Hindi cinema has long shaped the memories, culture, and emotions of generations of Indians. It has provided cultural representation, identity, and ideology to the nation. In Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema: Poetics and Politics of Genre and Representation, Mohammad Asim Siddiqui analyses the representation of the Muslim community in Hindi cinema, focusing on how the medium has imagined and stereotyped this marginalised community from the early historical period to the present. The book is an important intervention in the field of film studies. Siddiqui treats cinema as an active reflection of society that produces an ideological lens through which the Muslim community is seen and constructed. He examines these phenomena through genres, narratives, and visuals.

This is among the earliest books on Muslim representation in Hindi cinema written from an insider’s perspective. One significant antecedent in this field is Nadira Khatun’s Postcolonial Bollywood and Muslim Identity: Production, Representation, and Reception (Oxford University Press, 2024). Where Khatun examines Muslim identity within the postcolonial cultural field through production and reception, Siddiqui presents a detailed genre-based analysis of how different cinematic forms mould that identity.

To read Muslims in Indian cinema, Siddiqui uses a genre framework, which provides a productive way of approaching the material. He categorises the book by genre—historical, patriotic, action, gangster, and Muslim social—making the argument more fluid and coherent. Through these genre studies, the author traces the production and distribution of Muslim stereotypes.

Through Dhoom 3 (2013), he shows how genres overlap and resist neat categorisation, making genre an analytical tool rather than a fixed, rigid compartment. This reading of Dhoom 3 reveals the limitations of rigid classification and the politics of genre itself.

Siddiqui argues that films often carry a hidden ideology that goes unnoticed because the primary focus falls on actors and commercial success. He also evaluates the invisibilisation of Muslim characters in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), and Dil Chahta Hai (2001). This invisibility affects the community, stifling their voices and reinforcing radical stereotypes. Such erasure becomes a tool to justify and normalise cultural homogenisation, effacing minority identities.

The author traces Muslim representation from the Nehruvian era to the present. Siddiqui discusses how the 1950s and 1960s, aligning with the Nehruvian project, were used to project a secular image of the nation. The inclusion of Muslim characters was meant to bring India’s plural culture to the fore. However, the presentation was largely tokenism, with the recurring archetypes being craftsmen, poets, nawabs, and courtesans. The representation of Muslims as educated, rational, and upwardly mobile was inconceivable within these frames—tagged as “Muslim social” or “Muslim historical.” This tokenism, Siddiqui argues, produces permanent marginality.

The slow shift to villain

While analysing contemporary cinema, Siddiqui raises concerns about how historical films have been reinvented. Earlier cinematic justifications of the Mughal era as neutral or secular have given way to Islamophobic content. In Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior (2020), Aurangzeb is recast as a new Muslim villain, oppressive and one-dimensional, while the Marathas are glorified. Siddiqui observes how symbols—words like mullah, hijab, and the phrase “love jehad”—are weaponised to create hostility towards the community.

The fixed pattern for “Muslimness” depicts Muslims as oppressors, terrorists, or gangsters confined to ghettoised spaces. Such portrayals become a psychological barrier for majority audiences, reinforcing the perception of Muslims as extra-territorial. The author moves beyond the binary of positive and negative representation and focuses on the institutional mechanisms of cinematic production—situated within the political discourse of the state, which has the power to address or entrench communal stereotypes.

The author’s close reading of films is a notable strength. A wide range of films is discussed: M.S. Sathyu’s Garam Hawa (1973) powerfully engages with Partition cinema, portraying everyday anxieties, unemployment, mistrust, and marginalisation. Similarly, Siddiqui draws on Tamas (1987), Train to Pakistan (1998), Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001), and Pinjar (2003) to trace the mechanism by which the community is sidelined, forming what he calls a void—a pattern in which Muslims are made perpetually to prove their loyalty to the nation.

Siddiqui further discusses patriotic thrillers such as Sarfarosh (1999), Mission Kashmir (2000), Farz (2001), and The Hero: Love Story of a Spy (2003). These narratives construct Muslims as violent, anti-national, conspiratorial. In Sarfarosh, the singer Gulfam Hasan—soft-spoken, refined, fluent in Urdu and ghazals—is shown to be a conspirator involved in arms smuggling. The very markers of cultural sophistication become a mask for threat.

The book also addresses language politics in contemporary cinema. Siddiqui discusses the role of Urdu—its centrality to Hindi film’s music and dialogue even as its cultural position has shifted since the 1990s, when the language began to mark its speaker as an outsider, a sign of Muslim identity now viewed with suspicion.

Alongside genre and Muslim identity, Siddiqui devotes a chapter to gender. He traces representations of women from the courtesan of Pakeeza to the discourse of love jehad in The Kerala Story (2023), exposing gender politics around Muslim women—cast either as courtesans or as timid, veiled figures. At the same time, he highlights parallel cinema’s interventions in challenging such portrayals, allowing Muslim women to be represented as individuals resisting patriarchal structures.

The marginalisation of Indian Muslims continues in what Siddiqui calls the “albatross of partition”. From riot narratives to gangster films to the construction of the terrorist, a community suffers from its own cinematic image. Films such as Mission Kashmir (2000), A Wednesday! (2008), New York (2009), and My Name is Khan (2010) chart the increasing association of Muslim identity with terrorism. Siddiqui invokes Amartya Sen, who in Identity and Violence argues that singular identities are imposed on complex human beings to violent effect—a framework that resonates with his reading of how cinema reduces its Muslim characters to a single, threatening dimension.

The book deserves recognition for its engagement with minority representation and its accessibility—clear and grounded, free of jargon, valuable for cinema scholars and general readers alike. Its gaps are real but not fatal: a more sustained engagement with production and reception, with the role of editing, sound, and camera movement as tools of ideological meaning, and with Muslim representation in regional cinema, would have strengthened the argument. Nevertheless, Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema remains a timely and necessary study.

Sara Faraz is a researcher in media and ecological studies.

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