Bollywood's depictions of Muslims over time have gone from good to ugly

The year was 1959, and acclaimed director Yash Chopra was just getting started. In his directorial debut Dhool Ka Phool (The Flower of Dust), lyrics to one classic song resonate: "Tu Hindu banega na Musalman banega, insaan ka aulad hai insaan banega" - You will not grow up as a Hindu or a Muslim, you will grow up as a human being.

Chopra did not fixate on religion in The Flower of Dust, but found an existential healing in being human, which was well-received by his audience. The song echoed a growing sentiment in post-partition India, following a historical event full of loss and based on religious divide.

The plot of the film revolves around a Muslim man named Abdul Rashid, who parented an abandoned Hindu child. It established a "good Muslim" narrative, painting them as loyal countrymen and well-meaning citizens onscreen.

The portrayal of Abdul Rashid as a humane, loving Muslim man was a reflection of a visibly thriving real-life Muslim community of India at the time. Their presence resonated with the ethos of a newly founded nation: secular, democratic, plural, while synergistically flowering a creative atmosphere that produced some great literature, poetry and a whole lot of social films like Anarkali (1953), Chaudavi Ki Chand (1960), Mughal –e-Azam (1960) and Pakeezah (1972), all of which portrayed Muslims as essentially good.

By the 1970s, the trope of Muslims as "good human beings" was integral to the spontaneous cinematic narrative, as depicted in Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), a blockbuster directed by Manmohan Desai about three brothers separated in childhood. Desai celebrated pluralism by showing the brothers adopted by families who followed three faiths – Hinduism, Islam and Christianity, uniting the trio at the end.

But Indian cinema has changed a lot since the '70s.

In two decades time, friendly depictions of Muslims would begin to disappear. Newer sets of storylines loaded with anti-Muslim sentiments surfaced. The new scripts didn’t care for Abdul Rasids or Akbars, instead creating Abrar Haques (Animal 2023) through a complex journey rooted in India’s political and social reality.

One turning point was the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992, a 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya (the supposed birthplace of Hindu God Ram).

The mindless act perpetrated by Hindutva supporters not only propelled communal riots and devastation but also initiated the rise of far-right Hindu politics across the country. Essentially, this was the beginning of formalised Muslim marginalisation and dehumanisation in India.

Following the Babri mosque incident, anti-Muslim sentiment carried over to the silver screen with films like Roja (1992), the story of a namesake Tamil woman who searches for her husband (an Indian intelligence agency official), who was abducted by Muslim rebels from Kashmir.

Roja successfully and subtly created new cinematic tropes denoting Muslims as a metonymy of all things negative and demonic. What started with Roja gained momentum, and Muslims in no time were deemed "anti nationals" backed by a hidden agenda, proven or otherwise, or as supporters of Pakistan. Muslim men were often portrayed as shalwar kameez-wearing wife beaters and hypersexual males with an infinite appetite for meat.

The next decade saw a long list of films like Sarfarosh (1999), LOC: Kargil (2003) Veer-Zara (2004), Fanaa ( 2006) Kurbaan (2009), and New York (2009), which fell into stereotyping Muslims one way or the other until these tropes were normalised in Bollywood movies.

Fast forward to 2014, when India’s general election was historically won by Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP). From here on, films fanned full-blown Islamophobia and Hindu superiority by producing historical dramas like Padmavat (2018) and Tanhaji (2020), which included characters from India’s Islamic past.

Set centuries apart, these films depicted Muslim rulers as grotesque, hypersexual and morbid while conjuring fiction in the name of history.

As the political regime firmed up in the following years, films became propagandist to their core. In the last two years, films like The Kashmir Files (2022), which depicted the exodus of Hindus from erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir, and The Kerala Story (2023), which revolved around women trafficked to serve Daesh, were robustly promoted by the current Hindutva regime. Movie tickets were even declared tax-free in BJP-governed states to attract more audiences.

These films legitimised Muslim bashing and dehumanising to such an extent that no filmmaker would anymore hesitate when whipping up anti-Muslim sentiments. Case in point, the last two Bollywood films of 2023 were Animal and Dunki (starring Shah Rukh Khan)!

Dunki insensitively pulls off a casual sequence in which an army (that hints at being Iranian) tries to detain a motley group of Indian trespassers who are illegally migrating to the United Kingdom, with the leader of the army about to rape an Indian woman.

The scene is superfluous to the main plot and appears to simply highlight random anti-Muslim sentiment, with no connection to the rest of the story. And yes, Shah Rukh Khan plays the saviour, as a Sikh Indian army guy who frees the woman from the clutches of the demonic Muslim army personnel.

While Shah Rukh Khan's Dunki incorporates a random portrayal of how bad Muslims are, Animal is about the intentional reaffirmation of what a far-right mass audience would love to watch.

The last raging superhit of 2023, Animal is a revenge drama, a family feud that objectifies Muslim women and paints the villain Abrar Haque as a violent, grotesque antagonist.

As India inches closer to another general election, Bollywood has become a critical vehicle for upholding anti-Muslim tropes held around the country.

One Indian journalist warns that India is headed down a dark path if it continues on this road:

"It looks obvious that the Indian film industry is walking in the footsteps of Nazi Germany to prevaricate, control, and influence a specific group of audiences to achieve political goals. The 'big lie' strategy is used to brainwash the Hindu masses to convince them to develop apathy towards the Muslims loathing them for all the ills of the country."

Indeed, in the existing political climate, rampant Islamophobia in Hindi cinema has only added fuel to the fire. For viewers, it solidifies perceptions of Muslim men as maniacal meat eaters and hypersexual. Meanwhile, films portray Muslim women as sex objects who have no agency over their bodies, as in Padmavat and Animal.

Such anti-Muslim impressions are fomenting intolerance among the majority of the population, as seen through several instances of online trolling and social discrimination.

One is only wishful but to think that despite such polarisation perhaps filmmakers would take it upon themselves to bring back Akbar the charming from Amar Akbar Anthony, disrupting the playbook of Islamophobia even though for now it's a distant possibility.