It was morning by the time I completed watching Voot’s new thriller series “Asur”, whose poster had been stuck in my head from Mumbai’s vast billboards during my early March’s visit to the city. Yet, as the morning sun lit my room and the series came to a crushing, somewhat confusing and personally uncomfortable end, the character that left me wanting for more was neither of the two male leads. It was a woman, a Muslim woman named Nusrat Sayed, to be precise.
Ridhi Dogra plays Nusrat Sayed with as much competence as her screen time allows her to. However, ever since her first appearance in the series it was not Dogra’s acting but Sayed’s character, which if not for her name would have easily passed off as Hindu, Sikh, Jain etc that compelled me to ask the question— why is she Muslim? Nowhere in the series does Sayed’s Muslim identity affect the plot. And if not for a mere thirty-seconds telephonic conversation that she has with her mother, where she uses the words “Ammi” and “Khuda Hafiz”, her religious identity could have effortlessly been left untouched by the show’s writers. Then why does the not-so-necessary-to-the-plot phone call occur? Why is the character given the Nusrat, a name so unmistakably Muslim?
If the above decision was a deliberate attempt by the writers to incorporate a Muslim character in the show, the decision felt good is how I would word it. It was heartwarming to see a Muslim woman onscreen not be stereotyped into kajal-lined eyes and jhoomar adorned foreheads, but be given an attire suited to her role. It was even more encouraging to see a Muslim character, a woman at that, portrayed as a senior officer in the Central Bureau of Investigation. Especially, with Indian Muslims forming only 2.95% of the 5,018 IAS officers and 4.02% of the 3,236 IPS officers in the country in 2002 (Shabnam Hashmi, Harsh Mander and Ram Puniyani, In Defence of Democracy, New Delhi: ANHAD, 2007), Nusrat represents a minority within a minority— Muslims in positions of power.
Recollections of a similar representation are scarce in memory, owing either to my lack of awareness of the cinema produced around the country or to the lack of the existence of Muslims in professions that provide them the resources and methods to make a positive impact on their community. Such a feeling is not new. For their essay, Facing Ghettoisation in Riot-City (Laurent Gayer and Christophe Jaffrelot, Muslims in India: Trajectories of Marginalisation, New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2012) Christophe Jaffrelot and Charlotte Thomas worked on ground to understand the marginalization and ghettoisation of Muslims in Ahmedabad, which in 2002 “became the most affected Indian city in terms of casualties of communal riots”, and had between 1950 and 1995, ranked just behind Mumbai (A. Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civil Rights: Hindus and Muslims in India, New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2002). The essay also includes personal accounts and narratives of victims of the Gujarat 2002 pogrom collected through fieldwork and interviews, and many such interviewees believed that Muslims were targeted during the pogrom due to their lack of education, backwardness, and inadequacy of community representatives in positions of power:
‘Lack of education is the big thing; we don’t have education [...] education makes the difference; now due to 2002, education is growing within the community.’ (Interview with Rizwan Kadri, 25th January, 2010)
Coming back, the only other movie with an influential Muslim character that comes to my mind is Shahid, which was not about a fictional character, the biopic of lawyer Shahid Azmi. Again, the character represented two-fold marginalization, since Muslims are severely underrepresented in the judiciary as well, with only 6.26% of the 479 High Court judges in 2002 being Muslim without a single judge from the community in the Maharashtra High Court (Shabnam Hashmi, Harsh Mander and Ram Puniyani, In Defence of Democracy, New Delhi: ANHAD, 2007), and Muslims making up only 3.9% of the Gujarat High Court Bar Association (Rajesh Joshi, Ahmedabad Advocates Directory, 2007).
They are, however, Muslim characters that have stayed with me as a member of the audience. Some recent ones that I can recall include Murad and Safeena of Gully Boy and Imran of Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. However, the movies hardly addressed the religious identities of the characters, even when the former represented the ‘poor Muslim’, an important representation since according to the Sacchar Committee Report, 31% Muslims in India were living below the poverty line in 2004-05.
The same is the case with Nusrat Sayed. Simply the fact that her Muslim identity is made known from the very start and is consolidated during her conversation with her mother says something about the intentions, presumably good, of the show’s writers. An intent that was felt heavily in the series’ last episode, when CBI officer Lolark Dubey suspects his coworker Rasool Shaikh as being involved with the serial killings that form the central plot of the series. While Dubey’s suspicion of Rasool is portrayed as originating from the latter’s secretive personality, an uncomfortable tinge of Islamophobia is unmissable, especially in 2020’s communally hostile and tensed atmosphere. Perhaps it is this uncomfortable but prevalent Islamophobia that the writers of the show wished to counter with a character like Nusrat. If so, their attempts are appreciated at a time when trailers of movies like Sooryavanshi openly declare that only a certain kind of Muslims are accepted as Indians. An empathetic and strong bureaucrat like Nusrat, who is committed and honest towards her job and says Khudahafiz without shame might not make Akshay Kumar’s cut, but is needed to say the least.
It would also be a welcome sign to see Muslim identities make an impact on the plot rather than merely being a stock addition. If not an overwhelming effect on the story, then a baby step to start with would be the addressing of their Muslimness and the marginalization associated with it. A movie which does some work in this regard is very surprisingly Pati Patni Aur Woh. I will not confess why have I watched that movie, but while watching it I felt that Aparshakti Khurana’s character Fahim Rizvi’s friendship with Kartik Aaryan’s character Abhinav Tyagi is important in times when politics is severely breaking off friendships as more and more of our childhood friends come out as closeted Sanghis and post utterly Islamophobic comments on social media. Moreover, Khurana’s Rizvi was a Muslim living in Uttar Pradesh which again is an underrepresented section of the community since according to the Sacchar Committee Report, 26% of India’s Muslims live in the state. Yet, as Bollywood’s attention increasingly shifts north with more and more movies being based in my home state (Bareilly ki Barfi, Kanpuriye), Muslims of the state rarely make it on screen.
Not only this, in a particular scene in the film, Aaryan and Khurana are summoned to the police station for destroying their rival’s property. The police officer looks at Khurana and speaks to his character Rizvi, something along the lines of, ‘abhi yahi encounter kara dunga’. While releasing the duo with a warning, the officer warns Rizvi to be extra careful. Why is Rizvi and not Tyagi the recipient of the extra warning and the encounter comment? Because he is Muslim. Why was such a brutally honest scene included in a non-serious movie like Pati Patni Aur Woh? Probably for laughs. However, in a Muslim viewer like myself, it does not induce laughter but an uncomfortable sense of truth being spoken in the garb of bad humour.
Conclusively, Nusrat’s character sends another important message. The presence of Muslims in circles— social and political— is not normalized and therefore stands out like a sore thumb. While finding upper caste Hindu characters in influential positions is so commonplace in films that viewers hardly seem to notice anything out of the ordinary. Movies like Padmaavat are not questioned about their Islamophobic intentions for portraying an actual historical figure, a Muslim king, as a meat-eating barbarian. It is one thing to exaggerate an undeniably ruthless sovereign for dramatic effect but another to completely change him into a psychopath and blame his desire for power not on his position as a Sultan, which was the norm for 14th century mind you, but on his being Muslim. Especially in times of intense communal tensions that would only be worsened by pseudo, crackhead feminism that equates a bangle to a sword! Why don’t movies like Raazi, which was released five months after Padmaavat, receive the same attention when they portray a Muslim woman spy who is making such a tremendous sacrifice for her country? Why was her patriotism, given how the movie was based on a true story, not applauded when Muslims are so often questioned on their Indianness? Why are bad Muslim characters hated and good Muslim characters ignored? When would the presence of a Muslim, as people going about their lives with or without a skullcap/headscarf, be normalized in mainstream media is a question that is integrally important to ask.
Picture credits- voot.com