ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the way the Indian cinema and television industries present classical music and poetry from the “Indo-Muslim” world. The industry has contributed a lot to archive the Muslim contributions to North Indian (and Karnatic) classical music traditions. Its films present a memory of “Indo-Muslim” culture and civilization with its great personalities to the general public. However, its interpretations take some liberties and present the material in a distinctive way. I illustrate this with a case study of the nineteenth-century poet Ghalib’s Urdu ghazals, as represented in a movie and a television serial.