the bad Muslim as an affront to the nation (as in the case of Rehan played by Aamir Khan in the film Fanaa), as compared to that of a good Muslim (like Zooni played by Kajol in Fanaa or Riyaaz Masood played by Vivek Oberoi in Kurbaan), who can be co-opted within the fold of majoritarian ensemble, has become a popular symbol to validate this hegemonic majoritarian agenda. Through such portrayals, Bollywood seems to have discreetly knit into its narratives, the popular slogan prevalent among the Hindu right’s political parlance that ‘all Muslims are not terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims’.

The above Hindutva shibboleth is very much open ended. When it says that all Muslims are not terrorists, it implies that the good Muslims should always be on the defensive and prove that they are not terrorists. Significantly because clipped to this is the other side of the shibboleth stating that all terrorists are Muslims, with which the Hindutva discourse is creating a singularly synonymous symmetry between the terms Muslim and terrorist. Meaning, even the good Muslims are not always trustworthy, simply because they belong to the Muslim community and can shift their roles for the sake of Islam at any moment. Thus, if the bad Muslim in the shape of a terrorist, part of a non-State organisation, is threat to the nation, the position of the good Muslim in the Hindutva nationalist consciousness is also not very much different. The only point of departure is that a terrorist is a proven enemy, who has violated the obligations of being a citizen. Whereas in the case of a good Muslim, who is a citizen of India and not a terrorist, the chances of him or her becoming one or, turning out to be terrorist sympathiser, or betray the nation by a devious engagement in any other facet of social or political life are always omnipresent.

All this indicates towards one thing that has emerged as an unprecedented anomaly. This anomaly is the breakdown of India’s long-standing multicultural edifice that was the key stone of its social architecture. This debacle has been the offshoot of its tryst with modernity which was first propelled by colonial transition and accentuated by the divisive politics of divide and rule employed by the British colonial administrators. Colonial modernity not only questioned the positivist logic of India’s traditions, but also branded its inherent diversities as subversive components which were dormant and hence potentially capable of effecting cataclysmic consequences. Indian society was branded as incapable of constructive management of these differences because of the lack of governmentality among Indians. Further, the orientalist ideas of difference and division from the colonial times considerably affected or, perhaps infected the foundations of public life in India. In the postcolonial era, orientalism without colonialism has emerged as a headless theoretical beast that is much harder to identify and eradicate because it has become internalised in the practices of the postcolonial State, theories of the postcolonial intelligentsia and the political actions of the postcolonial mobs (Breckenridge and Veer 1993: 11). Majoritarianism of an imperious Hindu order is the manifestation of such a phenomenon. Besides, a facet of this has also been the pervasive dissemination of Islamophobia that has got deeply engrained into the heart of contemporary discourses in India on terrorism and global peace. Right from a layman Muslim to a top Muslim leader, the stigma of being a terrorist or, his aid, or, sympathiser, haunts each and everyone, carrying the brand of being a Muslim.14

Situating this category of narratives in Bollywood cinema, it may be observed that in films predicated upon a predominantly Hindu setting, a good Muslim is always under the scanner and his or her fidelity is persistently being watched over. Their credibility as rightful citizens of the Indian State is constantly in a state of incertitude and their allegiance is perceived to be not towards India, but towards Pakistan because it is an Islamic State. This is very much in concurrence with the belief in the dominant Hindutva discourse that a Muslim’s faithfulness is primarily towards his or her religion and not towards the country. Thus, if a Muslim police officer commits a mistake while engaging in any operation against a Muslim criminal or terrorist, his folly is not considered as natural human error but regarded as a deliberate inclination to save the people of his own community (qaum).

A reading of films, such as Sarfarosh, Charas and Shaurya, demonstrate as to how Bollywood cinema in its narratives constructs the image of such a good Muslim within the framework of the hegemonic Hindutva discourse and paints the picture of Muslims as probable traitors because of their fanatic loyalty towards Islam. In Sarfarosh, Salim, played by Mukesh Rishi, is an honest and upright police inspector, whose skills of gathering intelligence is considered to be one of the best in the force. However, a failed attempt at nabbing Sultan (Pradeep Rawat), a gangster, resulting in his escape and the death of three police cops, entirely changes the image of Salim. Now his seniors begin to suspect that since Sultan was a Muslim and so was Salim, the police officer displayed deliberate callousness in performing his duties. Salim is immediately stripped of his field duties and assigned a desk job, as a mark of punishment.15

Similarly, in the film Charas, assistant commissioner of police Ashraf Khan (Uday Chopra) represents the vulnerable good Muslim, whose loyalty is always under the scanner. Despite being an efficient officer, he is not made part of an operation to get hold of an Afghan terror group hiding in New Delhi. His senior, deputy commissioner of police (DCP), Randhir Singh Rathore (Irrfan Khan), suspects that since the criminals are Muslims, Ashraf might show softness towards them. Although Ashraf sniffs this, he still importunes DCP Rathore to allow him to be the part of the operation and when Rathore is unrelenting, Ashraf alleges that Rathore doubts his credentials because of his Muslimness. In reaction to this, Rathore asks a question as to ‘Mr Ashraf, why do you want to become a martyr?’ In response, Ashraf states that ‘only to restore the faith of my fellow countrymen on Muslims and their loyalty towards the Indian State’. After this, he is made part of the team, but during the operation, Ashraf fails to hold on to a terrorist who flees after jumping from the top of a building. Ashraf could not catch up with him because he suffers from vertigo. However, one member of the terror group is caught by Rathore, in process of which he is seriously injured and hospitalised. In his absence, Ashraf was in charge of the case but due to high-level governmental pressure, the terrorist is let out. Hearing about this, DCP Rathore accuses Ashraf that since he was a Muslim, he could not attack the fleeing terrorist and also engaged in callous handling of the case of arrested terrorist. Here, Ashraf’s identity as a police officer pitted against a dreaded terrorist is completely erased and through the accusations of Rathore, only his identity as a Muslim is accented. He was demonised by his senior not for inefficiency in duty but for committing perfidy in love with his own religion (Islam). Rathore dubs Ashraf as gaddar (traitor) and accuses him by saying that ‘how could you have attacked your own people (fellow religionists)’.17

Yet another good Muslim in this genre is Javed Khan in the movie Shaurya. Situated on a plot pertaining to the institution of Indian army and its operations in the conflict-ridden Jammu & Kashmir, Shaurya presents itself as a story in which the loyalty of Indian Muslim army officers is constantly under the scanner of their fellow citizens who are also their colleagues. The key subject of Shaurya is the court martial trial on captain Javed Khan (Deepak Dobriyal), who is charged of killing his commanding officer major Virendra Singh Rathore, as well as of revolt and sedition. Major Siddhanth Chaudhary (Rahul Bose) is appointed as captain Javed’s defence counsel and Major Aakash Kapoor (Javed Jaffrey) is the prosecution lawyer. As captain Javed chooses to remain silent, his conviction seems to become an expected offshoot of the court martial.18

Brigadier Singh is harbouring an anti-Muslim prejudice that makes him consider all Muslims as a major threat to the security of the country. He is plagued with such a mindset because his domestic help who was a teenaged Muslim boy named Jamaal had not only raped his daughter but also burnt his entire family alive. Now, the brigadier is seeing Jamaal in all Muslims and such a psychological conditioning also strongly operated while he was performing his duties as an army officer. In one such instance, Rudra Pratap abetted and encouraged the torture and killing of innocent Muslims of a village in Kashmir by Major Virendra Rathore, who also nurtured a deep-seated sense of hatred towards Muslims. During Major Siddhanth’s investigations, it was revealed that captain Javed had killed Major Virendra for the crimes and excesses that he had committed on the Muslim civilians of the village while in uniform, done in complete connivance with brigadier Rudra Pratap who had abused the special powers granted to the army under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. On this count, the court martial arrives at the conclusion that the actual culprit was brigadier Rudra Pratap and not captain Javed. The critical aspect of this entire story is the semantic arrogance with which brigadier Rudra Pratap defends his criminal deeds as necessary actions in the name of national interest, while he was being charged of criminal indulgence in the court martial proceedings. As captain Javed is proved to be innocent, brigadier Rudra Pratap argues as to why even a good Muslim should not be defended:

you want to save Javed? Do you know his qaum (community), the inherent source of his identity that is derived right from his birth. This inherent identity runs in his veins and has smeared in his blood. His loyalty is only toward his community and unfortunately their community is full of poison and this poison runs in his blood. Their community is inscribed in all terror activities and the solution is that the entire community must be obliterated.19

The semiotic signification of Rudra Pratap’s defence is simple and patent. Muslim identity is essentialist and their allegiance is only towards Islam and not the country. Besides, the idea of India that is framed in terms of the discourse of nationalism in the narratives of Shaurya considers only the Hindus as the rightful claimants of its spatial anthropology and regards Muslims unfit to become the sociological and political coeval of that very idea. Thus, be it a bad Muslim or a good Muslim, for the category of Hindi cinema that has been discussed here, Islamophobia seems to be an inevitable phenomenon of the collective experience of the ‘Hindu Nation’, inhabited by the ‘we’ Hindus and the alien Muslim ‘others’.20

Here, it may be noted that the politics of Muslim identity itself is based on a religious rhetoric and an impulse towards accentuating majoritarian hegemony. As part of this hegemonic strategy, the macro-social identity of Muslims based on religion has factored deeply in shaping the narrative on the politics of Muslim identity in the public sphere. This narrative tends not only to reduce Muslim identity in terms of mere sociological and anthropological expression of their religion, subsequently obfuscating other aspects of their everyday life in determining their identity, but also through arguments, speech and social transactions, seeks to portray the Muslims as the nation’s other who are juxtaposed to the non-Muslim national self. Wrapped in theologocentric attire, such majoritarian perspectives on Muslims are yet to graduate from its self-imposed knowledge deficit of viewing the Muslim community from only the religious perspective. The major product of this deficit has been the fusion of the definition of the socio-cultural and political space occupied by the Muslims with the realm of their theological beliefs. Thus, majoritarianism has emerged as a

form of power that immediately applies to everyday life which categorises the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognise and which others have to recognise in him. It is a form of power that makes individuals the subjects. (Foucault 1982: 781)

Conclusion

The crisis of identity and dilemmas of accommodation among minorities emanates out of the very predicament of sharing cultural spaces with the majority and the precariousness of preserving their own cultural identity. The problem gets compounded, if they have been demonised by a hegemonic majoritarian order which also renders them to a ghettoised existence by declaring the minorities as aliens in majoritarian language and narratives. In India, this has been the product of the majoritarian cultural assertiveness regarding the superiority of Hindus and its portrayal of the Muslim minority as the cultural other. Such majoritarian narcissism and the denigration of minority culture are also grounded in the portrayal of Muslims as a metonym of fear by declaring them as the ultimate threat to the very foundations of Hindu culture.

The life line of this majoritarian agenda is the hegemonic vocabulary that describes a persistent contest between the native Hindu and the Muslim outsider. This is constantly portrayed in various forms of popular culture and the notion of the dominance of Hindu culture coupled with the feeling of Muslims as being outside its fold is represented as a type of collective experience in popular mediums such as films and television soaps. In today’s India, cinema, arguably one of the dominant forms of popular culture, has proved to be an ideal platform to theatre this dyadic contest conceived by the Hindu majoritarian ideology. The dichotomy has been presented in Bollywood cinema by putting the categories of Hindu culture and Muslim culture into a kind of Manichean rivalry wherein Hindu culture, practiced by the native self, is projected as good and the Muslim culture, as the way of life of the alien other, is represented as bad. By displaying a complex process of negotiation between these two aspects of Manichean symbolism, Hindi films have sought to hoist the dominant ideology of Hindu majoritarianism on a reified and unsuspecting populous.

Acknowledgements

This is a revised version of the article ‘Metonymies of Fear: Islamophobia in Hindi Cinema’ presented at the FILM AND MEDIA 2014: Visions of Identity—Global Film and Media, The Fourth Annual London Film and Media Conference, held at the Institute of Education, University of London, UK during 26–28 June 2014.

I thank the participants for their comments from which I benefitted immensely. Thanks are also due to the anonymous referees of the journal for their insightful reading and valuable suggestions that I hope have added to the quality of this writing.