Bollywood's secular image
In the past, Hindi films projected a world without communal or casteist tensions. But the recent spate of Muslim-bashing films leads V. GANGADHAR to wonder what happened to Bollywood's secular image...

"Tu Hindu banega na Mussalman banega, insaan ke aulad tu insaan banega" (You shall be neither a Hindu child nor a Muslim child but will be a human being)...

THUS sang actor Manmohan Krishna after rescuing an abandoned child in B.R. Chopra's 1960s film "Dhool ka Phool". The audience cheered, the film was a hit. In several Hindi films of that era, a Muslim hero Yusuf Khan (Dilip Kumar) sang bhakti songs in temples. The songs were composed by lyricists Shakeel Badayuni or Sahir Ludhianvi, set to music by Naushad Ali and sung by Mohamad Rafi...

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