Page - 88 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

identities are but one of many identities. And yet, in the wake of Islamic and Brit- ish Christian empires, when dominant religious identities were congealing around religious identity monolithically defined, majoritarian concerns and their required Others were developing. Thus, Vinayak Damodar Sarvarkar, the intellectual architect of Hindu nationalism, and Pandit Nehru, advocate of what is often deemed Indian secular nationalism, stand in agreement, for both nationalisms tend to essentialize India as Hindu. As we can now see, Nehru’s pluralist secular nationalism was fragile, its latent fissures ripe for exploitation, its conflations and elisions often lost on elites but evident to either those who did not share the vision or those whose place in India was more tenuous. Such tenuousness was made particularly evident by the end of the 20th century, when Indian life was itself changing rapidly, with the crosscurrents of economic lib- eralization, unmet material expectations beamed into new cable televisions, and ascendant Hindu and Islamist nationalisms. The times were changing quickly and so too were depictions of the religious Other. We may thus characterize Muslim representation in two ways, reflecting an evo- lution of dominant national and subnational ideologies from Independence through the 1980s, and then from the 1990s until 2010s: the male Muslim is either the innoc- uous and dutiful sidekick or, more recently, the dangerous Other, a terrorist with links to Pakistan and Kashmir or, if the film is set in the West, an Islamist with links to ISIS or al-Qaida. Note the negative portrayals of Indian Muslims as disguised Pa- kistanis, the veiled presence threatening to destroy India from the inside out. This shift in filmic representation is marked by films like Roja (Rose, Mani Ratnam, IN 1992) and continues with Dil Se (From the Heart, Mani Ratnam, IN 1998), Main Hoon Na (I am Here, Farah Khan, IN 2004), Fanaa (Destroyed in Love, Kunal Kohli, IN 2006), Deevaar (The Wall, Milan Luthria, IN 2004), and Kurbaan (Sacrifice, Ren- sil D’Silva, IN 2009), to bring us well into the new century.39 Ironies always attend Manichaean worldviews. Some 25 percent of native Hindi speakers are Muslims, yet their depiction in Indian films – though not their overall industry participation – is severely skewed. More ironic is that over the last quarter century, Bollywood’s leading male actors have been the Muslims Shahrukh Khan, Aamir Khan, and Salman Khan. Heroes of the box office with a global fan base, they sporadically face accusations of “anti-nationalism”, a code word generally leveled against Indian Muslims. In 2015, after Shahrukh Khan gave an interview criticizing 39 The multiple Bombay train blasts of July 11, 2006 certainly played into this characterization. It was striking how this attack was quickly interpreted along American 9/11 lines by Indian media outlets, paralleling the Indian government’s adoption of the American “war on terror” hermeneutic since 2001. The date itself, 7/11 (or 11/7), suggested an Indian equivalence to many. Dharma and the Religious Other in Hindi Popular Cinema | 87www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 73–102