The Poetics And Politics Of Bollywood Storytelling Since 1947

A few years ago, designing a postgraduate course on post-1947 Indian history posed a particular challenge: how to trace the evolving political consciousness of India’s Republican journey through its visual culture, particularly Bollywood cinema. Scholars such as Jyotika Virdi, Joya Chatterji, Akbar S Ahmed and Shyam Benegal have long used popular Bombay cinema as a mirror for national anxieties, secular posturing and democratic identity. Yet academic engagement with popular cinema often faces resistance, both outside and within university walls, a tension subtly signalled in Asim Siddiqui’s dedication of his new book to his mother, who does not regard film as a serious academic subject.

That resistance has a long history. In a landmark lecture at Aligarh Muslim University on 25 November 1991, the writer Rahi Masum Raza argued that cinema is a legitimate branch of literature, and criticised intellectual elites for dismissing films as unworthy of study. He warned that if universities refused to teach film literacy, society would remain captive to uncritical media consumption. Scholar and Professor of English at Aligarh Muslim University Mohammad Asim Siddiqui’s new Routledge volume, Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema: Poetics and Politics of Genre and Representation, answers that call directly, treating Hindi cinema as a serious text for historical and cultural investigation.

Siddiqui’s book maps how Hindi cinema constructs Muslim identity, tracing a trajectory from the classic ‘Muslim Social’ genre to contemporary majoritarian tropes. It shows how early cinema used idealised Urdu diction, courtly etiquette and nostalgic feudal aesthetics to render Muslims culturally visible yet politically unthreatening.

That romanticised isolation, Siddiqui argues, gradually fractured: the Muslim Social became a space where majoritarian anxieties were projected, and Hindi cinema increasingly framed Muslim identity through binary lenses, either as an exoticised relic of the past or as a threat to the nation-state.

The book’s strongest section maps the formal shifts within the genre, showing how localised spaces such as the haveli or the kotha were replaced, after the 1970s, by criminalised, hyper-visible urban settings, a shift that Siddiqui reads as part of a wider politics of stereotyping. He also offers sharp analysis of how film music and code-switching between Urdu and Hindi dialogue signal political inclusion or alienation across different eras.

Siddiqui’s analysis is most likely to prompt debate in its treatment of internal community dynamics. While Hindi cinema has long engaged with Hindu social issues, including caste discrimination, untouchability, widow remarriage and agrarian feudalism, it has been markedly more hesitant to examine socio-religious regression within Muslim communities.

Nikaah (1982), released while the Shah Bano case was before the Court of Appeal, dramatised the issue of instant triple talaq without maintenance, but stopped short of a systemic critique of patriarchy and orthodoxy.

It would be decades before a film such as Haq addressed the aftermath of that period and the legal and religious pressures facing women. Siddiqui contrasts this with contemporary Pakistani television dramas, which more regularly engage with gender oppression and religious conservatism within their own society, noting that Pakistan had reformed its own Muslim personal law as early as 1961.

Critics and scholars, from Iqbal Masud and Khalid Mohamed to Akbar S. Ahmed and Jyotika Virdi, have extensively analysed how Hindi cinema depicts Muslims through an external, majoritarian gaze. What remains largely absent, Siddiqui suggests, is a self-critical gaze from within, with filmmakers tending towards either romanticised nostalgia or vilification, rather than nuanced internal critique.

The book’s main limitation is its heavy reliance on textual analysis over industrial context: it says little about how box-office economics, censorship and changing producer demographics shape onscreen representation, and it leaves streaming platforms and regional cinema largely unexplored.

Despite these gaps, Siddiqui’s book is a valuable resource for students and researchers of post-independence Indian history, offering a clear framework for understanding how popular media reflects, and actively shapes, majoritarian politics. It raises important questions not just about what Hindi cinema shows, but about what it chooses not to show.

Read alongside Rahi Masum Raza’s 1991 call to take cinema seriously as literature, Siddiqui’s work is a timely contribution bridging cultural studies and political history, a reminder that popular cinema does not simply reflect society but actively participates in shaping it.

(Mohammad Sajjad teaches modern and contemporary history of South Asia at Aligarh Muslim University.)

(As I See It is a space for bookish reflection, part personal essay and part love letter to the written word. Views expressed are personal.)