‘Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema' by Ira Bhaskar and Richard Allen “explores the Islamicate cultures that richly inform Bombay cinema. These cultures are imagined forms of the past and therefore a contested site of histories and identities. Yet they also form a culturally potent and aesthetically fertile reservoir of images and idioms through which Muslim communities are represented and represent themselves.” According to the authors, this “Islamicate” culture influences the language, poetry, music, ideas, and even the characteristic emotional responses elicited by Bollywood films in general. However, their thesis in this book is that three genre forms of “The Muslim Historical”, “The Muslim Courtesan Film” and “The Muslim Social” are prevalent amongst Bollywood films. They argue that it is through these three genres, and their critical reworking by New Wave filmmakers, that social and historical significance is attributed to Muslim culture for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The authors are both academics: Ira Bhaskar is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; Richard Allen is Professor and Chair of Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Excerpts from the book provided exclusively to Saudi Gazette take a deeper look at the portrayal of Muslims in Bollywood cinema. ‘Islamicate' cultures and idioms Following Marshall Hodgson and Mukul Kesavan, we use the term ‘Islamicate' to refer not directly to the Islamic religion per se, “but to the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims”. From its very inception Bombay cinema, via the influence of Parsi theater, has been informed by Islamic culture and the Urdu language, the Persian love stories of Laila–Majnun and Shirin– Farhad, poetic forms such as the ghazal and the masnavi, and song traditions such as nazms, ghazals and qawwalis. Islamicate idioms and their distinctive genre forms and inflections emerged during the second decade of Indian Silent cinema (in the 1920s) though little of its early manifestations survives. By the early 1920s, Muslim Historicals like Nurjehan (1923), Razia Begum (1924) and Shahjahan (1924), had begun to appear, and the pre-Sound period continued to see the emergence of others like Mumtaz Mahal (1926), Siraj-ud-Daula (1927), Shiraz (1928), Adale Jahangir (1930) and Chandbibi (1931). Orientalism While the Muslim Historical was a central vehicle for the articulation of Islamicate cultures in Bombay cinema in the Silent period, there were other film cycles that circulated a repertoire of images and stories that emerged from and helped to express these cultures. These were forms that had wide provenance, and can be seen as the entertainment cinema that formed the popular cinematic culture of the time. They include legendary romances like Laila Majnu (1922 and 1927), Shirin Farhad (1926) and Anarkali (two in 1928); Arabian Nights fantasies like Alibaba and the Forty Thieves (1927), Hatim Tai (1929) and Kamer-el-Zaman (1931); fairy tales and folk legends like Gul-e-Bakavali (1924), Bulbul-e-Paristan (1926), Gul Sanovar (1928) and Bulbul-e-Shiraz (1931) and others, drawing from a variety of sources including folk tales, Persian and Arabic legends, and masnavis popular on the Parsi stage; films evoking an imagination of the larger Muslim world like Toorkey Hoor (1924), Hoor-e-Arab and Hoor-e-Baghdad (1928), Gulshan-i-Arab (1929), Hoor-e-Missar (1931); and fantasy and adventure films with kings, princes, princesses and slaves, drawing upon a generalized Orientalist imagination of the East, like Ghulami Zanjeer (1931) and the first Sound film, Ardeshir Irani's Alam Ara (1931). All these films drew upon and evoked a generalized Orientalist imaginary familiar to film-makers and audiences alike from the Urdu Parsi theater, from performance idioms like the mushaira and dastangoi, from the Orientalist narratives and motifs of international cinema, and from the popular visual and aural culture of illustrated books, pamphlets, monographs and poems within which these stories, imagery and affective forms circulated widely. The cycles of Orientalist films described above thus disseminated a generalized Islamicate imaginary and provided a sense of a greater world beyond the everyday, charging the imagination with all the glamor and appeal of utopian landscapes that cinema can so easily embody and circulate. Muslim Historicals From the 1940s to the 60s, when there was a significant increase in the number of Muslim Historicals that were made, most of them focused on the Mughal period with Mughal Emperors such as Humayun (Humayun, 1945), Akbar (Shahenshah Akbar, 1943; Mughal-e-Azam,1960) Jahangir (Anarkali, 1953; Mughal-e-Azam, 1960; Noorjehan,1967 ) Shahjahan (Shahjahan, 1946; Taj Mahal, 1963) and even Bahadur Shah Zafar (Mirza Ghalib, 1954) as protagonists or important characters. The Mughals had built an empire, consolidated fragmented political kingdoms into a nation, presided over a cultural and artistic efflorescence, and, especially with Akbar, also provided an example of religious tolerance with the affirmation of multiple and plural religious traditions. In the immediate pre-independence decade of the 1940s, in the context of the anti-colonial struggle and the intensely fractious communal situation in the country, the affirmation of the Mughals performed a dual ideological function, both equally critical. The ‘great Mughals' – Akbar, Jahangir and Shahjahan – became a symbolic location of ethical and moral values, military and political power, and justice, as well as of a high level of cultural, social and artistic development. The celebration of these achievements asserted the ability of colonized India for self-governance. While this anti-colonial gesture was extremely significant, the Muslim Historicals were equally important in the way they affirmed the value of Muslim rule and culture against the majoritarian Hindu political mobilization of the time. After independence, this valuation of Muslim culture fed into the secular ideology of the Nehruvian polity, and became critically important, especially in the post-Partition period, to counter negative attitudes towards Muslims in the country. Pukar (1939), a pre-independence masterpiece, eloquently argues the case of a merciful Mughal system of justice even at it issues from an absolutist state. Muslim Social films The third genre explored here is the Muslim Social, which emerged in the early 1940s and which is the only one of the three genres we are discussing that was thus named by the film industry. It was in Mehboob Khan's Najma (1943), an early Muslim Social, that the genre crystallized into its canonical form, to be en- shrined later in the popular classic Chaudhvin ka Chand (1960). The Muslim Social conventionally focuses on the feudal-aristocratic Muslim household at a moment when it faces the pressures of social change on conservative cultural values that are at once challenged and preserved. It addresses the importance of women's rights especially protection against divorce, the need for empowerment and education of women, and the advocacy of professional as opposed to feudal lifestyles for men. In the post-Partition, post-independence context, the idiom of the Classic Muslim Social was dramatically out of sync with the realities of Muslim social life, and projected a certain ideal of that life to a Hindu majoritarian audience that may wish to deny those realities. In a film like Mere Mehboob (1963), even as neo- feudal values are called into question, the tehzeeb of nawabi culture is nostalgically preserved for the contemporary context. The New Wave film-makers engage with the concerns of the Muslim Social but in a manner that is shorn of nostalgia for the past. The idiom of New Wave films is a realist one, in the sense that they eschew the entertainment values of mainstream Bombay cinema and are committed to exploring the everyday realities of contempo-rary Muslim life in post-Partition India, in which Mughal India or nawabi Lucknow appear as a phantasm in relationship to the grim realities of communalism, social discrimination and urban deprivation. Yet the nobility of self and depth of culture that are manifest in the mainstream genres resonate still, not simply as part of the cultural memory against which the aspirations of the present are measured, but also in terms of the dignity and sense of purpose embedded in the lives of ordinary people even when faced with the most difficult of circumstances. Many New Wave films – for exam-ple, Garm Hawa (1973), Mammo (1994), Naseem (1995) – address the deracination and devastation wrought by the Partition upon Muslim social life, and others, like Salim Langde pe Mat Ro (1989), explore the urban milieu in which young working-class Muslim men struggle for meaning and livelihood in a socially and economically deprived environment. __
