Page 290 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

and more ostentatious. The heroine may prefer miniskirts to traditional Indian
clothes but, when challenged to sing at college, chooses a bhajan (devotional
song), and wears a sari once married (Kuch kuch hota hai, 1998). The gods may
intervene in the ¤lm, whether indirectly as the crystal images of Ganesh in Dil
to pagal hai or more directly as in Hum aapke hain kaun . . . ! when Krishna
directs the shades-wearing, Coke-drinking dog to carry a message between the
lovers.
Muslims appear rarely in these ¤lms: Hum aapke hain kaun . . . ! has a Mus-
lim couple, a doctor and his wife, who visit the family, whose main function
seems to be reciting poetry, a performative version of Muslimness. There are no
characters who are only distinguished from the Hindu norm by their names. 16
Only gangster movies show the communities working side by side in their aim
to depict the underworld/ma¤a realistically (Satya, 1998). Christians are usually
drinkers and small-time racketeers, although several ¤lms have shown Chris-
tian heroines romancing Hindus with no comment on this as an issue (Mohab-
batein, 2000; this was most famously seen in Raj Kapoor’s seminal Bobby, 1973).
Sikhs are the closest a minority community comes to being nonperformative,
but they may also be ¤gures of fun (as in Kuch kuch hota hai), although they
are also shown as representing the Indian military, as in Border (1997), which
depicts their martial prowess.
Yet it would be stretching a point to argue that these manifestations of re-
ligiosity and Hindu signs and symbols are symptomatic of the growing presence
of Hindutva in Hindi cinema. Another category of ¤lms has, however, been
more closely identi¤ed with such ideology, namely, those that can be described
loosely as nationalist, patriotic, or historical, and those that are overtly hostile
to Pakistan. Terrorism and security have featured more frequently in ¤lms of
late, representing the insecurity of the Indian state after the assassinations of
two prime ministers (Indira Gandhi in 1984 and Rajiv Gandhi in 1991), and
the long-running separatist campaign in Kashmir and con®ict with Pakistan.
Despite the problems the Punjab faced in the 1980s over issues of separatism,
this seems to have largely bypassed the Hindi cinema, despite its predominantly
Punjabi personnel. 17
Hostilities between India and Pakistan have been central to their histories
but only very recently have Hindi ¤lms mentioned Pakistan by name or shown
agents of that state, such as in Sarfarosh (The Willing Martyr; John Matthews
Matthan, 1998). One of the few war ¤lms made since Independence, Border
(J. P. Dutta, 1997) is set during the 1965 war with Pakistan but shows the Indian
army’s respect for Islam in the daring rescue of a Quran from a burning house. 18
Such ¤lms may show Muslims in a negative light not because of their cul-
ture but because they are Pakistani. Indian Muslims are shown positively, as in
Ghulam (1998), where a Muslim police of¤cer complains that he is tired of
proving his Indianness to the star, Aamir Khan, a Muslim, who plays a Hindu
police of¤cer. Gadar (Turmoil, 2001), which is a Panjabi ¤lm in all but language,
has a dramatic scene where the Sikh hero goes to Pakistan after Partition to try
to persuade his in-laws to allow his Muslim wife to return to India. Surrounded

The Saffron Screen? 279