How does Bollywood portrays Muslims?
The Muslim Maa, Bahen, Biwi
Posted online: Friday, April 08, 2005 at 0000 hours IST
The representation of the minority community which has largely been cartoonish, patronising and often fantasticated. Christians and Parsis are the butt of ridicule and jokes, while the Muslims are either benign Rahim Chachas and Rahima Chachis, or alarmingly in recent years, terrorists from across the border.
The representation of the minority community which has largely been cartoonish, patronising and often fantasticated. Christians and Parsis are the butt of ridicule and jokes, while the Muslims are either benign Rahim Chachas and Rahima Chachis, or alarmingly in recent years, terrorists from across the border.
If there was caricaturing once, it was at least devoid of malice and politics. Indeed, during the 1950s there were sub-genres of Hindi-Urdu cinema like the Muslim mythological, the prime example of this being Hatim Tai, and the Muslim social which found patronage specially with Muslim audiences of the urban mohallas. Not surprisingly, with changing fads, time, taste, and commercial compulsions, the Hatim Tai genre died and so did the Muslim social, the last successful one being Mere Garib Nawaaz and on a bigger-budget scale, Mere Mehboob, Mere Huzoor and Nikaah.
The male miyan protagonists were either indolent nawabs, often revealing a less than seven year itch for another shariq-e-hayaat. Or they were college campus romantics a la Rajendra Kumar in Mere Mehboob and Rajesh Khanna in Mehboob Ki Mehndi. The supporting characters were more often than not equipped with quivering goatees, piety and tears, as they played good Samaritans like the poor man, played by the ever suffering Manmohan Krishna, who raised an abandoned illegitimately born child in Dhool Ka Phool, on secular tenets (‘Tu Hindu banega na Musalman banega…’ the refrain still rings in the ears).
Muslim women also represented patented types, which is perhaps inescapable because custom and movie tastes wants them that way. For instance, the ammi jaan was expected to be snow-haired, unbending and a model of tolerance, a kind of a Mohammed Ali Road Ammi India. In effect, she was like every other mother in the movies, only her costumes and hair tints were different. She did namaaz the way the Hindu women went to the temple, there was a certain grace and commonality in the representation of the mother figure.
The sister, the appa was like the normal screen didi, peppy, innocent and frequently seduced and ravished by the villainous elements. Also, the biwi or the beloved was slotted into a groove from which there seemed to be no escape. The Muslim heroine found ancestral roots in Anarkali, the classic cinema courtesan. She was the dancing girl, the nautch girl, the tawaif, the raqassa… in countless films… till this reached some kind of apotheosis in Pakeezah. Enough?
Meena Kumari, the contradictory chaste and sullied woman, had portrayed it all. Or that’s what you thought till the shimmering, singing Umrao Jaan aka Rekha mesmerised viewers. Interestingly a movie corporate baron recently asked me to write a courtesan script. The reason? His logic was, Aishwarya Rai would look very well as an updated Umrao Jaan of Lucknow. It is another story altogether that the mujra mahals of Lucknow have all but disappeared today.
Reality, a contextual base or credibility are not the issues here. Flexibly cinema lends itself to fantasies, concoction and fictionalisation. Yet, even while spinning a yarn about say extra-terrestrials or imaginary courtesans, there has to be a relation to our real anxieties, fears, wishes and dreams. Take Mughal-e-Azam, the black-and-white version that is… it is an apocryphal love story of a Mughal prince and a courtesan who did not exist according to the history records. Nevertheless, the film was made with such immense power and conviction that we tend to suspect, may be just may be Anarkali was real.
On the flip side, the maa, bahen, biwi of popular Hindi cinema were believable only intermittently. Otherwise they were theatrical, relentlessly melodramatic ammijans, aapas and bahu begums given to abject suffering without raising a whimper against the feudal order created by males. Whenever the women protested against subjugation, they either died or failed miserably at the cash counters, an example being the Bimal Roy produced Benazir.
Of course, melodrama, gross exaggeration and distortion are not exclusive to the representation of Muslim characters. To strike connection with the viewers, from different strata, the tradition has been to avoid subtlety and restraint in order to underline matters to the nth degree.
Hindu characters have also been stereotyped without any let-up, a trait which has found further expression on TV soaps and serials. Only they aren’t made marginal characters hanging around on the fringes of the script.
This much was obvious to me during the early years of film watching, in other words a child could tell that there was a facetious short-hand in the portrayal of Muslims. That many of the stalwart writers, lyricists, producers, artistes and directors belonged to the Muslim faith was strange to say the least. Stranger still, I have not been able to quite understand why Yusuf Khan chose to give himself the screen name of Dilip Kumar. Was it to strike a chord with the larger segment of the audience?
Be that as it may, as one started reviewing films circa the late 1970s, one made it a religion not to lose one’s innocence and emotional bearings while watching films, even while synopsising analysing or reconstructing them in the journalistic mode. In the ’70s, there was a trend to glorify the parallel or off-mainstream cinema, while disparaging the commercial or the mainstream. In principle, one had to be supported and the other, attacked. This I found to be an Achilles heel in some of my senior colleagues. In effect, they were setting up borders in cinema, which were unnecessary and unfair. So, if one raved about Manmohan Desai’s Amar Akbar Anthony or Naseeb or the films of Raj Kapoor, one was considered a bit addle-headed. Eclectic tastes in cinema were suspect. Today, mercifully, eclecticism has become the norm.
Desai’s ironical entertainer about three lost and found brothers, weaned on different religions, was a joyous laugh riot. Manmohan Desai continued to push the secular further, not with the same impact though. Coolie, with its incredibly absurd finale - in which the hero survived about a thousand bullets - at the Haji Ali is unforgettable for sure, but finally far too fantasticated and over-the-top. The same goes for Allarakha which he produced and piloted. Manmohan Desai was a child-like adventurist and there’s little doubt that his unashamedly absurd adventures were the best of its kind.
While looking for valuable signs and meanings in the big-budget movies, it was also rewarding to discover sensitive and lastingly significant portrayals of the Muslims in alternative cinema, the most important one being MS Sathyu’s Garam Hawa. It dealt with a Muslim family faced with the prospect of losing their moorings in India, because of the Partition. Several attempts have been made to tell Partition stories, but Garam Hawa remains the most emotionally moving… since it touches the central truth of a political tragedy.
An under-rated film Bazaar, this was Sagar Sarhadi’s expose of the selling of young brides. For some of its truth-telling moments, the earlier black-and-white Dharamputra is important too,more as a socially conscious streak in Yash Chopra’s oeuvre before he flew off to discover the scenic vistas of Switzerland.
Of the other films which have been valuable for their treatment of minority issues, Aparna Sen’s Mr and Mrs Iyer comes instantly to mind. It took a stand, and indeed was a corrective on Mani Ratnam’s Bombay which strived to perform such a balancing act that it was neither here nor there. Govind Nihalani’s Tamas and Dev have their hard-edged moments, while Saeed Mirza’s Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro, and Naseem, point towards a filmmaker whose humanism was more palpable than the political content which tended to get dogmatic.
In recent times, the Muslim woman has come out of the purdah, but is still hidden behind a mask of tinsel and glamour, as in Veer-Zaara which was so politically correct that it was sterile. In Gadar, too, the Muslim woman was in dire distress and served as a Barbie doll being saved by a superman. By contrast, the helpless mother of Khamosh Pani, in recent times, stood out as an authentic portrait of a woman who has no choice but to convert to another faith during the Partition. Also more convincing, by the strength of her portrayal, was the character of Tabu in Maqbool, caught in the crossfire of the underworld and savage ambition.
Over the decades, critiquing the pitfall of popular cinema has been common. The question is: is this critiquing to any point? On asking this despairing question some years ago, it was filmmaker Kumar Shahani who answered, “The accumulation of criticism is the point”, encouraging me to continue with my… dare I say it?.. love. I say love because I see it as a faith in itself rather than an occupational preoccupation or hazard.
Of this accumulation, of criticism and concurrent life experiences, came my effort first at film script writing, an opportunity given to me by Shyam Benegal, and then film direction, a purely accidental visa to another realm altogether stamped for me by the selfless support of cinematographer Santosh Sivan, and actors Jaya Bachchan and Karisma Kapoor. They were of the opinion that if had a story to tell, a cinematic framework, I should go ahead and do it.
The scripts for the Shyam Benegal-directed triptych Mammo, Sardari Begum and Zubeida were extremely personal, drawn from the lives of my maternal family. Mammo was a grand aunt who was living in Pakistan but longed to return to India as she considered it her home. Sardari Begum was her younger sister, who rebelled against family orthodoxy to become a flamboyant thumri singer of the 1930s ultimately to lead a lonely exitence and meet with a tragic end. Zubeida was the story of my mother whose second marriage to a Rajasthan Maharaja precipitated scandal and her death, at the age of 19, in an air crash.
The scripts drew on anecdotes, investigation and real-life events. Without having the base of close-to-the-bone reality none of the three stories would have been possible. Ornamentation of the real stories is what I tried to avoid. In fact downplaying the inherent melodrama in the stories is what I aimed for, successfully or unsuccessfully is not me to say or even guess remotely. All I can say is that the task of re-telling the real stories of three Muslim women, of some substance and nostalgia, was a therapy, a means of coming to terms with the women I’d known to a degree, always searching for the missing pieces in the puzzle of their stories.
To come to Fiza. I directed the film simply because filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma for whom the script was researched and written for, suggested far too many alterations. The catalyst for Fiza were the restless and eternally watchful lives of several families in Mohammed Ali Road. Sons, brothers and husbands had vanished after the ’93 communal riots in Mumbai. Were they dead, alive or…? The immediate reaction of the film industry and a section of journalist was: how can he dare to make a film when he’s been critiquing them?
The reaction didn’t affect me to the extent of giving up what I’d ventured out to do, because I saw filmmaking as an extension of journalism. If I was straying into another medium of reportage, comment and story-telling, there were no written codes or laws to prevent me from taking the step. Perhaps the sudden popularity of Hrithik Roshan who has been cast as the missing brother, before he became hugely popular with the release of his debut film Kaho Na Pyaar Hai, evoked inordinate curiosity. But it did help me considerably in getting the sub-text of the film across to a large audience. The sub-text was simply this - the ruination of human lives caused by political self-servers.
A sequence showing the Muslim girl, Fiza, dancing up a storm to the lyric ‘Main nachoo bin paayal…’ elicited a horde of negative reactions. This was a compromise, an item number, how could a Muslim girl do this? That was exactly why the sequence had been in the original script, it wasn’t an afterthought tagged on because of commercial compulsions. A sequence in Sarhadi’s Bazaar had shown Muslim men and women dancing and drinking at a party. I wanted to echo that - a Muslim girl need not be closeted, shrivelling lilly. She could enter a disco and dance up a storm. In real life they do, but on cinema this was believed to be taboo.
Next, I directed Tehzeeb, a look at a troubled mother-daughter relationship, inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, a work of tremendous literary quality in the writing. The sub-text here was to depict a Muslim family like any other, unencumbered by shararas, burqas or serving sheer-korma on Id festivities. The point was missed, the film was marketed haphazardly and received lukewarmly, to put it mildly. Too heavy some felt, too slow others said. The only silver lining is that women audiences seemed to relate to it.
If there are two questions that I feel wary about, they are, “Why do you always make films about women?”, “And why are they all about Muslims?”
What can one say but to emphasise that one narrates stories one feels strongly about and concerned with? I have just completed filming a third film titled Silsilay which is about women again, and one of the three women portrayed, is the character of a Muslim housewife.
I may be absolutely wrong, I may be partially right. But cinema, like other art forms, has firmer roots when it draws from the real and the experiential.
While searching for the identity of the Muslim woman, I hope to find my own identity, if not today, then some day soon.
Khalid Mohamed
In arrangement with seminar on ‘Pluralism and Democracy in Bollywood’ organised by Teesta Setalvad