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The Kashmiri as Muslim in Bollywood's 'New

Contemporary South Asia Vol. 18, No. 4, December 2010, 373–385

The Kashmiri as Muslim in Bollywood’s ‘New Kashmir films’ Ananya Jahanara Kabir*

School of English, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

This article examines the depiction of the Kashmiri protagonist in three popular Indian films, Roja (1992), Mission Kashmir (2000), and . . . Yahaan (2005), in order to argue for a new emphasis, cumulatively evident through these films, on the Kashmiri as Muslim in the history of Bollywood’s long engagement with the Valley of Kashmir. In analysing closely the visual, narrative, cinematic and aective aspects of this development, and in contextualising it against global and local politics of Islam, the article aims to contribute to a better understanding of how Kashmir, and Islam, while topics with separate discursive genealogies within Bollywood, have converged decisively at a certain historical juncture so as to open up new possibilities for the ideological co-optation of the Kashmir conflict, and the place of Muslims in , by the popular cinematic apparatus. Keywords: Kashmir; Islam; Bollywood

Introduction The prominent release in early 2010 of My Name is Khan, the Shahrukh Khan film that potently brings together autism, 9/11 and Indian Muslim identity, has prompted several commentators on Indian cinema to return to an old question: the portrayal of the Indian Muslim as a minority subject within Bollywood (Kesavan 2007). Earlier an operation to be delicately executed in step with the Nehruvian consensus on secularism – an emblematic film here being Amar Akbar Anthony – the relationship between cinema and Indian Muslim identity (Islam 2007; Kazmi 1994) took on an even more complicated turn after 9/11 and 26/11 (the attack on the Indian Parliament on 26 November, 2008). In the episode entitled ‘Hindi Films: Stereotyping Muslims’ of her signature television programme We the People, journalist Barkha Dutt (2010) can now add the ‘ominous terrorist’ to the list of stereotyped Muslim characters that the Indian media circulates, such as ‘the drunk nawab’ or ‘the benevolent chacha’ (uncle). If, according to the anonymous article ‘Indian Muslims’ (2010), the average Indian Muslim viewer appreciated My Name Is Khan as a film about terrorism ‘where the central character that stands out against this does it not in spite of his upbringing and religion but because of it’, this appreciation is all the stronger because of several films prior to its release that attempted to narrativise the implications of the War on Terror for India. In these films, notably New York, Aamir, and Kurbaan, the protagonists were Indian Muslims caught up in the aftermath of terror; but the filmmakers failed to

*Email: [email protected]

ISSN 0958-4935 print/ISSN 1469-364X online Ó 2010 Taylor & Francis 1 of 1 DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2010.526201 2/11/16 4:32 PM http://www.informaworld.com