Three Bollywood movies that revealed the complexity of being an Indian Muslim in 2018

Graphic by Soham Sen

In Manto, Mulk and Kedarnath, Bollywood’s Muslims learn to live dangerously.

It is Bombay 1947 and the cry is “Hindi, Hindu Hindustan, Muslims go to Pakistan”. Writer Saadat Hasan Manto, in whom Bombay lives, is wondering how he has become a stranger in his own land. Who are the people who think the film studio, Bombay Talkies, “has too many Muslims”, who force him to wear a cap when he is passing through “Muslim areas”, who make him “enough of a Muslim to be killed”?

The same people who, 70 years later, write on Murad Ali Mohammed’s wall in the film Mulk: “Go back to Pakistan. Terrorist.” Or the same people who question Mansoor’s presence, the porter in the film Kedarnath. Although he says his family has been carrying pilgrims on their backs to the Shiva temple for generations-“tirath hamari ragon main hai (pilgrimage is in our veins).”

This year, Mumbai cinema has shown us a mirror, and the void we see is where our hearts should be. In Mulk, Manto and Kedarnath, Muslims in India have been shown their place – in a corner, fearful and intimidated, feeling as an other, as never before. As Kedarnath’s Mansoor tries explaining to his mother who is terrified that he has fallen in love with Mukku, the daughter of a pandit: “Yeh kaffir hai, kamini hai, makkar hai, magar pura aasman pee jati hai, kya karoon?”

At a time when superstars are asked to go to Pakistan when they speak of intolerance, when directors have to issue public apologies for casting Pakistani actors, and when actors who use their movies as nationalistic mouthpieces are rewarded by the state in spades, these movies are important. They show us our complexity, warts and all. They also underline the possibilities and potential of art in speaking out against the atmosphere of hatred and reversing the narrative of toxicity.

As the brouhaha over Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmaavat showed, even the suggestion of a romance, one-sided and rooted in legend, between a Hindu and a Muslim, was enough to cause crazies to demand Deepika Padukone’s head, spark protests, and change the title of the film.

Have the wounds of Partition not healed, or are these fresh injuries inflicted on us by politicians looking for easy votes with their ugly rhetoric? Anubhav Sinha, the director of Mulk, believes every five or ten years, “someone comes and tells Muslims and Hindus we cannot co-exist and we buy into it. We have to break the glass wall that separates us. No one else can do it for us.” He has a controversial solution for it: Build the temple, be done with it, he says. “And then let this be the last battle between Hindus and Muslims. Then promise us, you won’t talk about any other temple.”

One of the most heartening things that happened to him after Mulk was when a Muslim gentleman came to meet him and said: “Thank you for making me feel like an Indian again.” It echoes Murad Ali Mohammed’s cry in Mulk: “Kaise karoon saabit mera pyaar mere mulk ke liye? (How do I prove my love for my nation?).” It is something that bothers SSP Danish Javed, who is neither a “bad” Muslim nor a “good” Muslim in BJP parlance, just one who loathes elements in his own community who have stigmatised it with terrorism.

Cinema is reflecting how identities are being used to divide people, and nothing is as divisive as this chasm. Nandita Das, director of Manto, says she made the film as a response to the growing violence and prejudice around this alienation, because the ultimate irony was that Manto never wore his religious identity on his sleeve. He would say: “How can I claim to be an Indian writer when I don’t even know all of India? And Pakistan, even less. I am a walking-talking Bombay.” He considered himself to be a “Bombay writer” and that’s why leaving his beloved city for Lahore broke him. He truly took Partition to heart, she points out.

Yet, it is a box into which Muslims are being put repeatedly on and offscreen, despite our complex reality and history, in a year when even monuments, streets and cities are being interrogated about their faith.

As director Abhishek Kapoor says, Kedarnath is about the idea of Shiva and his spirit of sacrifice, of seva, of drinking the poison for humanity to survive. It is religion agnostic. “Whether it is Kedarnath or Amarnath, the truth is Hindus and Muslims have lived and loved together in the great democracy that is India,” he says. “Har har Mahadev is not so much a war cry as is it the belief that Shiva resides in all of us, no matter who it might be.”

And yet, the reality is pretty close to the timid exodus of Muslim porters and shopkeepers in Kedarnath when Mukku’s extremist Hindu fiancé threatens them with violence. This is what the Muslim extremist nephew of Murad Ali Mohammed emphasises in Mulk: “Hamein ladkar apni jagah leni hai (We need to fight for our space).”

Das’s first film, Firaaq (2008), dealt with the aftermath of the Hindu-Muslim riots in 2002 in Ahmedabad, but she sees both Firaaq and Manto not “through the narrow prism of ‘Muslim’ experience but rather as stories about human experiences and relationships”.

“In Firaaq, it is more about what lingers after the overt violence ends – anger, vengeance, guilt, loss of hope – and how people deal with it, both Hindus and Muslims. Manto is first and foremost a story about the angst a writer feels when denied the freedom of expression. It is about his struggle to be himself. It was not part of any plan to address the same space but I do see a parallel between Firaaq and Manto as both broadly deal with the struggles of identity,” she says. Indeed, you hear its echo in Mulk when Arti, Ali Mohammed’s lawyer and daughter-in-law, broadens the definition of terrorism to include “atrocities against untouchables and adivasis”.

All three movies show Hindus and Muslims existing in separate silos. In a revealing dialogue in Mulk, a neighbourhood auntyji at a Muslim celebratory feast says: “Khaana nahin khaate inke yahaan. Naachne gaane ke liye theek hai. (We don’t eat with them. It’s okay to sing and dance with them though).” It recalls Sinha’s own childhood in Varanasi. He says his father had a friend, Ashraf, who would often come home to dinner, but would always be served in separate plates, until he was about 13 and protested to his parents. “It was good of my parents to agree, but the sad thing is Ashraf uncle knew of it, and accepted it.”

It is interesting that in Mulk, the one couple that has an interfaith marriage lives in London, a cosmopolitan city, which presumably does not ask them too many questions.

There was a time when we could at least escape to Manmohan Desai’s idealised onscreen democracy, where Amar, Akbar and Anthony could wear their identities proudly, if superficially, on their multicultural hearts. Cut to now, where we can watch our nastiness magnified on multiplex screens, with nowhere to hide from witnessing what we have become.

Manto had said: ”If you cannot bear my stories, it is because we live in unbearable times.” The times, they are truly unbearable.

The writer is a senior journalist and was Editor of India Today (2011-2014).