Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema Poetics and Politics of Genre and Representation

Introduction; 1. From ‘History’ to Circus: Politics of Genre and Muslims’ Representation in Hindi Films; 2. Shades of Diversity or a Case of Tokenism: Muslim Characters in Hindi Films; 3. Riots, Rage and Religions: Portrayal of Communal Violence in Hindi Films; 4. “Nayak Nahin Khal Nayak Hoon Main”: Muslim Gangsters, Dons and Sidekicks of Hindi Cinema; 5. Courting Terror, Constructing the Terrorist: Terrorism and Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema; 6. Muslim Genres to Brand Bollywood: Begums, Bais and the New Muslim Women of Hindi Films; Index

Biography

Mohammad Asim Siddiqui is Professor of English at Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India. A critic, translator and reviewer, his recent publications include Shahryar (2021), A History of Aligarh Muslim University 1920-2020 (co-authored, 2021) and translation of Qurratulain Hyder (2023). His articles and reviews have appeared in The Hindu, The Guardian, Scroll.in, Rediff.com, The Book Review, Biblio, and many other magazines and news portals.

"This remarkable book combines encyclopaedic scholarship and a subtle critical sensibility to produce a milestone study of Hindi cinema. Focusing on the numerous forms and functions of Muslimness in Hindi popular cinema, Siddiqui offers remarkable insights into Partition, into the diacritics of cinematic otherness, and the unparalleled importance of Urdu in Hindi cinema. This book should be compulsory reading for students of Indian cinema, of Partition, of Urdu and of Muslim identity in India." 

- Arjun Appadurai, Professor Emeritus, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University, U.S.A.

 

"Asim Siddiqui’s Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema: Poetics and Politics of Genre and Representation is an elegantly written and comprehensive book on the portrayal of Muslims in Hindi cinema, especially timely because of the increasing levels of religious conflict witnessed in the public space that Hindi cinema had worked against." 

- M.K.Raghavendra, Film scholar and critic

 

"Like any minority, Muslims in India are sensitive and vulnerable. They are an active film going audience too. Their pride of possession is their language - Urdu, full of romance and humour and thus part of a culture of joie d’ vivre of many pockets in India. Asim Siddiqui’s book is an academic and cultural analysis of Bollywood where Muslims are an audience or an ingredient of the masala content, either present with a change of name for acceptance or obvious by their absence, violent or peace loving, faithful or untrustworthy. The book takes you on an uneasy path of belonging to the minority when an unnatural conflict with the majority is gaining momentum."  

- Muzaffar Ali, Filmmaker and artist

 

"Bringing his encyclopaedic viewing of Hindi cinema together with an elegant intellectual apparatus, Mohammad Asim Siddiqui has written an important book on a timely subject. If popular cinema is a bellwether of public opinion, Bollywood's treatment of minorities reveals much about the state of our psyche." 

- Jerry Pinto, Poet, novelist and film scholar 

 

"This book is a reality check on the 2^nd largest Muslim population in the world. A mirror on the minuscule representation of the plight of the Indian Muslims in the world’s largest and biggest film industry."  

- M.K.Raina, Theatre actor and director

“Mohammad Asim Siddiqui must be lauded for writing Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema: Poetics and Politics of Genre and Representation – an excellent, passionately argued monograph on a tricky subject. Though the subject has been handled in articles and book chapters, a full-length study requires some courage and a strong ethical stand to be attempted in our time. […] Overall, the book is a very important intervention on the subject, and a must read for film buffs and serious academics alike.”

-- Sumanyu Satpathy, former Professor and Chair, Department of English, University of Delhi, India, in The Wire, 4^th August 2025.

 

“The diacritics of cinematic aporia call for an objective delineation and insightful analysis, and it is what Asim Siddiqui’s recently published book, Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema does with academic rigour. The author rightly considers cinema a site of hybridity, diversity, and splitting, where relations, assimilations, and syncretizations are negotiated and renegotiated. […] the book provides a panoramic yet invigorating view of the representation of Muslims in new social settings and idioms. Siddiqui discovers, excavates and discusses the changing perception of Muslim identity from the historical films of the 1940s down to the recent movies that perpetuate stereotypical notions of Muslim identity. With critical acuity and social and cultural sensitivity, he unravels the representation of global Muslim identity in a post–9/11 world and emphasises the need for a more nuanced understanding. […] In sum, the book presents an insightful and multilayered analysis of the representational aspects of Hindi cinema.” --

-- Shafey Kidwai, director of Sir Syed Academy, Aligarh Muslim University, India, in Hindustan Times, 5^th August 2025.

 

“[A] meticulously researched work which throws fresh light on the depiction of Muslims in cinema from the pre-Partition days […]”.  

-- Ziya Us Salam, in The Hindu, May 29, 2025.

"The strongest chapters of Siddiqui’s book showcase his curatorial strengths and his eye for emblematic scenes. The early surveys of “diversity” and “national integration” narratives distinguish helpfully between characters whose Muslim identity is highly marked—through Urdu diction, qawwali (devotional music performance), mosque iconography, color palettes, and costume—and those for whom it is incidental, signaled mainly through a taxonomy of names….There is also, to his credit, a recurring attentiveness to asymmetry. Instead of slipping into a comfortable “both sides” rhetoric, Siddiqui does name and critique films whose balancing act obscures the distribution of harm, and he signals when sympathetic portrayals are rare outliers rather than a norm….Siddiqui’s case studies concentrate the mind and are a useful resource for teaching."

-- Syed Haider, Lecturer in World Cinema at the University of East Anglia(UK) in Journal of Religion and Film (University of Nebraska, Omaha), Volume 29, Issue 2 (October 2025).

 

"Mohammad Asim Siddiqui's book Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema opens up a huge arena of debates related to the past of the Hindi film industry, now famously known as Bollywood, going back to the pre-Independence times and from there to contemporary times...Tapping a variety of sources, challenging myths and crossing many disciplinary boundaries, this book gives us an acute, thought-provoking analysis to look at the construction of Muslim in Hindi movies...The scope of the book, therefore, is beyond academic. This will be the platform for any further discussion in the visual media to understand the depiction of Muslim in these turbulent times."

 -- Krishnan Unni P., Professor of English, Deshbandhu College, University of Delhi, in Rediff, 6 June, 2026.

"Siddiqui’s prose moves between criticism and elegy. He is alert to cinema’s cruelty—the stereotype, the convenient villain—but also to its capacity for redemption. Even recent films, he notes, harbour countercurrents of empathy: the humane patriotism of Main Hoon Na, the quiet moral intelligence of Raazi, the cross-border tenderness of Bajrangi Bhaijaan. These, for him, represent a “cinema of small restorations,” works that refuse the binary of victim and aggressor. What elevates Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema beyond standard film studies is its moral clarity. Siddiqui writes not from grievance but from wounded affection. His closing argument—that cinema, by staging the Muslim’s precarious belonging, continually tests the republic’s secular promise—resonates far beyond film. In an age when representation itself has become a political battleground, he offers a reminder that to look, carefully and compassionately, is itself a civic act."

-- Aftab Husain, Vienna University, Austria in The Friday Times, November 23, 2025.

"Siddiqui’s “Muslim Identity in Indian Cinema: Poetics and Politics of Genre and Representation” is poised to become a foundational text for scholars across film studies, cultural studies, and the study of minority representation. Its incisive examinations into the mechanisms of “othering” and the ideological underpinnings of cinematic narratives will undoubtedly stimulate further critical inquiry into how marginalised identities are constructed and contested on screen, both within India and across global contexts. The book serves as a vital call for more nuanced, sensitive, and responsible cinematic portrayals, ultimately fostering a deeper and more empathetic understanding of India’s pluralistic society. The book is a must-read and a treasure trove for lovers of Indian Cinema."

-- Pradeep Trikha, a Visiting Professor at University of Munster, Germany and a former professor at Mohanlal Sukhadia University, Udaipur, in Littcrit: An Indian Response to Literature, Volume 51, Issue 100, Number 2(December 2025).

 

"Siddiqui’s method is descriptive, empirical, archivally wide, committed to cataloguing currents, genres, types, and exceptions across decades of Hindi cinema. Yet embedded within this encyclopaedic ambition are moments of disorienting creativity, ideas introduced in a matter-of-fact tone that nevertheless gesture toward a far more radical rethinking of Muslim presence in Hindi cinema…. What emerges from this excavation of Siddiqui’s text is a para-political theory of futurity."

-- Yanis Iqbal, independent researcher and freelance writer, in Eurasia Review, 21 November 2025.

 

"Over the past two decades, scholarship on Muslim identity in Hindi cinema has expanded considerably, and Mohammad Asim Siddiqui’s book marks a distinctive intervention within this growing body of work….It offers fresh insights and debates on the politics of representation of Muslim identity in Hindi cinema, while drawing connections to existing knowledge on the systematic and deeply embedded nature of communalism. Through its engagement with cinematic, historical, political, and global discourses and contexts, the book firmly positions itself as an indispensable resource for students, researchers and academicians of film studies."

-- Nishat Haider, Professor of English, Jamia Millia Islamia (Central) University, New Delhi, India, in The Book Review, Volume XLIX, Number 10 (October 2025).

"Siddiqui’s inquiry into Islamic identity in Hindi cinema reaffirms cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s stance that representation is not merely repetition, but rather a process of interpretation that can thus never be politically neutral."

-- Keerthana Haridas, Master’s student at Ashoka University, India in Doing Sociology: Building the Sociological Imagination,23 November 2025.