Abstract

The portrayal of Muslim Social in Hindi films has witnessed different phases since India’s independence in 1947. In the early part of the 1990s, one specific category of Muslim Social films, a distinct genre known as terrorist films, emerged with a clear-cut distinction between good Muslims, who heroically sacrificed their lives for the nation, against bad Muslims. Death, often of a very violent nature, in those one-dimensional narratives has served as a means of punishing the unequivocal enemy of the state, the perceived “bad Muslim.” However, films, based on this genre, that were released over the following two decades promised a more nuanced representation of the Muslim Social with additional multifaceted accounts of religious identity, citizenship, discrimination, injustice, human suffering, and subjective trauma. These multi-dimensional narratives effectively enhanced the earlier simplistic, and often flawed, representation of the Muslim Social, and blurred the margins between good and bad, right and wrong. As this study broadly examines the politics of on-screen death, here the attempt is to comprehend the shift of narrative by studying films released in those three decades to reveal the nature of religious majoritarianism in Bollywood films. To achieve this objective, eight Hindi films within this genre have been selected through purposive sampling for a comprehensive content analysis.