In the 1977 film Amar Akbar Anthony, Rishi Kapoor played Akbar Illahabadi, a youngman with a penchant for singing. He’s an adopted son of an old Muslim tailor who had found him crying in a garden years ago and picked him up, just like his two brothers were adopted by kindly men who raise them as a Hindu and a Christian respectively – hence the title, Amar Akbar Anthony.Akbar is a happy-go-lucky, romantic kind of guy, who sings to his beloved Salma (Neetu Singh), one of the several daughters of timber merchant Taiyyab Ali, and also to Sai Baba, the early 20th century spiritual preacher who is considered the granter of boons to anyone who goes to him. He wears a netted vest, lungis and a skull cap. He peppers his sentences with Urdu words and references to Allah. He is the archetypal Muslim of Hindi cinema of the time.Forty-one years later, Rishi Kapoor is Murad Ali Mohammed in Mulk, a former lawyer whose life is turned upside down when his nephew turns into a terrorist and the entire family comes under suspicion. Murad has to now prove his patriotism not just to the police or the legal system, but also to his own friends and associates.What a distance we have travelled in these four decades. It is a cliché to say ‘New India’ as much as it is to recall the ‘Good Old Days’, and India is much too complex to reduce to popular culture references, but Hindi films do tell us something – a lot, when you think of it – about not just what India is but its current preoccupations and sensibilities. Filmmakers are members of the same society as everyone else and absorb the conversations around them. Some continue to live in their fantasy worlds but others internalise what they see and hear, and it is reflected in their work.A still from Amar Akbar Anthony.In the late 1970s, Manmohan Desai read about the story of a man who left three children in the park and went off to commit suicide. Desai wondered: what if the man changed his mind and came back to find the kids missing? He proposed this idea to his writer Prayaag Raj who took it further – what if the three kids were adopted by families from different religions? There was likely no debate on how to present those families–the templates were quite established. The minorities were often reduced to stereotypes – the drink-loving Christian, the eccentric Parsi, the jolly and brave Sardar; the Muslims were almost always portrayed as kindly, loving and god-fearing. The Rahim chacha or the best friend trope made commercial sense, since no one wanted to upset the large Muslim demographic, but it also fitted well with the idea of a diverse and secular India – Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Isai, hum sab hain bhai bhai. No one would think otherwise. Not that bigots did not exist, but they were frowned upon and certainly not in the mainstream.Hindi cinema also made ‘Muslim socials’, or Islamicate films as they have been called, populated by nawabs and sometimes tawaifs, which were set among Muslim families, who were excessively mannered in costume and language. I have often been told by Muslim friends that they do not say “Lahaul villa kuwwat” all the time.One significant exception was Garam Hawa, M.S. Sathyu’s searing account of the dilemmas faced by a Muslim family in Agra which decides to stay on in India as others around them are packing up to leave for the newly created Pakistan. Hindi mainstream (and art) cinema had not fully confronted such issues before this. But that remained an exception – the chachas and the khalas continued to proliferate.Desai followed the formula — the eldest brother is a Hindu — but also tweaked the formula a bit. Amar Akbar Anthony was notable because the Muslim boy in the film is not a caricature and had a central role, with no less than three solo songs and two group songs. His sweetheart’s father is a figure of ridicule because he has his own mistress tucked away. But Desai went further – he did not, at the end of the film, show the two boys (Akbar and Anthony) revert back to being Hindus. Nor were their own girlfriends suddenly converted into adarsh Hindu naris.Six years later, Manmohan Desai made Coolie, in which the hero was a Muslim – he was everything that the protagonist of any Hindi film was supposed to be: good looking, valorous, brave and funny. The girl he pursues, Julie D’Costa, (Rati Agnihotri) is obviously a Christian. Not even Desai could show a Muslim-Hindu relationship on screen.But that was then. Today a Muslim character on screen is a charged figure. When did all that change? When did the benign Muslim turn into the sinister, menacing Muslim? When did Muslim and terrorist began to be used in the same sentence? How did the skull cap, earlier just a prop to identify a Muslim character, become so threatening?It is difficult to pin-point the exact moment, but a more nuanced portrayal of Muslims was evident by the late 1980s and 1990s. Salim Langde par Mat Ro (1989) and Naseem (1995) touched upon the alienation of Muslims in the ghettos of Mumbai and Bombay, by Mani Ratnam, was about a Hindu-Muslim couple caught in the riots of 1992-93.Most of the villains in popular, commercial cinema were politicians out to create trouble or betray their country to its enemies – inevitably Pakistan – and Indian Muslims were seen as victims too.But a transition was taking place. Kashmiri militants, Pakistani spies and naturally, terrorists began to proliferate. Friendly and romantic Muslims revealed themselves to be planning terror conspiracies (Fanaa, Kurbaan). Occasionally there was an attempt to balance it with a Muslim cop (A Wednesday), but the die was cast. It was open season now and the niceties of the past had been discarded.In this prevailing environment, Mulk is an outlier. It insists that while a Muslim youth can be misled into becoming a terrorist, this does not reflect in any way on his community or even his family. It rubbishes the idea that a man who has lived in India for generations has to now provide a certificate of patriotism. It shows that the state is not going to be helpful in this regard, but we, as ordinary citizens, should not fall for such propaganda. It shows Muslims can be victims too.Its not as if Mulk is without its problems. It is much too melodramatic for one thing, and makes its point – for and against – too loudly and simplistically. There have been some arguments that it has relied on the bad Muslim-good Muslim idea. But this can be put down to commercial imperatives – too much subtlety does not work in Hindi cinema. Anubhav Sinha’s style is to push the point home forcefully and it seems to have worked –the film has moved audiences and there are reports of spontaneous applause at the end.The film belongs to Rishi Kapoor, who was utterly convincing as the flamboyant qawwali singer in Amar Akbar Anthony and now equally inhabits the character of a retired lawyer who sees his certitudes crumble around him.The great skill of the film is to use a common cliché – the young Muslim terrorist – to make a much larger point. In these times of blatant communalism, sometimes officially endorsed, this could have turned out to be one more case of one-sided Muslim-bashing. It hasn’t, and that is to be welcomed. Ignore the weaknesses – the larger point it makes is much needed in today’s India, which is mulk to all who live here.