While Bollywood continues to be part of the psyche of Indians and South Asians the world over, the complex question of how religious and sectarian identities are represented has emerged as crucial. The cinematic representation of identities, particularly of the Muslim as a cultural category, also contains within ideas about visualities and their impact. As identities are redefined in the context of extremist ideologies, the advent of religious nationalism aids and abets such redefinitions. The contribution of cinema to ideological milieus is immense. Hindi cinema—through its romantic narratives and culture of myth-making as well as the capital-intensive, industrial nature of production—has tended to be one of the most powerful tools of political communication and propaganda.

This book aims to bring cinematic narratives under the analytical lens and contextualize the representation of the Muslim in popular Hindi cinema. It also argues in favour of a noticeable transformation in the representation of Muslims in films through the 1990s and 2000s, culminating in the emergence of a secularized portrayal which is far from unproblematic. Can one discern an attempt to construct a visual binary where the Muslims can be categorized as ‘good’ and ‘bad’? Does Hindi cinema perceive the Muslim only through a simplified worldview of loyalty and nationalism? This book seeks to answer such questions.