Fabricating a Spiral of Islamophobia through Kashmir Issue: A Critical Discourse Analysis on two Bollywood Films (original) (raw)

Indian films, namely Bollywood films, have an appreciative reputation for making cinemas that embrace intercultural values and racial coexistence. Nowadays, Bollywood films have noticed an aberration from its history of producing highly acclaimed films irrespective of ideology and affiliation. Many films were banned in many Muslim countries, and many were receiving widely controversial talks from internationally recognized film experts. As anational film industry, Bollywood has been trying to show the problems existing in Kashmir. The author selected two recent films, The Kashmir Files (2022) and Mudda 370 J & K (2019), based on the dimension of insensitive scenes shown in the films. Seemingly, the films were exploring what was happening in Kashmir and what had already happened there against the Hindu community. However, the narrative and visuals of the film are explicitly Islamophobic. This study intended to examine the selected films' text,dialogues, signs, and overall content. Through qualitative film analysis, the author explored how the films' contents were insensitive to a particular ethnic group and could create disharmonizing factors in society. Due to the extensive multimodality of film contents, the author used critical discourse analysis. Through rigorous analyses, the author showed how they used contents (signs and text) narrative, i.e., the storyline fabricated Islamophobic discourses. Films’ contents dehumanize Muslims, a minority group in India, as rapists, traitors, brutal bigots, and evils. The film industry should responsibly represent every communal group in the proceedings of developing the story and script of a film. If otherwise happens, the espousal of inter-religious peace and cultural pluralism gets hindered. So far, the representation of the Muslim community in Bollywood films is confined to racial majoritarianism, which is subtly backed by ideology and power.