Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema: Poetics and Politics of Genre and Representation (published by Routledge in 2025) by  Mohammad Asid Siddiqui investigates the representation of Muslim identity in Hindi films. For this inquiry into representational politics, Siddiqui focuses on commercially successful cinema, especially newer films that have “questioned but also contributed to various stereotypical notions of Muslim identity”. Spanning several decades, the book, which begins with pre-partition era historicals such as Noorjahan and ends with contemporary blockbusters like Tanhaji: The Unsung Hero, shows how Hindi cinema, its genres and its tropes have evolved in response to changes in the country’s sociopolitical landscape. Siddiqui’s inquiry into Islamic identity in Hindi cinema reaffirms cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s stance that representation is not merely repetition, but rather a process of interpretation that can thus never be politically neutral. Muslim characters in the films of the 1950s and 1960s were influenced by the Nehruvian imperative to promote interreligious unity at a time when communal tensions were at their highest in the wake of the partition. Siddiqui identifies a “trickle of Hindu nationalism” in mainstream Hindi cinema following the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in the 1990s and traces it to the present day, where Muslim characters are consistently portrayed in a negative light.

As Siddiqui acknowledges in his Preface to the book, his work has no pretensions to arrive at a “grand theory” of Hindi cinema that can explain it all, but rather it strives to delve into the specificities of select films. In the first chapter, the author explicates how generic expectations shape representational politics in cinema through biographical films and historicals that feature Muslim protagonists. However, the author fails to articulate the validity of his choice of genres for this argument in a cogent manner. The second chapter addresses the (in)visibility of Muslim characters; whether they are marginal or central to the plot and the ideological core of the film. The next three chapters examine three subgenres: films portraying communal violence, gangster films and the more recent subgenre of “terrorist films” as Siddiqui calls them. Other than their increased popularity in recent years, what these three subgenres have in common is a tendency to link characters that openly perform their “Muslimness” through regular prayers or sartorial markers of identity like beards or skull caps with negative traits like physical or sexual aggression. Siddiqui asserts that socially and politically constructed markers of culture associated with “Muslimness” become “racial signifiers”, therefore inviting the charge of Islamophobia. The final chapter draws attention to how female Muslim characters have historically been incidental rather than integral to the unity of the plot when compared to their male counterparts. The author discusses “the Muslim social” and “the courtesan film” in this respect, both being informal subgenres that centre on the lives of their female Muslim characters.

This book provides an exhaustive survey of Islamic and Islamicate representation in Hindi films. However, the arguments made by the author lack clarity at certain points. The author shares his observations about the countless films he has studied, but in the end leaves it up to the reader to decipher the argument he wishes to make from the evidence he has presented. Though each chapter references several films, the sheer number of films that have to be referenced and condensed takes up much of the space on the page, thus limiting the author’s ability to produce an original, in-depth analysis. In the final chapter of the book, the author merely summarises the different roles that female Muslim characters have commonly come to be identified with, leaving several questions unanswered. For instance, how has the rightward ideological shift in mainstream cinema affected these characters as opposed to the men?  Are there any significant differences in the representation of Muslim and non-Muslim women on screen? Similarly, other tropes and genres broached in this book and their political implications require deeper introspection beyond mere recognition and collation.

In conclusion, although this book offers early career researchers a comprehensive overview of the history of Muslim representation in commercial Hindi cinema, it suffers from a lack of direction. As it stands, a large portion of the book is spent discussing films that add little to the argument at hand. Yet when the films referred to are pertinent to the topic, the analysis is curtailed before a coherent conclusion can be reached. These limitations together result in a book that has flashes of insight that lie few and far between stretches of plot summaries.

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Keerthana Haridas is a first year Master’s student of English at Ashoka University.