Bollywood’s long-running character stereotypes
Article based on an IIM Professor’s study
Professor Dheeraj Sharma (and his research team) of IIM Ahmedabad randomly selected 50 popular films from each decade spanning the 1960s through the 2010s (roughly 300 films total) and found the following pattern. He published his findings in 2015 and has since been discussing these false stereotypes in articles, books, and interviews to date.
Inside Bollywood’s moral architecture
For decades, the mainstream Hindi cinema operated with a clear and consistent representational pattern.
The hero audiences were invited to root for was overwhelmingly coded as Hindu, even when the actor portraying the role was not.
The world around him, however, was frequently shaped by a different set of assumptions.
58% of corrupt politicians carried Brahmin surnames.
62% of corrupt/ greedy businessmen often carried Vaishya surnames.
74% of Sikh characters were reduced to laughable/ comic characters with remarkable regularity.
78% of promiscuous or morally loose women were disproportionately given Christian names.
84% of Muslim characters were shown as devout, honourable, or principled, even when they were criminals.
This was not an occasional tendency. It was a durable feature of commercial Hindi film for much of the post-Independence period.
The precise percentages can be debated. The sample size is limited relative to the total output of the industry. Coding decisions always involve judgment. What cannot be seriously disputed is the directionality. The same images appear repeatedly in audience memory, in critical commentary, and in the lived experience of watching Hindi films over decades. The pattern is real.
This pattern becomes more striking when set against the composition of the people who wrote the films.
The default on-screen hero remained Hindu-coded even when the biggest stars themselves were not.
Dilip Kumar, Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, and Aamir Khan spent the greater part of their careers playing characters named Raj, Vijay, Rahul, or Aditya.
Explicitly Muslim protagonists were the exception, usually reserved for niche ‘Muslim social’ films or issue dramas. The mass audience’s primary identification figure stayed majority-coded.
Dialogue writing and lyrics in Hindi cinema drew heavily for decades on the Urdu literary tradition.
The writers who supplied the language, the moral framing, and the secondary characterisation were Muslims.
Sahir Ludhianvi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Kaifi Azmi, Javed Akhtar, Salim Khan, Kader Khan, Rahi Masoom Raza and many others occupied central positions in the creative process.
Post-Partition migration concentrated significant Muslim literary and artistic talent in Bombay. The progressive cultural networks of the time, including the IPTA tradition and Nehruvian secularism, further shaped the sensibility of the writing rooms.
The result was a structural mismatch: a Hindu-majority audience identified with a Hindu-coded hero, while a disproportionate share of the people defining the tone, the villains, the comic figures, and the ethical commentary came from a minority community with a different cultural formation and political orientation.
This mismatch did not require a conspiracy. It emerged from ordinary incentives.
In a Hindu-majority market, it was commercially safer to keep the protagonist broadly acceptable to the majority while allowing sharper treatment of internal majority subgroups.
Stereotyping Brahmins as corrupt politicians or Sikhs as comic sidekicks carried lower risk of organised backlash than consistently negative portrayals of Muslims.
Progressive self-image among sections of the creative class made critique of Hindu orthodoxy and caste hierarchy feel legitimate, even virtuous.
Formulaic storytelling then locked the images in place.
Once established, they were cheaper to repeat than to invent against.
The outcome was a cinema that could simultaneously flatter the majority audience with a Hindu hero and quietly distance itself from the majority’s internal hierarchies and religious practice.
The hero remained “one of us” for the majority film-goers.
The corrupt, the ridiculous, and the morally compromised were often drawn from specific slices of the same majority, while minority characters were frequently granted a moral seriousness that majority orthodoxy was denied.
This is not the same as balanced representation. It is an asymmetric distribution of dignity and ridicule.
The pattern was never total. Commercial cinema is messy.
Yet the durability of the skew across decades, the concentration of certain personifications, and the demographic imbalance between who appeared as the hero and who wrote the words he spoke form a coherent picture.
In a Hindu-majority country, the industry produced a body of work in which the majority supplied the identification figure while a minority-influenced creative stratum exercised disproportionate influence over the moral architecture surrounding him.
That is the directionality that matters.
In an additional sample of 20 films featuring Pakistan analysed by the same team, Pakistani characters were often shown as welcoming/ open-minded/ courteous in 18 of them, while Indian characters were frequently depicted as narrow-minded or conservative.
Pakistani governments were shown more negatively; Indian officials more neutrally/ indecisive.
Whether and how far this long-running representational pattern shaped public attitudes, self-esteem and electoral behaviour remains under-examined. Systematic work on its psychological and political effects, and on how much the pattern has shifted in the last decade, is still largely missing.
Note:
1. Text in Blue points to additional data on the topic.
2. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of PGurus.
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