While exclusionary forces continue to claim Muslims do not belong in India, specific Muslims are uniquely visible across diverse genres of cultural representation. Created by Muslim and non-Muslim producers, these moments of presentation reveal the unseen political and cultural terms of Muslim belonging in today’s Hindu-majority India. Shaped by the assumed preferences of middle-class Hindu audiences (Gold 2013) and neoliberal capitalism (Kunnummal 2022), these trends illustrate a necropolitics (Mbembe 2003) of Muslim cultural representation that has important implications for how ideas about religion and community are known in India today. I argue in this paper that the paradoxical hyper-visibility of acceptable Muslims shows that the Hindutva movement functions not only as a politico-religious project but also as an economic one. Today’s Hindu supremacist ideology informs and supports a consumer-driven capitalism that undermines Muslim dignity.
This paper focuses on the tension between official forms of Muslim exclusion and the selective visibility of certain types of Muslims in diverse genres of representation including commercial theatre, Hindi cinema, and Delhi-based heritage tourism. Questions this paper explores include: what kinds of Muslims are “sellable” for twenty-first century forms of cultural consumption? How are the goals and strategies of producers to make Muslims visible in genres of cultural representation shaped by the forces of twenty-first century, late-stage Indian capitalism and neoliberalism? What can data from contemporary India offer to understanding global trends in Muslim representation, and particularly the potentials in and pitfalls of efforts at Muslim inclusion (Alsultany 2022)?
Plays regularly performed in Delhi, such as M. Sayeed Alam’s Sons of Babur and Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq, respond to contemporary anxieties about Muslim belonging through their representation of Muslims from the pre-modern past. In these performances, medieval Muslim sultans and Mughal rulers return to the present to explain their actions and prove their commitments to a shared north Indian, Hindu-Muslim culture (“Ganga-Yamuna Tehzeeb”). They offer diverse reasons for their fidelity to Hindustan, and articulate that they see no contradiction between their religious identity and proto-national belonging. In these performances Muslims are signified as narrowly historical and in that depiction, are determined to be both out of time and out of place.
While Bollywood cinema is often lauded for an inclusion of Muslims as confirmation of India’s secular ethos (Sengupta 2022), the industry’s selective nature in representation excludes Muslims that might disrupt commercial interests. Post-2008 productions show how the industry’s historical preoccupation with Muslims as terrorists takes new forms as it focuses on diverse Muslim claims in response to violence in the name of religion. Muslim representation in several films, including Kurbaan (Sacrifice, dir. Rensil D’Silva, 2009), New York (dir. Kabir Khan, 2009), and My Name is Khan (dir. Karan Johar, 2010) illustrates how the necropolitical trend in performances of Muslims makes distinctions within the Muslim community. Cinematic Muslims who voice their social justice grievances tend to be punished with death, while other Muslim characters are rewarded for supporting the neoliberal agenda in the name of the post-2001 War on Terror.
The paper’s third data set focuses on heritage walks conducted in Delhi that combine a researched presentation with elements of performance. In the name of promoting literacy about the city’s overlooked past, producers such as Darwesh and Enroute Indian History lead audiences through crumbling medieval spaces and emphasize the formative histories of Muslim elites associated with the remaining monuments. At the heart of many of these presentations are renditions of the lives of formative medieval Muslim rulers such as Qutb ud-Din Aibak (d. 1210 CE) and Muhammad bin Tughlaq (d. 1351 CE). Producers involved in this trend in heritage tourism tend to construct pre-modern Muslim selves a-historically and along the terms that their twenty-first century audiences find acceptable: as enlightened and tolerant rulers with complicated relationships to “Islam.” Crucially, the necropolitics of Muslim cultural representation that characterizes these depictions ideologically excludes them from belonging to the nation’s present and future.
The typologies of desirable Muslims in cultural representation identified in this paper reveal the socio-political conditions of religious belonging not just in India, but also in other secular democratic societies during twenty and twenty-first century late-stage capitalism. More than just simply entertainment, these moments of representation shape knowledge about religion, and particularly Islam, both for Muslims and non-Muslims. Ultimately, this paper argues that representations of Muslim identity and belonging in contemporary Indian culture are deeply intertwined with economic interests, revealing the invisible yet significant terms of Muslim citizenship in contemporary Indian society.
While exclusionary forces continue to claim Muslims do not belong in India, specific Muslims are uniquely visible across diverse genres of cultural representation. This paper focuses on the tension between official forms of Muslim exclusion and the visibility of certain types of Muslims in diverse media forms including commercial theatre, Hindi cinema, and heritage tourism. Created by Muslim and non-Muslim producers, the paradoxical hyper-visibility of selective Muslims shows that the Hindutva movement functions not only as a politico-religious project but also as an economic one. Such representations support a neoliberal capitalist agenda that undermines Muslim dignity (Kunnummal 2022). Questions this paper explores include: what kinds of Muslims are “sellable” for twenty-first century forms of cultural consumption? How are the goals and strategies of producers to make Muslims visible in genres of cultural representation shaped by the forces of twenty-first century, late-stage Indian capitalism and neoliberalism?