When the Muslim Presence Stops Explaining Itself
This article unfolds from the wager that Prof. Asim Siddiqui’s book Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema: Poetics and Politics of Genre and Representation (2025) contains, beneath its patient encyclopedic sweep, a set of conceptual provocations that the book itself states only in passing. Siddiqui’s method is descriptive, empirical, archivally wide, committed to cataloguing currents, genres, types, and exceptions across decades of Hindi cinema. Yet embedded within this encyclopedic ambition are moments of disorienting creativity, ideas introduced in a matter-of-fact tone that nevertheless gesture toward a far more radical rethinking of Muslim presence in Hindi cinema. My aim is to extract these latent insights, to elaborate and extrapolate them into a coherent conceptual argument. What appears in Siddiqui as scattered remarks – about incidental identity, playful dissolution of genres, decontextualised worlds, or presences that refuse narrative burden – can be read as a subterranean philosophy of representation. Through a close reconstruction of these implicit lines of thought, this article seeks to show that Siddiqui’s work points toward an entirely different vocabulary for imagining Muslim representation.
Logics of Representation
Siddiqui’s survey of “meaningful marginality” operates within a recognisable critical horizon: the desire to redeem tokenism by foregrounding Muslim characters who, despite occupying small narrative spaces, exert decisive ethical influence, anchor value-systems, or embody a secular ethos. Imam Sahib in Sholay, Rahim Chacha in Deewar, or Abu Mian in Mirch Masala form a catalogue of corrective figures who elevate the moral tone of their worlds. Their marginality becomes meaningful because they provide narrative ballast, ethical clarity, or spiritual depth. Siddiqui repeatedly emphasises how these figures “shape the action, movement, and values of the film,” thereby countering the superfluity of mere representational placeholders. This approach remains tied to an overarching project: a cinema where Muslim presence acquires dignity through integration into the narrative’s moral core.
Yet this remains a reformist answer to tokenism, grounded in the logic of representation itself. Muslim presence becomes meaningful precisely when the character is culturally intelligible, ethically resonant, or narratively indispensable. In this model, the minor Muslim figure’s worth derives from his capacity to stabilise communal harmony, enrich moral discourse, or stand as a repository of secular ideals. The village of Ramgarh reveres Imam Sahib; Rahim Chacha offers the rationality behind Vijay’s anger; Dr Farid personifies the intimacy of interreligious coexistence; Fakir Baba and Abu Baba supply spiritual or ethical depth. These figures overcome tokenism through a compensatory elevation: they are small presences with large moral stakes. This logic preserves the classificatory matrix through which Muslim identity becomes legible. Even when marginal, the Muslim character must bear cultural meaning, moral example, or spiritual symbolism.
The more radical, playful solution Siddiqui gestures toward elsewhere sits askance to this entire reformist orientation. Where “meaningful marginality” operates through integration and moralisation, the playful solution that I am trying to extrapolate from his book begins from a refusal of representational burden. According to him, the classificatory apparatus of “Muslim social,” “Muslim historical,” and “Muslim courtesan film” already installs a regime of legibility in which Muslim presence must register through recognisable narrative templates, aesthetic markers, or thematic clusters. Siddiqui cites Ira Bhaskar and Richard Allen’s widely used taxonomy as “very useful,” yet he positions it as insufficient precisely because it presumes that Muslim identity requires a stable narrative container. What interests him is the cinematic field that spills beyond these containers, where “Hindi films … touch Muslim philosophical and mystical subjects without necessarily being about Muslims.” This formulation signals a dissolution of the boundary between essence and milieu, a cinema where Islamicate sensibilities circulate as affective and aesthetic currents rather than as representational obligations.
The invocation of Iqbal Masud’s reading of Devdas marks the first step in this displacement. Masud perceives “Hindu and Arabic–Persian traditions of Radha–Krishna and Laila–Majnu in Devdas,” a canonical text of Hindu melodrama. In this reading, the Islamicate is neither a separate genre nor a minority fragment. It becomes a spectral inflection, a set of thematic resonances that traverse the film without resolving into identity markers. Cinema, in this expanded sense, becomes a space where love, suffering, and devotion draw from multiple cultural lineages that remain entangled rather than segregated. Siddiqui uses this insight to pry open the rigid schema of Muslim genres, showing how certain films generate Islamicate atmospheres without requiring Muslim characters or recognisably Muslim worlds.
This playful solution rejects the demand for a “stable Muslim presence” by showcasing films where Muslim characters appear within mainstream genres without delivering legible cultural pedagogy or symbolic multiculturalism. A film like Lagaan embeds Ismail within the broader national allegory of anti-colonial struggle, where his partnership with Bhuvan arises from shared vulnerability rather than from token inclusion. Similarly, Iqbal refracts the difficulties of a Muslim protagonist through the grammar of sports melodrama rather than through a programmatic minority narrative. These films exhibit what might be called dispersed Muslimness: a presence fully absorbed into the narrative’s horizon of action, desire, and conflict, without becoming a cultural specimen.
The case of Chak De India brings the logic of dispersed Muslimness into sharp relief because the film builds its central crisis on an act of communal suspicion while refusing to organise its narrative around that suspicion. Kabir Khan misses a decisive penalty stroke in an India–Pakistan match, and this single sporting failure is immediately interpreted by the media and by his neighbours as evidence of betrayal. His “identity is criminalized,” as Siddiqui notes, since “he was charged as a Muslim for collaborating with Muslims,” and the ferocity of this accusation forces him into seven years of exile. Crucially, however, the film does nothing to narrativise or work through this communal wound. Kabir’s Muslimness remains the silent precondition for his ostracisation, yet the narrative declines to treat his identity as an object of exploration, confession, defence, or explanation. Instead, the film absorbs him into the mechanics of sporting redemption, allowing his identity to remain untheorised, even opaque. This refusal to monumentalise identity provides a counter-move to tokenism. The Muslim figure escapes assimilation through moral overdetermination and escapes marginalisation through decorative inclusion; he becomes a character whose identity is neither erased nor thematised.
Siddiqui’s conceptual wager – or the implicit line of thought that I reconstruct here – lies here: a cinema that suspends the requirement that Muslim presence carry representational weight opens a field where the Islamicate operates as a wandering affect, a tonal undercurrent, a narrative intensity. By declining to stabilise Muslim identity through genres, markers, or pedagogical functions, such films stage a different kind of pluralism, one grounded in shared narrative worlds rather than in curated diversity. This mode of representation carries a radical potential since it breaks the pact between identity and legibility. Muslimness circulates freely, unanchored in pre-given forms, allowing the cinematic world to articulate coexisting sensibilities without resorting to classificatory closure.
Thus, we can detect a structural tension between two approaches in Siddiqui’s book. The corrective paradigm requires morally weighty Muslim figures whose minor roles carry maximal ethical force. The playful paradigm loosens this requirement by allowing Muslimness to drift through unexpected genres, affective registers, and narrative environments. It refuses the expectation that Muslim characters must rescue the narrative from ethical deficit or solidify its secular promise. Films like Lagaan, Iqbal, or Chak De India exemplify this shift: Muslim characters participate in narrative action without embodying a pedagogical function. Kabir Khan’s trauma remains unworked through in communal terms; Ismail’s partnership with Bhuvan arises from action rather than symbolic multiculturalism; Iqbal’s journey unfolds within sports melodrama rather than identity ethics. In this schema, Muslim presence gains freedom precisely because it ceases to serve as the conscience of the cinematic world.
Whatever Muslim
This cinematic freedom is strikingly visible in Siddiqui’s category of the “incidental Muslim,” which opens a representational field that aligns strikingly with Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “whatever being.” These characters neither conform to the older regime of visible markers (sherwani, skull cap, chaste Urdu) nor serve as the ethical correctives that populate Siddiqui’s catalogue of meaningful marginal figures. Instead, they inhabit the cinematic world as ordinary presences whose Muslimness neither disappears nor crystallises into a narrative function. Their identity is “incidental,” yet this very quality reveals a new mode of cinematic singularity: a Muslim character presented “such that it always matters,” to borrow Agamben’s re-reading of quodlibet. These characters refuse the reduction of Muslimness to properties or predicates and appear instead as singularities that carry their identity without being confined by it.
Agamben’s key insight is that the whatever being “relates to singularity not in its indifference with respect to a common property… but only in its being such as it is.” This perfectly captures the status of figures like Inspector Khan, Jaan Nisar Khan, Sultan Ali Khan, Rizwan Ahmed, or Dr Jahangir Khan. In each case, the film acknowledges the character’s Muslim identity, yet declines to convert that identity into an interpretive anchor. Rizwan Ahmed in Baazar announces his full name “without any self-consciousness,” and the film retains his Muslimness without structuring his narrative fate through it. Jahangir Khan’s presence in Dear Zindagi does the same: his name signals a Muslim lineage, but his function in the narrative arises entirely from his skill as a therapist, his wit, his charisma, his professional ethics. These characters are neither assimilated into anonymous secular universality nor curated as emblems of multicultural depth. They appear instead as Muslims “in their being such,” free from the classificatory compulsion that ordinarily governs cinematic identity.
Through this lens, Siddiqui’s incidental Muslim approximates Agamben’s singularity freed “from its having this or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or that set… reclaimed… for its being-such.” These characters neither perform Muslimness nor abandon it; they simply carry it, lightly but irrevocably. Sultan Ali Khan’s Haryanvi-inflected world foregrounds regional belonging far more strongly than religious identity. Yet the nikah ritual, the ziyarat at the tomb of Syed Sahib, and the Muslim names in the narrative surface without narrative weight or cultural exposition. These gestures preserve identity at the level of appearance without making it the ground of meaning. The films thus stage Muslimness as a mode of appearing rather than a category that demands narrative justification.
Agamben’s formulation that “whatever singularity… is lovable” illuminates precisely this form of representation. The incidental Muslim is presented in such a way that the audience’s attachment stems neither from stereotype nor from pedagogical elevation. Inspector Amjad Khan’s comic eccentricity in Qurbani or Jaan Nisar Khan’s image of domestic joy in Andhaa Kaanoon creates affection through manner, gesture, vulnerability, and force of personality rather than through emblematic identity. The viewer encounters a Muslim character who is desired, admired, or remembered “with all of its predicates, its being such as it is.” In Agamben’s language, these characters allow identity to function not as a classifying predicate but as part of a singular constellation of traits that draw love and recognition.
Crucially, this mode breaks the older representational dialectic between stereotype and token transcendence. The incidental Muslim no longer stands as the moral conscience of the village, the wise old man, or the custodian of secular harmony. Siddiqui’s earlier figures overcame tokenism through moral depth; the incidental figures sidestep tokenism by releasing identity from moral or symbolic labour. This creates a cinematic analogue of Agamben’s “intelligibility of an intelligibility,” where the character’s presence communicates a form of belonging without the weight of representation. Javed Siddiqui’s role in Uunchai or Lateef Zaidi’s in Chehre exemplify this shift: eloquence, intelligence, and decisiveness shape the viewer’s relation to the character, while Muslimness remains a fact that neither structures the plot nor demands interpretive decoding.
We see the emergence of the “whatever Muslim,” a being who belongs without being bound, who appears without becoming exemplary, and whose presence matters not because it fills a representational quota or corrects a stereotype, but because it embodies “being-such” within the cinematic world. This mode holds the promise of a new politics of representation in Hindi cinema: one that neither fetishises identity nor evacuates it, but allows Muslimness to circulate as an ordinary, lovable, fully singular presence.
Siddiqui’s reading of the “decontextualised world” of gangster films reveals a further mutation in Muslim representation, one that extends and radicalises the logic of incidental identity. In these narratives, Muslim gangsters inhabit a cinematic space stripped of political referents, real-life communal conflicts, and recognisable ideological coordinates. Their Muslimness remains legible primarily through names (Musa, Sultan, Jibran, Abdul Khan) yet the films decline to bind these names to cultural or religious predicates. The world itself is stylised, insulated from real history, operating in what Siddiqui calls “a decontextualised world of crime where there is no reference to any political ideology, political party, or government.” This evacuation of context paradoxically generates a new mode of Muslim presence: freed from both stereotype and the burden of positive pedagogy, Muslim characters appear as singularities, neither exemplary nor emblematic.
Characters like Musa Bhai in Plan or Abdul Khan in Parinda function within a stylised universe where identity cues lose their explanatory force. Musa’s regret that he could not perform kanyadan blurs the religious code entirely; Abdul Khan’s refusal to return Iqbal’s salaam foregrounds gang loyalty over communal solidarity. These gestures detach Muslimness from its usual narrative functions (victimhood, moral conscience, bearer of composite culture) and reposition it as a trait among others. Agamben writes that “singularity is freed from its having this or that property… for its being-such,” and Siddiqui’s decontextualised gangsters embody this state. Their Muslim identity neither determines their morality nor aligns them with communal narratives; it instead appears as one element in a constellation of qualities (loyalty, cruelty, wit, weakness, aspiration) that define them as singular cinematic beings.
This decontextualisation provides a solution to the impasse of Muslim representation by suspending the demand that Muslim identity signify. Earlier models oscillated between stereotype (gangster, fakir, qawwal) and corrective tokenism (moral guide, secular conscience, guardian of harmony). Even Siddiqui’s “meaningful marginality” preserved this logic by requiring Muslim figures to enrich the ethical universe of the film. The decontextualised gangster breaks that cycle. The films sidestep both burden and sympathy; Muslim characters neither redeem the narrative nor threaten it with communal meaning. In Agambenian terms, their identity is encountered as style, gesture, rhythm, rather than semiotic content.
This dynamic becomes especially vivid in Parinda through the figure of Abdul Khan, a Muslim gangster whose presence unsettles the viewer through an unexpected aesthetic register. Siddiqui emphasises that Abdul is “the most trusted man of Anna,” a violent enforcer who “cuts throats of people,” yet the film repeatedly shows him in moments of stillness, absorbed in playing the flute. This juxtaposition is central. In Hindi cinema, the flute often carries associations of refinement, classical training, or mystical interiority, and these associations are themselves historically entangled with the prominence of Muslim ustads in classical music. Parinda invokes this cultural resonance only to fracture it. Abdul does not play the flute as an emblem of cultural sophistication or as a coded indicator of an Islamicate interior life. Instead, his playing appears in odd, quiet moments that offer no narrative explanation or psychological backstory. The film refrains from linking his musical skill to a tradition, a lineage, or a stereotype.
What emerges instead is a moment of eerie singularity. The police officer’s line – “the way he plays the flute in the same way he cuts throats of people” – collapses two registers that are usually kept apart: aesthetic modulation and violent precision. Abdul’s flute becomes neither a sign of refinement nor a symbol of moral contradiction; it becomes a purely cinematic gesture, an unexpected texture that complicates the viewer’s sense of who he is without resolving him into a type. This is precisely where the scene departs from the usual representational patterns that attach Muslim identity to musical artistry. Siddiqui calls this juxtaposition “a subversion of the association of classical music with a lot of well-known Muslim artists,” but the key point is that the film does nothing to stabilise this subversion into commentary or critique. It simply lets the incongruity stand.
Abdul’s flute playing, therefore, exemplifies the “whatever” mode of Muslim presence: a trait that gestures toward cultural memory without collapsing into it, a behaviour that enriches the character without explaining him, a moment that belongs to the visual and sonic logic of the film rather than to an identity script. The conjunction of “music and crime” becomes an aesthetic quality, an unsettled, atmospheric detail, rather than a cultural message. In this way, Abdul Khan’s character contributes to the larger movement in Siddiqui’s analysis: Muslimness appears as a lightly held, untheorised presence that refuses both stereotype and symbolic weight.
Moreover, the decontextualised world creates a space where Muslimness appears without being mobilised as a marker of community politics. When Tyson’s Christian gang, Jibran’s Muslim gang, and Jindal’s Hindu identity appear in Mohra, the configuration mirrors “the power dynamics of Indian social structure” yet refrains from moralising or politicising these identities. Religion becomes a background texture, an as rather than an essence. Jibran can survive, betray, or align himself without his Muslimness offering narrative justification. This loosening of identity from function allows Muslim characters to exist outside the usual dialectic of visibility and burden.
Finally, this mode reconfigures the Muslim presence beyond the politics of recognition. The decontextualised gangster does not seek inclusion, does not serve as a stand-in for secular harmony, and does not embody the threat stereotype. The character’s name may echo real-life resonance (Yusuf Pathan, Billa Jilani) yet the film withholds sociological explanation, refusing to translate the character into a symptom of Muslim criminality or minority marginalisation. This refusal creates a representational openness: Muslim identity becomes a free-floating signifier, part of the world’s texture rather than its problem. In this sense, Siddiqui shows how decontextualisation enables a “whatever” mode of representation: Muslimness appears without obligation, without typology, without symbolic weight. It becomes part of the cinematic world’s taking-place, a presence that matters precisely because it no longer must matter in the old ways.
A Muslim Without Qualities
Siddiqui’s reading of Company provides a striking instance of what may be called a presencing without essence, a mode of Muslim representation that refuses both erasure and fixation. The marriage scene becomes the conceptual hinge of this mode. Malik performs a Hindu fire ritual to please Saroja, and Siddiqui emphasises that this gesture carries no capacity to “determine his identity.” This refusal of determination is the point. Malik’s willingness to step into a ritual associated with another community exposes identity as a wearable surface rather than a deep predicate.
This mode of appearance places Muslim identity in the realm of the incidental, the lightly held, the lived rather than the declared. The film avoids dwelling on Malik’s background, history, or religious commitments. His name circulates as a sign with dual resonance in Hindu and Muslim settings. His actions supply no interpretive anchor that would allow the viewer to classify him within a religious framework. Identity becomes something he carries rather than something he performs. In this sense, the marriage scene stages a form of identity as gesture, an embodied flexibility that avoids both assimilationist erasure and essentialist visibility.
The contrast with Chandu’s world sharpens this insight. Chandu’s marriage is saturated with visual cues and ritual indicators that affirm a Hindu domestic setting. Siddiqui highlights “religious symbolism” in Chandu’s surroundings precisely to show the asymmetry: Hindu identity is thematised, foregrounded, placed within a frame of social recognition, while Malik’s identity remains suspended, indeterminate, neither concealed nor highlighted. The result, however, is not an erasure of Muslim presence. Instead, Malik’s Muslimness enters the frame as a possibility, a horizon, an as that structures how he is read without enclosing him in a fixed type.
Chandu’s companions complete this conceptual field. Hasan wears a skull cap and immediately signals Muslim identity. Koda Singh marks Sikh presence. The small gang becomes a miniature tableau of secular plurality, yet Malik stands apart as a figure whose identity appears through relation rather than symbolism. His connection to Chandu, his participation in ritual for love rather than doctrinal fidelity, and his position within a mixed religious world all create a form of Muslim presence grounded in lived interaction rather than archetype.
This produces a new representational possibility. Instead of affirming Muslim identity through visible markers or narrative functions, the film allows Muslimness to appear as an aspect of social being that emerges through action, affection, and environment. It dramatizes a world where Muslim identity gains presence by entering shared rituals, shared life, shared risk, and shared ambition, without losing its distinctiveness or becoming a stereotype. It shows a Muslim figure who belongs through gesture rather than through explicit cultural coding, allowing representation to escape the rigid binary of hypervisibility and invisibility.
Conclusion
What emerges from this excavation of Siddiqui’s text is a para-political theory of futurity. The eccentric Muslims of Hindi cinema – Kabir Khan coaching the nation after being hounded out as a traitor, Malik stepping calmly into a Hindu fire ritual, Abdul Khan playing the flute between murders, Rizwan Ahmed circulating in corporate boardrooms without anxieties about his name – constitute, in their very implausibility, a political archive of possibility. They are absurd, yes, because the world that surrounds Indian Muslims today offers little space for such unburdened existence. Yet cinema’s absurdity becomes its strength. It conjures forms of Muslimness that social reality disallows, producing figures neither governed by the stabilising demands of secular reassurance nor trapped in the punitive gaze of majoritarian suspicion.
These cinematic Muslims expose the poverty of our political imagination. Against a public sphere where Muslim identity is constantly policed, explained, defended, or pathologised, Hindi cinema inadvertently generates Muslims who neither apologise nor signify, who neither embody minority trauma nor enact multicultural aspiration. They simply exist – irregularly, unpredictably, as beings whose presence cannot be reduced to pedagogy, grievance, or stereotype. In these figures, identity appears as gesture, accident, style, attachment, mood. Their very unseriousness becomes politically serious, for it breaks the monopoly of state and society over what counts as a “proper” Muslim life.
The “whatever Muslim” gestures toward a mode of belonging that escapes the traps of hypervisibility and invisibility. It hints at a future where Muslimness circulates without pre-scripted meaning: a future where one can be a therapist, a gangster, a lover, an athlete, a trader, a neighbour, a traitor, a saint, a nobody, or all at once, without each role collapsing back into a single communal essence. It invites us to imagine Indian Muslims as beings whose possibilities exceed the representational grids that have long trapped them in the dialectic of threat and token.
This, finally, is the political provocation of Siddiqui’s accidental philosophy: that Hindi cinema, through its most casual gestures, its throwaway details, its narrative indifference, sketches the outlines of Muslims who remain irreducible to the categories that dominate the nation’s imagination. These are Muslims without qualities, without assigned meanings, without explanatory burdens. And in a moment when the Indian Muslim is relentlessly fixed into legible roles – loyal patriot, dangerous outsider, secular friend, demographic fact – the cinematic figure who walks through fire for love, refuses to return a salaam, snorts drugs, lifts a hockey team to victory, or plays a flute between killings becomes profoundly political. These are beings who refuse to be what they are told they are.
In their unpredictability lies a lesson: that identity can be lived without weight, that belonging can occur without permission, and that Muslim life in India might yet inhabit forms that exceed both fear and representation. Here, in the strange freedom of these cinematic presences, we glimpse what Indian Muslims can become: lives unshackled from the compulsion to signify, lives allowed to be as they are, lives that stake a claim to the world simply by appearing within it.
