A look at the Islamic elements of Bollywood

It is hard to imagine the Hindi film pantheon without its great Muslim movies. It is harder to believe that it has taken all these years for someone to come up with a scholarly look at the provenance and progression of the Muslim components — the nawabs and the tawaifs, the kotha and the kaneez, the ghazals and the qawwalis — of the cinema that came out of Bombay.

In their introduction, the authors of Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema define what they mean by Islamicate — a composite term for “the influence and impact of the forms of imagined history, social life and expressive idioms that are derived from and are associated with Islamic culture and history of Bombay cinema”. Ira Bhaskar and Richard Allen contend that these forms reached their “most distinctive and complete realisation in specific genres and sub-genres of Bombay cinema”, and classify those genres as the Muslim Historical, the Muslim Courtesan Film and the Muslim Social.