Cinema plays a significant role in forming and reforming a culture and a cultural identity. It mirrors what we believe in and how we co exist as people. A good example is when people copy fashion trends from movie stars. It is also common these days to find people using figures of speech that are inspired by the film industry. 

There is an awkward ‘formality’ in the way Muslims are shown in films, part of the problem has to do with political correctness and a desire to not offend. Whether it is the character of Captain Bashir who served a hand in saving Indians during a plane hijack, in the film Zameen; Iqbal, an Indian cook from Ghazi attack; character of smile from the movie Lagaan, who plays for the villagers with a crippling leg and lastly the character of Imran Ansari from the latest web series Patal Lok. 

Whenever a movie tries to portray a Muslim character in a “positive light”, they are often shown as the backbone of the protagonist. They are shown as equally good as the main ‘hero’ character but certainly not chosen to put in the position of influence even if the film actually mean to break the stereotypical way of perceiving Muslims. In the series Patal Lok the character of Ansari is shown as a calm and hardworking officer who accompanies Hathi Ram, the protagonist, through thick and thin. But, this aspiring civil  servant, despite the evident ‘nationalism’, had to go through communal slurs, the show portrays as a depiction of an Islamophobic society. 

If we consider the top 12 Bollywood movies that crossed the Rs.300-crore mark in box office collections within previous years, 10 out of 12 films did not have a single Muslim protagonist based in India. 

India consists of diverse ethnic communities, classes and sects, which are the building blocks of the Indian society by large. In such a society, hegemony of the majority in the public sphere paves the way for inequalities and oppression of the marginalized. This society measures Muslims in an over-simplistic categorization in binaries of good and evil. The scene where Ansari eats the prasad his Hindu colleague offers him by ‘joining his hands one below the other’, shows that good Muslims are not only expected to listen to the communal slurs like ‘katua’ silently but are also expected to obey the majority religion at every sphere of their lives. 

Unfortunately, the radicalisation of which we are now witnessing, where Hindu mobs can be seen killing and compelling Muslims to chant Jai Shri Ram in public to prove their “decency”.

Contrary to this, whenever we find Muslims revealing their identity explicitly in a public sphere, either wearing a skull cap and Kurta or keeping a beard, we immediately label them as ‘orthodox’. Perceiving their clothes as not ‘secular enough’ has now become a normalised understanding of society. We as a society have failed to accept them the way they are, as Indian enough.

Movies like Lipstick Under my Burkha and Gully boy among others are perceived as stories where ‘new-age’ Muslim characters choose an Indian identity overriding their religious one. Now, this creates another discourse about ‘new-age Muslims’, who are meant to be rebellious, passionate and probably don’t care much about their religious identity. But, though these movies give us a false conscience of Muslim representation, it did nothing to normalise their religious identity within the society in other words, to build a society that can absorb them as one of their own without any judgement. Contrary to this, they only create an image of a more ‘secular’, ‘new age’ Muslim, who basically tries to dress up and practice like the majority permits or expect.

This very notion has resulted in building a mentality where we seek ‘proof’ to even consider Muslims as a decent human being. The recent incidents of Jamaatis refusing to eat medicines and misbehaving with doctors, where somehow tend to confirm these biases, the later incident about them donating blood plasma to COVID-19 patients or a Muslim doctor sacrificing his life treating corona patients not only came to us as a shock but also drive us to believe that these are ‘some’ good Muslims, considering the given as ‘proof’.  This not only leads to some immediate consequences but also impacts society by large.

This tokenistic treatment of Muslims discretely from their community, in reel and real life as well is effectively making them the ‘other’. We are building a society where ‘they’ have to face extra security checking for wearing a pathani kurta, a society where ‘their’ dissent is termed as anti-national and are charged with UAPA, where ‘they’ need to prove their nationalism to live in a country in which ‘they’ are living since years, a society which continued to make ‘them’ feel more vulnerable, a society where a father of a Muslim boy feel scared to even raise him as a Muslim.