Page - 92 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

than as sidekicks, background players, metonyms of national religious diversity, or performers in stylized Bollywood Bhangra numbers yelling “ballé, ballé!”44 Finally, we have the rather conflicting representations of Christians in sāmājik films. There are, in my estimation, four ideal types: the scantily clad, denationalized Westernized vamp, the comic drunkard, the gangster, and the pious Catholic nun or priest. For heuristic purposes and commensurate with the Manichaean world in which we seem to be dwelling, we might condense these representations further into a helpful dyad: the morally dubious Westernized Other versus the pious Catho- lic clergyman. There has been a significant difference between Muslim and Christian characterizations since Independence. Whereas Muslim portrayals have noticeably shifted diachronically from sidekick to menace, Christian characterizations have re- mained relatively stable and simplistic. In fact, the latter mirror the challenges of Indian Christian identity in the wake of British Christian Imperialism. So, while vil- 44 There are certainly significant exceptions. In the aughts of the new century, we saw the release of two films with Sikh protagonists: Singh is Kinng (Anees Bazmee, IN 2008) and Rocket Man: Sales- man of the Year (Shimit Amin, IN 2009). The primary difference is that these Sikhs are keśdārī (tur- baned), whereas in previous films (Veer-Zaara, Yash Chopra, IN 2004), the religious signifiers are more subtle, e.g., a character with a traditionally Sikh name or the presence of the kaṛā, or steel bracelet. A noticeable exception is Amir Khan’s character, Chandrashekhar Azad, in Rang De Bas- anti. Fig. 3: Actors Jeevan and Nassir Hussain as Christian sinner and saint, respectively, Amar, Akbar, Anthony (Manmohan Desai, IN 1977), 02:17.55. Dharma and the Religious Other in Hindi Popular Cinema | 91www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 73–102