Muslim women in bollywood Tracing the political and cultural transitions

Abstract

Cinema as a cultural text functions as the roadmap in understanding the socio-political complexities of any nation. Bollywood exists in India as a nexus of the deceptive power play operated by dominant political structures over the Muslim minority subjects. The work attempts to read the representation of Muslim women in Bollywood as evolved out of the complex historical re-appropriations, majoritarian discourses and cultural nationalism in India. The study delves into an extensive research on the evolution of the character formations and narrative constructions in the films through which the popular images of Muslim women are constituted among the Indian spectatorship. The study has incorporated the critical perspectives and theories of Stuart Hall, Harold Lasswell, Louis Althusser and others. Through the exegesis of the film texts, the study postulates that the political transitions in the 1990s and the injection of cultural nationalism and Islamophobia into cinema have resulted in the misrepresentation of Muslim women and their lived experiences. By the foregrounding of Islamic religion as an oppressive agent and patriarchy as the exclusive domain of Muslim men, Muslim female characters are projected as reductive tropes of victims, nationalists and neo-liberal feminists. The research also contends that Bollywood, by nullifying the multilayered systemic oppressions faced by Muslim women, contributes to their erasure from cultural imagination and thus aligns with the majoritarian power politics.