Why Islamophobia In Popular Culture Must Not Be Mainstreamed

In the recent past, we have seen blockbuster movies that have been entertaining. We have seen films that have given powerful messages to the masses. We have watched our favorite heroes and superstars fight villains and monsters and thus give us hope for a better world. That's what cinema does. It gives you light at the end of the tunnel when life often seems meaningless. When villains win in real life, cinema makes you believe that the good guy can actually have a fighting chance in the movies.

Of course cinema can also be used for the opposite: for propaganda, that too of the most divisive sort. Cinema can also easily be used to tell tales that cause rifts and anger groups for wrongful depictions and misrepresentation. Cinema is, after all, a prism of a group of perspectives of a creative team that aims to tell a certain story in a certain way.

So when a filmmaker goes out to make terribly propaganda-esque films that justify gore and violence merely for audiences’ satiation’s sake, does that make it okay?

What happens when your favorite superstars start peddling the dangerous idea that hating on a certain group or community in a specific country is okay? What happens when a two-to-three-hour feature boils down to one racist trope: that a single group or country is responsible for all the evils in the universe? What happens when big blockbusters decide that instead of giving an empowering message of humanity, peace, tolerance, brotherhood and an acceptance of the real world, they start manufacturing consent for violence against a vulnerable community?

When a film peddles Islamophobic nonsense, when it showcases that Muslims are responsible for terrorism, it defeats the purpose of good cinema. Sometimes films try something subtle too, when it comes to Islamophobia. They use Muslim characters to apologise for the actions of a few deranged individuals. Why must a Muslim, one among billions, even justify the action of one crazed individual? This Islamophobic lens through which certain filmmakers view Muslims and Islam must be revised.

As we all know politics is a complex and layered reality. We also should know that the actions of few cannot justify racist and stereotypical depictions of a certain group. Hollywood has learned that lesson. Post 9/11 there were ridiculous movies where the villain was almost always the Muslim. That’s not to say that the harmful trope didn’t exist before 9/11 (Iron Man, Taken, True Lies all had Muslims or Arabs as villains). However it's slowly realized that these kinds of tropes harm unity. In the age of celebrating diversity, it isn’t really helping a country to almost always show a Muslim as the villain. The US is filled with millions of Muslim immigrants and tropes like these were rightly called out as lazy writing.

Bollywood, aka the Hindi film industry, is milking this trope for various reasons. India has had a right-wing government for a while now and there clearly seems to be a profitable margin in making films like Kesari, Mission Majnu, and now Dhurandhar. In many of films such as these, Pakistan is almost always at the receiving end of some kind of heroism of the Indian military hero. Indian heroes are either teaching Pakistan a lesson or using Pakistani stories to tell a version of their own events.

It wasn’t always like this though.

An illustrious era of Bollywood seems to be officially over. There was a glorious era of Bollywood where films and its music was legendary. Mughl e Azam, Pakeezah, Qurbani, Sholay, many classic films in Bollywood have had Muslim actors, writers, musicians, lyricists. But it seems as if with the advent of Hindutva, the exodus of Muslim literati in Bollywood has given way to the Hindutva mindset. Now the mainstream actors appear in films that openly peddle war and scream Pakistani cities’ names to promote their movies.

Movies that are about war often focus on the cost of war. Jojo Rabbit, Dunkirk, 1917, Saving Private Ryan, were all human stories about the losses one takes, or a toll society bears at large when people cannot resolve their issues diplomatically. However Bollywood has been drowning in a sea of jingoistic, problematic, angry films that perhaps want to appease the anti-Pakistan and Islamophobic factions in their politics and their society.

India is a country of 1.4 billion people and there are millions of Indians outside India that reside in other countries. Indian cinema is extremely influential and has a global footprint. Is it then, not extremely dangerous, for Bollywood and associated Indian cinematic or even OTT features, to show Pakistan as the bogeyman that it obviously isn’t? In films the Indian military wins wars that it hasn’t and showcases Pakistanis as kohl-wearing, half-bearded, angry men who beat their wives and have a suicide bomber career otherwise.

This simply must stop. India itself has large Muslim population. Many of whom are often vulnerable to mob violence and dispossession of residence. India must go back to its roots, why everyone loved Bollywood. We loved it for its romance, for Shah Rukh Khan dancing on the alps and where his life’s biggest issue was marrying a girl way out of his league.

Hate in this day and age has absolutely no place and cannot be fostered for our future generations either. Here’s hoping someone learns and manages to do better. Because as a Pakistani, I really miss Shah Rukh Khan dancing on the alps and frankly, fairly tired of Ranveer or Akshay or Sidharth trying to dismantle our nuclear programme at the drop of a hat.

Surely, you can tell by the number of memes Pakistanis make nowadays… whether on Dhurandhar or on Border 2… that we really just laugh at this. And it’s kind of become a sad joke.

Cinema can be more than just a sad joke. It can be a plea to humanity and a way to build bridges. The question is… what is the choice Bollywood wants to make?