Presented by the Centre for Cinema Studies and Cinema Thinks the World, the Critical Thinkers Series features research talks by notable and emerging scholars in Cinema and Media Studies. Join us for the second talk in the Spring 2026 Series by Dr. Sunera Thobani, Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at UBC.
Rethinking Muslim Presence in Popular Indian Films
Muslims were indispensable to the founding and development of the pre-Partition popular film industry (Masud, 2008; Roy, 2015 ); this was also the case in the industry’s post-liberalization transformation into Bollywood, a global cultural behemoth (Raghavendra, 2016; Mishra, 2002). Studies of this cinema have, for the main, used the concept of the ‘Islamicate’ (Hodgson, 1974) to classify the representation of Indian-Muslims into the ‘period-historical’, ‘the courtesan’, and ‘the social-reform’ genres (Bhaskar and Allen, 2021), with the post-1990s religio-national conflicts giving rise to the ‘terrorist’ film (Murty, 2009).
Critiquing the concept of the ‘Islamicate’ as well as the tendency to confine the cinematic Muslim to the genres delineated above, this paper presents a study of the representation of Islam and Indian-Muslims in a number of Bollywood box-office hits. Reading the cultural politics of these films by situating them in their particular socio-political and geographical contexts, I analyse where, when and how Islam and the figure of the Muslim are featured in their depictions of the nation, state, religion, gender, caste and class. My paper argues these films are contested sites and implicitly counter the homogenization of the figure of the Muslim by depicting the heterogeneity that exists within Islam and in the everyday lives of Indian-Muslim communities. Moreover, as I demonstrate in my paper, trenchant critiques of hegemonic nationhood emerge from the particular perspectives of the Muslim characters featured in these films.
About Sunera Thobani
Sunera Thobani is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Her scholarship focuses on critical race, postcolonial, diasporic and feminist theory and practice, colonialism, globalization, citizenship and migration, Muslim women, media and the war on terror, and South Asian women’s and sexuality studies.
This event is free and there is no need to RSVP.
