A New Wave Of Muslim Filmmakers Tell Their Stories

This conversation between Khan and the woman was filmed sometime between December 2019 and March 2020 when women, mainly Muslim, led a peaceful sit-in protest at Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh in response to the passage of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act by Parliament on December 11, 2019. Four days later, police action at Jamia Millia Islamia university shook students, including Khan, now 31, an alumna of Jamia’s AJK Mass Communication Research Centre.

Her film—Land of My Dreams (2023)—was a result of the cognitive dissonance she was experiencing during this period. “I didn’t have a film in mind when I first started shooting. I was in the crowd of protesting students on December 13 and all the footage of the protest that I had seen on the news was from behind the crowd or the police. I thought there should have been a view from within the crowd as well. I took out my phone and I started documenting.” After she recorded various instances of students being lathi-charged by the police, she tried sending the videos to various media outlets. But there were no takers. “That’s when I thought of making a film by myself,” says Khan. The film reflects her ideas in its form. It has a voice-over by Khan—sharing her own experience of reconciling with her identity as a Muslim woman filmmaker—while the visuals exhaustively document the Shaheen Bagh protest and the Delhi violence of 2020. Entirely self-funded, the film bears witness to a movement that empowered Muslim women to break through the stereotypes that have historically been associated with them. In a glimpse at one of the many protest sites in Delhi, a hijabi woman protestor states: “We are told that we are oppressed by the men in our community. But we have established that if we know how to be behind a purdah, we also know how to speak up when necessary.”

Khan’s film is a difficult watch—it organically follows the trajectory of a movement led by Muslims to demand their right to citizenship, which culminated in the violent deaths and prolonged incarceration of many from the community.

In a similar vein, In a Dissent Manner (2022), by Ehraz Zaman, is a film on a footnote of recent history—the violence unleashed by UP Police on the students of Aligarh Muslim University, on the same day that the Jamia students were assaulted. Zaman—an AMU graduate, who was 20 then—has been unable to screen it at his alma mater. “I always wanted to make a film. This one became a natural response to both my interest in cinema, as well as my surroundings. I realised that if I wanted to practice filmmaking, documentary was the best format to begin. So, I picked up my camera, and figured out what to shoot on the go,” Zaman says.

The film came from the intention of correcting the imbalance in the larger perception of what transpired at AMU. “I don’t think that even people living in the vicinity of the campus knew the full extent of what had really happened. Since there was a state clampdown on the internet, a lot of information coming out of the university was suppressed. The idea was to put these unspoken stories out,” Zaman says. So far, Zaman and his team have only managed to screen the film at a few festivals and its primary viewership has been through the circulation of private links.

Yet, no hurdle—in sourcing funds or audiences—has been able to stop the steady increase in the number of young Muslim filmmakers in the country. Shahrukhkhan Chavada, 29, the director of Kayo Kayo Colour (2023), says that he simply wanted to portray the life he knows. Hailing from Vadgam, Gujarat, he had no prior training in filmmaking. “There have been two kinds of perspectives on Muslims in our cinema—one is the right-wing perspective of absolute demonisation. But the other, which is of well-meaning left-liberals, has also been stereotypical in its approach. Aksar in filmon mein ant mein Musalman mar jata hai,” he says. “I have been deeply inspired by the aesthetics of Iranian cinema. Its low-budget, realist style has encouraged me to make a film about 24 hours in the life of an ordinary working-class Muslim family.” Most of the characters in his film are non-actors; some are even his relatives. The locations of the ghetto in the film are all spaces that he and his partner have inhabited since childhood. Still, he has managed to weave a narrative that plays with the boundaries between documentary and fiction. In the process, the film lays bare not just the ordinariness of their lives, but also the social hierarchies within the community.

The film has an intriguing climax. Tension is built through the culminating sequences of the film about the news of something big happening in the country. As a spectator, one assumes that since this is a film about Muslims and is set against the backdrop of the internal migrations in cities post 2002 in Gujarat, one is about to witness a hate crime again. But the event in question turns out to be demonetisation. When asked about the climax, Chavada laughs and says: “I didn’t want to kill any of my characters or leave them with trauma. Neither did I want to shy away from the contemporary state of politics in India. To me, demonetisation seemed like the perfect event, because it did not impact just Muslims.”

Another promising film in this recent crop is Syed Arbab Ahmad’s Insides and Outsides (2023). Autoethnographic in its approach, the film strays away from conventional storytelling. The personal lives of Ahmad and his parents become deeply imbricated with the larger history of violence that haunts Muslims in India. The literature documenting this violence seamlessly flows into the personal documents and memories of the family, throwing up larger existential questions about the intersections between religion, class, caste and gender in the process. Through this web emerge the negotiations that constitute a Muslim citizen in today’s time.

Ruuposh (2021), also an autoethnographic documentary by Mohd Fehmeed and Zeeshan Amir Khan, pushes this premise further. The film points out how the existent vulnerabilities of Muslims deny them the right to reconnect with their roots—leading to an even deeper erasure of their identities. Fehmeed traces the lineages of his mother to Pakistan, where everyone except his grandfather migrated during Partition. His grandfather refused to go because he believed India was his home. Through the fond memories and unspoken pain of his mother, Fehmeed highlights the palpable fear in wanting to reconnect with his loved ones across the border. Being a resident of Jamia Nagar and a Jamia student, he fears that re-establishing associations could actually confirm the stereotypes that majoritarian forces have about Muslims.

These films have one common thread—that they are made by a new generation of Muslim filmmakers, determined to tell their stories. But can their humble endeavours counter the narrative that the multi-crore Bollywood productions and the 24-hour news channels churn out? “I’m not sure. But what I’m confident about is that it will leave an impact on whoever watches the film,” says Chavada. Khan and Zaman, too, remain uncertain but interacting with fellow filmmakers gives them hope. “We are making films in spite of the vulnerable locations and identities we come from. This, in itself, makes this moment a movement,” says Khan.

(This appeared in the print as 'The Other’s Stories')