Page - 85 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

film in which the protagonist is Muslim, Christian, Sikh, or Parsi. Second, when religious minorities are portrayed, they appear as sidekicks, or as necessary contributors for the authenticating pluralist mise-en-scène, or as poster children for Indian’s sense of itself as a tolerant multi-religious nation. Finally, when minorities occupy pride of place, they do so in unthreatening period pieces or within designated niche communities.36 Of the 300 million non-Hindus in India, some two-thirds are Muslim. There was a time when Muslim actors felt it necessary to change their names to more generically Hindu-sounding ones. For example, two of the stars of Mughal-E-Azam (The Great Mughal, K. Asif, IN 1960), Dilip Kumar and Madhubala, began their lives as Muham- mad Yusuf Khan and Mumtaz Jehan Dehlava, respectively. Other examples abound. Name changes can be made to mean too much, but they do signal dominant percep- tions about what the Indian viewing public is thought to desire or require. They also demonstrate normative Hindu influences on the Indian public. Beyond these broad representational generalizations, however, we can say that as national ideologies have changed, so too have minority depictions, moving from a type of secular pluralism known in Hindi as dharma nirpekś, usually translated “sec- 36 See, for example, the famous Mughal-E-Azam (The Great Mughal, K. Asif, IN 1960). Yes, Muslims once ruled this land, but that is now, safely, a thing of the past and thus fit for romanticization. Fig. 1: Emblems of the Nehruvian secular ideal. Three brothers save their mother, unwittingly. Film still, Amar, Akbar, Anthony (Manmohan Desai, IN 1977), 00:26:01. 84 | Kerry P.  C. San Chirico www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 73–102