ABSTRACT
To insert India into a global discussion of Muslims and their location in an increasingly Islamophobic world is to trouble the edges of the binary distinctions commonly made between such concepts as homeland and diaspora, native and foreigner, and insider and outsider. India holds the world's third largest population of Muslims after Indonesia and Pakistan, and Indian Muslims are the largest minority in the world. From the dawn of Indian cinema in the colonial period, through the post-Independence era of Nehruvian secular socialism, to the climate of Islamophobia so prevalent in the contemporary period of right-wing Hindu neo-liberalism, we may track the movement of Muslim identity formation in film that this chapter title gestures at: from nawab to jihadi. The Muslim Social celebrated its heyday during the post-Independence decades of the 1950s and 1960s, a period regarded as the Golden Age of Hindi cinema.
