In the long history of Indian cinema, few questions have proved as persistently generative, or as persistently uneasy, as those surrounding the Muslim presence on screen and the idea of Pakistan just beyond it. For decades, Hindi cinema has served as the subcontinent’s most democratic public sphere: a shared imaginary through which the nation rehearses, displaces, and occasionally repairs its divisions. Yet this same cinema has also reflected the slow hardening of identities, the gradual collapse of a composite culture once held together by language, music, and myth.
Two recent books—Mohammad Asim Siddiqui’s Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema: Poetics and Politics of Genre and Representation (Routledge, 2025) and Meenakshi Bharat’s Hindi Cinema and Pakistan: Screening the Idea and the Reality (Routledge, 2025)—arrive almost simultaneously to map this terrain from complementary directions. Siddiqui turns his gaze inward, toward the Muslim within: the citizen, the neighbour, the archetype refracted through a century of cinematic storytelling. Bharat looks outward, across the border, tracing the evolving imagination of Pakistan as idea, threat, and mirror. Between them, they chart nothing less than the emotional cartography of modern India’s most intractable division.
If Siddiqui writes from within the Urdu-inflected heart of Indian culture, Bharat approaches as a cultural cartographer, situating cinema at the junction of ideology and affect. Both reject polemic in favour of poetics; both see the screen not as propaganda but as parable. Their work, read together, reveals how deeply the moving image continues to shape—and sometimes rescue—the republic’s moral imagination.
The Poetics of the Citizen: Mohammad Asim Siddiqui’s Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema
Siddiqui’s study opens not with theory but with image: the old tonga driver in Garam Hawa (1973), turning his carriage around at the sight of a Hindu–Muslim procession, choosing faith in coexistence over despair. For Siddiqui, this small cinematic gesture encapsulates the paradox of Muslim belonging in India—a belonging at once affirmed and perpetually deferred. His book unfolds as an extended meditation on that paradox, spanning genres from the Muslim social and historical epic to the terrorist thriller and diasporic melodrama.
At its core lies an argument about genre as ideology. The “Muslim social” of the 1950s and 1960s, epitomised by Chaudhvin ka Chand and Mere Mehboob, idealised an Urdu cosmopolitanism that was as much aesthetic as political. Its courtyards and ghazals projected a nostalgia for pre-Partition civility: the grace of a world in which faith and art coexisted. But as the secular consensus frayed, that graceful idiom curdled into caricature. By the 1990s, the Muslim had migrated from lover to suspect, from tragic hero to potential terrorist. Films like Sarfarosh (1999) and Mission Kashmir (2000) turned suspicion into spectacle. The genre’s very syntax—gunshots interrupting prayer, betrayal coded in Urdu intonation—betrayed the corrosion of pluralism.
Siddiqui charts this transformation with forensic patience. His analysis of the “token Muslim” in the 1970s—the gentle Rahim Chacha or the loyal Imam Sahib—is particularly acute. These figures, he argues, were the secular conscience of an insecure majority: benign placeholders for inclusion that simultaneously confirmed the minority’s marginality. Their disappearance in the globalised cinema of the 1990s signalled a deeper loss—the erasure of the Muslim from the landscape of aspiration. The sparkling Switzerland of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge contains no mosque, no Urdu phrase, no visible minority. In that erasure, Siddiqui detects the cinematic rehearsal of the new India’s gated imagination.
Language becomes the quiet hero of his book. For Siddiqui, the decline of Urdu in mainstream cinema marks not just linguistic change but cultural amnesia. The “Hindi” of Hindi film was, for decades, a supple blend of Hindi, Urdu, and Hindustani—a language of syncretic sentiment. As that composite tongue gave way to Hinglish or Sanskritised bureaucratese, cinema lost something of its soul. “If Bollywood forgets Urdu,” he writes, “it forgets its own idiom of feeling.” The observation is not nostalgic but diagnostic: Urdu, the linguistic embodiment of coexistence, fades precisely as secular confidence wanes.
Both scholars conclude that Hindu cinema remains a crucial site for ethical reflection, where the 'cinematic Muslim' tests the nation's secular promise and the imagination of Pakistan forces India to confront its own divided self
Siddiqui’s prose moves between criticism and elegy. He is alert to cinema’s cruelty—the stereotype, the convenient villain—but also to its capacity for redemption. Even recent films, he notes, harbour countercurrents of empathy: the humane patriotism of Main Hoon Na, the quiet moral intelligence of Raazi, the cross-border tenderness of Bajrangi Bhaijaan. These, for him, represent a “cinema of small restorations,” works that refuse the binary of victim and aggressor.
What elevates Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema beyond standard film studies is its moral clarity. Siddiqui writes not from grievance but from wounded affection. His closing argument—that cinema, by staging the Muslim’s precarious belonging, continually tests the republic’s secular promise—resonates far beyond film. In an age when representation itself has become a political battleground, he offers a reminder that to look, carefully and compassionately, is itself a civic act.
Across the Border: Meenakshi Bharat’s Hindi Cinema and Pakistan
If Siddiqui’s cinema faces inward, Bharat’s faces across the line of control. Hindi Cinema and Pakistan: Screening the Idea and the Reality examines the mirror image of the Muslim question—the imagining of Pakistan as other, kin, or echo. Where Siddiqui reads identity, Bharat reads relation. Her subject is the border as metaphor: the thin screen separating self from shadow.
Bharat begins with a premise both historical and psychoanalytic: that Pakistan, in Indian cinematic consciousness, functions less as a foreign adversary than as a disavowed double. The “idea of Pakistan,” she writes, predates the state itself; it is the negative image through which Indian identity defines its contours. From the tentative reconciliations of Lahore (1949) to the anxious nationalism of Phantom (2015), she traces how Hindi cinema projects upon its neighbour the oscillating emotions of loss, guilt, and desire.
Her account of Partition films is the emotional spine of the book. Early post-Independence works such as Apna Desh and Dharmputra approached Partition with allegorical caution; later masterpieces like Garam Hawa and Tamas dared to name the wound. In these films, Bharat finds cinema’s first honest reckoning with its own origins. The act of remembrance becomes, for her, an ethical gesture: “a way of keeping the wound clean.” Each retelling, from Pinjar to Earth 1947, negotiates between trauma and transcendence, reminding viewers that the border is not merely territorial but emotional.
From here, she moves to war and terror, the twin genres that have most aggressively codified Pakistan as an enemy. In Haqeeqat (1964) and Border (1997), patriotism is still collective; the soldier fights for comradeship as much as for the flag. By Mission Kashmir and Phantom, that solidarity has curdled into suspicion. Bharat dissects this shift with careful restraint, noting how post-Kargil thrillers aestheticise violence even as they moralise it. The Pakistani villain becomes less a person than a device through which the Indian hero’s virtue is tested. Yet in films like Raazi, she sees the possibility of empathy returning: the spy who infiltrates the enemy only to fall in love with its humanity.
Perhaps Bharat’s most original chapter is “The Nation at Play,” her study of sport as substitute war. In Lagaan, Chak De! India, and Gold, the playing field becomes an arena where the ghosts of Partition are replayed through competition. Victory, she argues, offers symbolic closure but not catharsis; the match ends, but the rivalry remains. Still, she finds in these films a utopian glimmer—the suggestion that games, unlike wars, permit mutual respect. When Chak De! India’s Muslim coach restores honour through teamwork, he redefines patriotism as participation rather than exclusion.
Her sections on cross-border romance—Henna, Veer-Zaara, Bajrangi Bhaijaan—extend this vision of the border as emotional frontier. Love across nations, Bharat observes, is cinema’s recurring dream of reconciliation, though one invariably disciplined by patriarchy: the Hindu male who rescues, the Pakistani woman who is redeemed. Yet even within this hierarchy, she locates tenderness, a yearning for contact that ideology cannot extinguish.
In her later chapters, humour enters the frame. Films such as Tere Bin Laden and Filmistan transform hostility into farce, allowing laughter to do what solemnity cannot. “The border,” she writes memorably, “is most porous when it becomes the punchline.” That line encapsulates her method: to take even comedy seriously, as symptom and as cure.
Bharat’s scholarly range is formidable. She draws with equal ease on cultural theory, film historiography, and political analysis, yet her style remains lucid, never pedantic. She treats cinema as what Raymond Williams called a “structure of feeling”—an archive of moods rather than doctrines. The reader comes away not merely informed but moved, aware that behind every reel of patriotic spectacle lies an unquiet conscience.
Shared Shadows: Two Visions of the Cinematic Nation
Read consecutively, Siddiqui and Bharat appear to be writing twin volumes of the same unwritten epic. His concern is the internal minority, hers the external other; together they describe the perimeter of the Indian imagination. Both understand cinema as moral education, a medium through which the republic negotiates its fears and aspirations. Both distrust nostalgia yet cannot abandon it entirely. And both write in tones of elegy—not for a vanished past, but for a lost confidence in pluralism.
Their temperaments, however, differ. Siddiqui’s is inward and lyrical, steeped in the cadences of Urdu humanism. His critical vocabulary borrows from poetry—“sign systems,” “idiom of feeling”—and his argument unfolds like a ghazal, returning to familiar refrains of loss and endurance. Bharat, by contrast, writes with the cartographic precision of a historian: mapping genres, tracing patterns, exposing ideological sediment. Her prose is cooler, her gaze panoramic. Yet beneath that analytic calm runs the same pulse of longing—the desire to reclaim cinema as a space of empathy.
The two books also differ in the direction of their hope. Siddiqui locates redemption in language and representation: restore the integrity of the Urdu-Hindustani idiom, re-humanise the Muslim figure, and the republic might recover its moral poise. Bharat’s optimism is more pragmatic. She finds possibility in the very circuits of popular culture—the sports field, the love story, the comic skit—where ordinary emotions subvert political enmity. For her, reconciliation is not a grand gesture but a small affective habit.
What unites them is their insistence that cinema is not a mirror held up to society but a workshop where social meanings are forged. Films do not merely reflect prejudice or tolerance; they produce them. To study the Muslim image or the Pakistani imaginary, therefore, is to study how India thinks—and feels—about itself. Both scholars write in the conviction that the health of a democracy can be measured by the complexity of its fictions.
In comparing them, one might say that Siddiqui’s book reads like a lament in minor key, Bharat’s like a cartographic symphony. His strength lies in close reading, in the ability to draw large conclusions from small gestures; hers in scope, in showing how multiple genres—war, romance, comedy—conspire to create a national mood. He speaks from the interior of culture, she from its panoramic edge. Yet each illuminates what the other implies: that the Muslim question and the Pakistan question are ultimately two aspects of the same anxiety—the fear of an incomplete self.
Taken together, the books also trace the evolution of Indian film criticism itself. Where earlier scholarship often confined itself to aesthetic or auteurist analysis, these works reinsert cinema into the bloodstream of history. They remind us that the reel is inseparable from the real; that to watch a film in India is always, whether one knows it or not, to participate in a political conversation about belonging.
Both conclude, in different registers, with hope. Siddiqui finds it in the enduring grammar of empathy—the persistence of Urdu poetry in Bollywood lyrics, the quiet dignity of the Muslim citizen who refuses erasure. Bharat discovers it in the porousness of culture—the laughter shared across a border, the shared melody of film songs that travel farther than diplomats can. Between them, they suggest that even when politics closes its doors, imagination keeps the corridor open.
The Future of the Cinematic Republic
In the end, these two studies converge on a single insight: that Hindi cinema, for all its melodrama and excess, remains the last functioning parliament of Indian pluralism. On its vast screen, the republic continues to debate its meaning—sometimes crudely, sometimes beautifully. When Siddiqui writes that “every cinematic Muslim is a test of the nation’s secular promise,” and Bharat observes that “India returns to Pakistan because it cannot let it go,” both are pointing to the same phenomenon: the persistence of the other as moral mirror.
Their combined achievement is to restore dignity to popular cinema as a site of ethical reflection. In the marketplace of spectacle, they find a fragile conscience still at work. Both call, in different idioms, for a re-enchantment of criticism—for reading films not as escapism but as civic text. And both remind us that the story of Indian cinema is, at its deepest level, the story of India’s struggle to imagine coexistence.
To read these books in tandem is to encounter a double vision of the subcontinent: Siddiqui’s introspective republic of citizens and Bharat’s expansive republic of borders. Between them lies the space where art, memory, and politics meet—the flickering screen on which India continues to project, contest, and occasionally reconcile its divided self.
In that flicker, one glimpses not only the ghosts of history but the possibility—however faint—of repair.