Race, Class, and Gender at the Margins: Exploring My Name Is Khan

by Ajay Parasram

This essay anchors its analysis in the experience of marginalized Americans following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on New York City (9/11) as explored in Karan Johar’s 2010 film, My Name Is Khan (MNIK). Amidst extreme politicization over the events of 9/11 and the subsequent global war on terror, popular culture offers multiple readings of post–9/11 America from the standpoint of colored, Othered bodies caught between the crosshairs of the national security apparatus. Though Hollywood has produced a dizzying array of films taking up the issue of 9/11 and the war on terror from both critical and mainstream points of view,^[1] non-Western films that subvert, contort, or re-position the point of view away from the dominant cultural group have garnered critical acclaim (Soliman 183).

I explore the meeting points of race, class, and gender in Johar’s film, arguing that MNIK opens crucial spaces for solidarity building amongst racialized “Others” at the margins of American society. Class and race are shown to affect the degree to which the South Asian body is discursively produced as a “threat” to national interest, and also to emphasize how this nation’s interest ultimately excludes the interests of lower-class black America. While opening this important entry point for building solidarity, the film nevertheless repeats stereotypes about “good/bad” Muslims, and defines South Asian women through the trope of “real-life heroines,” whose subjectivities are subsumed by their duty/honor and whose choices are contoured and constrained by the men in their lives.

My Name Is Khan tells the life story of Rizwan Khan, a Muslim man with Asperger disorder who embarks on a mission to meet the president of the United States (Johar 2010). As a young boy growing up in India during the 1970s, Rizwan is different and no one knows why. After their mother dies, Rizwan’s younger brother Zakir brings him to the United States, where he has been living since leaving India at the age of eighteen. Zakir’s psychologist wife Hasina observes Rizwan’s behavioral patterns and quickly realizes Rizwan suffers from Asperger disorder. She then works with him to develop strategies to ease his integration into American society. While selling beauty products for his brother’s company, Rizwan meets a divorced Hindu hairstylist named Mandira and her son Sam. The two begin an awkward and charming courtship and are soon married, much to Zakir’s chagrin, who rejects Mandira on the basis that she is not a Muslim. Rizwan, Mandira, and Sam enjoy a middle-class suburban lifestyle until the Twin Towers are destroyed. Over the course of the next five to six years, they begin to feel the effects of racism and Islamaphobia in their personal and professional lives. One day, a schoolyard confrontation results in a racialized assault that ultimately kills Sam. Mandira, heartbroken, blames the surname Khan for the death of her child and tells Rizwan she is leaving him; she cannot bear the sight of him because he reminds her of Sam’s death. Rizwan tells her he will leave, as their house belongs to her. He asks when he should come back, and in a fit of rage she sarcastically tells him to return after he can tell the president that he is not a terrorist, despite his Muslim name:

Tell everyone in America, “I’m not a terrorist” . . . Can you do that? Can you? No, you can’t. Why don’t you tell the president of the United States? Mr. President, my name is Khan, and I’m not a terrorist. Then he can tell all those people that my Sam was not the terrorist son of a terrorist father. He was just a baby. My baby. When you do that, come back. (Johar 2010, translation from subtitles)

Due to his Asperger disorder, Khan takes this instruction literally and embarks upon a journey to convey his message to the president. During his quest, he encounters a variety of ethnic Others including brown-skinned Muslims, Hindus, and African Americans who experience the consequences of the war on terror within American society in different ways.

Rizwan is mistaken for a terrorist at a rally and is falsely arrested; this story makes headlines thanks to a team of journalists who seek to call attention to the effects of rising Islamaphobia and racism within the United States. Upon release, he hears about a hurricane that struck the small town of Wilhelmina, Georgia, where his friends reside. Rizwan postpones his quest in order to travel to the stormy town to help rescue and rebuilding efforts. By the time Rizwan finally meets the president to deliver his message, the entire nation knows his story. When Mandira returns to him, he has brought down an Islamic terrorist cell, helped rebuild a destroyed town, and escaped death after being stabbed by an Islamic fanatic.

Building off Edward Said’s Orientalism framework, Mounira Soliman argues that Johar’s film resists the typical Orientalist trope of Muslims in Hollywood cinema. Soliman argues that Eastern films have received more critical acclaim in the post–9/11 environment because they tend to subvert the point of view of the center to focus on the perspective of the margin (177–8). Though MNIK receives relatively little attention in her paper, she identifies the importance of reversing the orientalist gaze in the film through describing the moment Rizwan is released from jail. The police officer stares at Rizwan, indicating with two fingers to his eyes that he will still be keeping Khan under surveillance. Soliman suggests that Rizwan’s reciprocation of this gesture indicates that he will also be keeping a watchful eye on the officer (175).

In light of the recurring song “We Shall Overcome” in MNIK, Soliman’s challenge to the power imbalance between margin and center is fitting. The film’s resolution shows that Rizwan succeeds in proving the inaccuracy of the dominant gaze, though the far-reaching consequences of this reversal are left open to interpretation. The dominant gaze is one that homogenizes the Other as Muslim in this film. Several brown-skinned characters representing a variety of religious denominations appear the same under the dominant cultural gaze and are treated as if they are Muslims; by extension, all brown-skinned people are seen as terrorists. The film opens the potential for moving beyond this somewhat obvious foreground to consider the importance of building solidarity among Others. A prime example is Jitesh, the Hindu motel owner Rizwan encounters midway through the film. Vandals smash a window in a racist attack as the two brown-skinned men are discussing a room, provoking Jitesh’s fierce anti-Muslim rant as he fires shotgun shells at the attackers. Rather than channeling anger toward the mainstream American society that demonizes the Muslim body, Jitesh instead internalizes this view and is outwardly angry at Muslims for bringing about racial violence against brown people.

In The Karma of Brown Folk, Vijay Prashad argues that Asians in America are used by the dominant culture to exemplify the ideal minority group based on their economic success. By ignoring the fundamental differences underscoring how African Americans and South Asian Americans came to America under radically different classes, white supremacy encoded into the American state is blurred by the manner in which South Asians allow themselves to be portrayed as the ideal immigrants. This supports the fiction that American society is free and fair to hardworking people (Prashad 160). Inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois’s seminal 1903 text The Souls of Black Folk, in which Du Bois argues that being black is seen as a problem in the United States, Prashad asks of South Asians, “How does it feel to be a solution?” (viii). In other words, Prashad is problematizing the way in which South Asian immigrants are used to legitimize the social status quo in America. Grounding his analysis in history, Prashad urges the building of solidarity among blacks and desis, recalling that the social construction of “blackness” and the terminology “nigger” was not particular to people of African descent. Its origins are in the Greek word anigros, which means “unclean” or “impure.” Under British rule, it was commonplace for Indians to be referred to as “nigs”; they were understood to be of the same essence as the African (Prashad 158–9). Today’s situation does not differ in nature, argues Prashad. South Asians continue to eschew solidarity-building with other marginalized groups because they are the “solution” rather than the problem in terms of minorities: “Attacking blacks by paying tribute to ‘Asian intelligence’ makes one immune from charges of racism, and the model minority thesis is thus a pillar of inferential racism” (Prashad 170).

MNIK’s juxtaposition of Muslim/white relations and Muslim/black relations after 9/11 offers a benign view of what such solidarity could look like. Post–9/11 Islamaphobia, enveloping all brown-skinned people into one homogenizing dominant gaze, opens some room for mutual recognition of Otherness at the margins of American society in MNIK. When Rizwan first visits Wilhelmina, he meets “funny-haired Joel” and his Mama Jenny. He is invited into their home in a scene composed of stereotypical images and music of southern black America. Mama Jenny is an emotional, large, Aunt Jemima–esque stereotype, and the scene is scored with blues slide guitar. The overt pandering to existing stereotypes of the black Other exaggerates the marginality of the non-white Others in America for reasons that I will explore in greater depth below.

Mama Jenny and Rizwan bond over the similar experience of losing their children as a consequence of the war on terror; Mama Jenny’s son was killed as a US soldier fighting in Iraq, and Rizwan’s son was killed in an anti-Muslim beating in America. Set amidst the relative economic deprivation of Wilhelmina, Georgia, the film makes an artistic suggestion that young blacks in the community are coerced into choosing a career in the military. This is reinforced by the next scene, which shows the all-black community gathering at their church for a memorial service to honor those who died in Iraq. Rizwan narrates that the town has a population of exactly 204. The fact that a small black community of 204 dairy farmers could have enough sons and daughters killed in the Iraq war so as to necessitate a memorial service reflects the somewhat constricted choices available to poor black Americans.

Rather than harboring any contempt for Rizwan based on race or religious essentializing, Mama Jenny adds Sam’s picture to her own son’s picture in front of the congregation, layering these two martyrs of the war on terror over one another in a movingly visible performance of solidarity. Although she is a devoted Christian, there is no suggestion here that she may confuse Sam for the “terrorist son of a terrorist father.” Rizwan is invited to tell the congregation about Sam, and he does so in Hindi, English, and Arabic.

[In Hindi] Sam had one more bad habit: he only told us good news. He always hid the bad news from us. He would never tell us when my favorite team, Manchester United, lost. [In English, smiling] Never. [In Hindi] Unless we had a bet. Then he would tell me. Then I would have to give him his favorite mint chocolate ice cream. [In English] Two scoops, always. [Laughter and restrained tears] Two scoops. [In Hindi] 27 November 2007 he was killed. He was thirteen years, nine months, and four days old. Sameer was not only my son, he was my dearest friend. Actually, my only friend. [In English] My, my . . . only best friend. [In Arabic] Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim. [In Hindi] I’m sure Allah is happy that Sam is in heaven with him . . . I . . . [In English] Mama Jenny, I don’t know what to say . . . I don’t want to say anymore.

Amid the uncomfortable silence as Khan struggles in front of the congregation, funny-haired Joel breaks into a verse of “We Shall Overcome.” As he sings, “We shall overcome one day!” Rizwan slowly recognizes the song and joins in his own language: “Hum honge kamyaab, ek din!” The congregation rises, singing and dancing together in a reference to the Bollywood^[2] dance sequences that normally punctuate and accelerate plots. As the soundtrack splices the Hindi and English songs, we see Mandira’s parallel story. She is bravely walking onto the soccer field where Sam was killed, interrupting a game in silent protest with a sign picturing Sam and the text: “6 months without justice.”

The Wilhelmina memorial service is important because it mirrors a very different memorial service earlier in the film attended by Rizwan, Mandira, and Sam in their mostly white suburban town following 9/11. At the 2001 service, there was visible fear and discomfort associated with Rizwan’s ordinary Arabic prayer, “Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim,” even though he personally donated his annual zakat^[3] to the memorial fund for the victims of 9/11. Inside a Christian church in the black community of Wilhelmina, a Muslim prayer does not so much as raise an eyebrow, yet in an allegedly public, secular, and predominantly white American space, those same words elicit fear and distrust. Wilhelmina, at the margins of the American society, is a safe space for another marginalized person, even though religious stereotypes suggest fear and distrust should prevail. Ironically, it is within a church that solidarity among the Muslim and the black Others might begin in MNIK. Language is not an obstacle; rather, Hindi, English, and Arabic intermingle in the marginal space and ultimately result in an emancipatory song of great significance across language, race, class, and religion.

Although MNIK opens up space for South Asian and black solidarity in America along race lines, the film has been criticized for its complicity with the “good/bad” Muslim divide (Balraj 93–4). The concepts of orientalism and the Self/Other distinction have been widely applied in literature about representations of Muslims in Hindi-language cinema and popular cinema more generally (see Balraj 91; Chanda and Kavoori 131–145). Soliman’s adaptation of Said’s theory in her article “The (Un)Wanted American: A Visual Reading of Arab and Muslim Americans” is particularly insightful with respect to MNIK. There is no simple race solidarity associated with black/brown Americans in MNIK. One of the boys who participated in the killing of Sam was black, and a Christian ticket seller who refuses Rizwan entry to a Christian-only fundraiser for a drought in Africa is also black; neither of these characters is presented as Other. Soliman argues that certain Americans are “unwanted” by a mainstream society that nonetheless needs to address their presence in some shape or form. Looking at “wanted” or “unwanted” enables a more flexible application of Self and Other, one that is also amenable to the argument advanced by Prashad. Prashad published his book the year before 9/11, and thinking of his argument through the binary of wanted/unwanted, individuals like Rizwan and Mandira were clearly “wanted” by their suburban society in the beginning. The representation of 9/11 as a critical juncture in American society is very pronounced in Johar’s film, showing the dramatic transition of Prashad’s “solution” immigrants into the realm of Soliman’s “unwanted” Americans. In representing pre–9/11 society as a bastion of liberal warmth and opportunity, the film hearkens to Prashad’s warning that the South Asian gaze, lacking in class/race analysis, is complicit with the unfairness of American society as exhibited through the condition of Wilhelmina.

The solidarities at play are not just between poor black Americans and Muslims, however. After Rizwan is mistaken for a terrorist and arrested at a rally, two Indian Hindu student journalists investigate Rizwan’s life, putting together a compelling news story that mainstream stations refuse to air. They take their story to a Sikh reporter named Bobby Ahuja, who rejects them as well. One of the students, Raj, notices Ahuja is wearing a turban in a family picture resting on his desk, while he does not wear one in the scene:

Raj: If you don’t mind me asking, sir, was this photograph taken before 9/11?

Bobby Ahuja: Yes, why?

Raj: [Laughs while shaking his head]

Bobby Ahuja: What’s so funny?

Raj: No, it’s not funny at all, actually. They confused a Sikh for a Muslim, and you changed your entire life. And here they are not even treating a Muslim like a human being, and you can’t even change your schedule.

Ahuja ends up carrying the story and broadcasts an interview with Rizwan’s brother Zakir and sister-in-law Hasina. The message touches all the brown-skinned characters shown in the storyline, who had been enduring indignities under the racist dominant gaze. Ahuja’s interview with Zakir in particular strikes a chord with viewers:

I mean, we are told to report suspicious characters. Participate in protecting the country from extremists, and then when we do that, we’re just put into the jail, like my brother . . . The question over here is not why he wants to meet the president. The question is what’s wrong in an ordinary citizen wanting to meet the president of his country? Or is it wrong for a Muslim man to even try?

Zakir is referring specifically to the fact that Rizwan called the FBI to report a “bad” Muslim he encountered while at a mosque. It was this piece of evidence that led to his release from prison, not any acknowledgement that he should not have been imprisoned in the first place.

That Rizwan’s release was contingent on his reporting of suspicious behavior of another Muslim reinforces the good/bad Muslim distinction that is not only vital in post–9/11 popular culture, but in Indian popular culture as well. As Shahnaz Khan notes, Rizwan spends the entire film trying to show that he is in fact a “good” Muslim (135). Belinda Balraj highlights that it takes a great pilgrimage and Asperger disorder to be a “good” Muslim in MNIK (93). Balraj and Khan raise important points in the broader context of Muslim-Othering in the canon of Hindi-language cinema. Chadha and Kavoori show how Bollywood has portrayed Muslims along three main temporal periods: exoticized Other, shown as separate from the “real” India but nonetheless a part of the nation-building project (1950s–1960s), marginalized characters of little significance (1970s–1980s), and demonized terrorist-Others (1990s–2000s) (135).

Clearly, Muslims have never been absent in Hindi-language cinema, though their roles in the modern period often play up the good/bad Muslim distinction. The most recent demonized Other time period overlaps with the war on terror but precedes 9/11, speaking to the currents of Indian politics rather than American politics. In the 1990s–2000s, Muslims have been portrayed as power-hungry politicians, Pakistani aggressors, corrupt police officers, and small-time crooks (Chadha and Kavoori 140; Khan 133–5). The 1990s was a tumultuous time in South Asian politics, with India electing the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party after the Congress Party introduced sweeping and socially disrupting neoliberal economic reforms in the early 1990s. Factional conflict fueled by a resurgent sense of Hindu nationalism resulted in a 150,000-person–strong riot and the destruction of the Babri-Masjid by Hindu nationalists in 1992. They claimed the mosque was built on the birthplace of Lord Rama (Tully n.p.). This conflict in particular brought to focus the simultaneity of Hindu and Muslim histories layered over one another in India, each struggling to assert contested histories in the postcolonial period (Deshpande 264–9). In the framework of religious dynamics of South Asian politics, coupled with the Al-Qaeda attack on New York and the subsequent global war on terror, Hindi movies have been accused of being complicit, even jumping on the Islamaphobia bandwagon rather than challenging it (Balraj 92).

With this context in mind, it is important that Rizwan’s salvation from prison ultimately rests on his decrying the “bad” Muslim, rather than the American security apparatus conceding there was little to no reason to believe he was a terrorist. This reinforces, rather than challenges, racist representations of Muslims in popular culture. The “bad” Muslim that Rizwan reports to the FBI clearly fits the role of the demonized terrorist-Other that Chadha and Kavoori describe. Taken in this political context, MNIK can be read as a problematic but important deviant case of Bollywood addressing the serious issue of Islamaphobia, though admittedly, doing so in the United States, far from having to weigh in on the currents of domestic politics in India.

By way of offering a view from the marginal spaces of American society, MNIK is sharply focused on race at the margins. Like a photograph, only the background or foreground can be focused, and in this case, focusing on the margin comes at the expense of a blurry view of the center. Consequently, the representation of whiteness is one-dimensional. There are no white American characters of much depth in the film, and most are essentialized as mere placeholders for racism. Although the film can be commended for emphasizing a viewpoint of marginalized, unwanted black and Muslim Americans, it also falls short in its representation of women in the “margins of the margins” in Hindi-language cinema (Mishra, cited in Jiwa, 129).

Women, whether gori^[4] or desi, have been traditionally marginalized in Bollywood. As Fazeela Jiwa argues, South Asian female characters in Bollywood usually represent the stereotypes of vamp, heroine, or real-life heroine, the latter of which takes the form of the virtuous (Hindu) mother (129). The principal division between female characters is vamp/heroine, or “good girl” and “bad girl,” represented differently in plots that unfold in India and plots that unfold in the diaspora (Jiwa 132). Jiwa adds a fourth category to Bollywood stereotypes: the “free Western woman” characterized by her independence (132). At first reading, Mandira can be seen as a free diasporic Western woman. She is introduced as a successful hairstylist in high demand on the cusp of opening her own hair salon. She was a victim of an arranged marriage to a man who abandoned her soon after. Mandira learned to survive on her own in the diaspora:

I was twenty-two when I was divorced. I had nothing. No money. No parental support. I didn’t even have a house. I had only Sam with me . . . I walked a lot and stopped after reaching here. There was no way ahead . . . So I turned around, saw the entire city in front of me. And for a minute, I felt it was waiting for me. I decided then, [In English] No, I’m going to make this work. And I’m gonna win! [In Hindi] Hum honge kamyaab.

In this scene, as Mandira turns around to face the city of San Francisco, she pointedly switches to English to declare her intentions to realize the American dream of succeeding through hard work and determination. She must overcome the challenges of being a deserted, homeless, single Hindu mother and make a life for herself and her son. She seems to do this seamlessly in the film. Her story, pre–9/11, is one of triumph over adversity. She happily falls in love and marries Rizwan, who becomes a best friend and father to her son, Sam.

Mandira seems to fit the stereotype of the “free Western woman,” but a closer consideration shows she more closely aligns with the stereotype of the “real-life heroine” as a virtuous Hindu mother. She is shown performing puja for Sam regularly throughout the first half of the film and very much embodies the idealized male conception of the Hindu mother in Hindi-language cinema. MNIK breaks with Chadha and Kavoori’s 1990s–2000s tradition of demonizing the Muslim-Other and reclaims an aspect of post-independence nation-building cinema that seeks to show the compatibility of Hindu and Muslim. In one scene in the film, Mandira is shown performing puja for murtis in the foreground while Rizwan is in the background, prostrating to Allah. Several shots in the film show Hindu deities alongside the Muslim Quran.

After Sam is killed and Rizwan leaves at her bequest, Mandira is shown talking to her sister-in-law Hasina.

Hasina: Bhabhi, whatever you said then was said in anger. It was Sam’s grief that made you say it. We all know you love him [Rizwan] a lot. Then why don’t you—

Mandira: There is no space for love in my life right now. Love will weaken me. Hate will help me fight this battle. And I have to fight for Sam. I can’t be Khan’s wife right now. I’m just a mother whose son has been killed.

In this scene, Mandira and Hasina are talking in a kitchen as Mandira clears and washes dishes. The once happy and successful entrepreneur’s life has crumbled before her, not due to any actions of her own, but in direct relation to the two men in her life: husband and son. Her business slowly went under after 9/11 because her name was Khan. Her son was killed while engaging in a defiant anti-racist act against a gang of bullies at school who consistently hurled slurs connecting him to Islamic terrorism. Despite being presented as a free Western woman, Mandira articulates her options within the dichotomy of wife and mother roles, and she chooses the sacrificial mother, or real-life heroine, stereotype. Even with a view from the margins in a race-based reading of the film, Mandira illustrates another layer of marginalization.

Hasina’s character also may have been presented at surface level to fit the stereotype of the liberated Western woman. A university professor of psychology who specializes in identity studies, she is intelligent, well spoken, and acts against her husband Zakir’s wishes when they contradict her own. For example, though Zakir initially disowned Rizwan for marrying a Hindu, Hasina decided to attend Rizwan and Mandira’s wedding as the only person representing Rizwan’s family. Hasina is the moderating peacekeeper and diplomat—in the scene discussed above, she is in the kitchen trying to coax Mandira into reconciling with Rizwan. Hasina always selflessly puts the interests of her family ahead of her own. When she is violently attacked in the hallway of her university shortly after 9/11, her hijab is ripped from her head. The scene is shot from the point of view of the approaching attacker, and a white male hand reaches out to tear her hijab away. As she falls to the ground and inches away from her attacker, a man’s voice growls, “Get outta my country!” The next scene shows her in tears at home, retying her hijab. As Zakir approaches and tries to comfort her, he tells Hasina, “Don’t wear this now. Allah will understand. These people won’t. Never.” It is not Hasina who makes the decision to remove the hijab in this scene; it is Zakir who physically removes and tells her not to wear it.

Yet it is through her assault that the Khan family is actually reunited; in this way, Hasina too is a sacrificial character. That same evening, Mandira comes to visit Hasina, and when Zakir answers the door, the audience realizes that they have never met. It took an attack against Hasina for the crime of belonging to the wrong religion for Zakir to realize that he rejected Mandira on the same charge. He gestures her upstairs, welcoming her as “bhabhi” after she tells him Rizwan is waiting outside because he will not enter his brother’s home. Hasina and Mandira’s respective suffering reunite Zakir and Rizwan through their mutual experiences under different expressions of the male gaze. From this vantage point, it is clear that while on one level of analysis MNIK offers a view from the margin, that view is itself hegemonic in that it subsumes the agency of women into predictable tropes.

This reading has sought to illustrate the analytical tensions grounded in race, gender, and class represented in MNIK in the context of living under the dominant post–9/11 security gaze in America. As Rizwan’s relationship with the black community of Wilhelmina, Georgia demonstrates, at the margins of American society there exists the possibility for solidarity building between Christians and diasporic Muslims. It is the common experience of being unwanted that shrinks the significance of the linguistic, religious, and perhaps class-based distinctions between Rizwan and Mama Jenny. They are also united in the martyrdom of their respective children, and their bond is reinforced by Rizwan’s great sacrifice to ensure the community’s safety when even the American state would not come to their aid. It is perhaps the sociopolitical violence of 9/11 that jolts Rizwan out of what Prashad might see as the middle-class complacency associated with being the ethnic “solution” to American society in his rapid transition to unwanted Other. Yet taken in the historical context of Hindi-language cinema and Indian politics, the film remains wedded to the good/bad Muslim trope that has characterized the last two decades of Bollywood films.

As the reading of Hasina and Mandira illustrates, these two characters speak to Vijay Mishra’s observation that women in the diaspora tend to be the “margins within the margins” (Mishra 2007: 145). While a first reading of Mandira might see a “free Western woman” in control of her own life, this is violently taken away from her, and she ultimately sees the limits of her life choices as being one of mother or wife. Both Mandira and Hasina’s gendered suffering is used to advance the plot in MNIK, but otherwise the characters remain superficial. While the film opens space to imagine the construction of solidarity among Muslim and black Americans in the marginal space of Wilhelmina, it reinforces the popular cultural trend to essentialize the Islamic terrorist-Other in both Bollywood and Hollywood. Although MNIK represents a critical view from the margins of race and class, it falls short of challenging dominant patriarchal views on the role of women in Bollywood.

Works Cited

Baljraj, Belinda. “‘My Name is Khan and I’m Not a Terrorist’: Representation of Muslims in ‘My Name is Khan.’” Journal of Language and Culture 6.2 (2011): 91–95. Print.

Chadha, Kalyani and Kavoori, Anandam. “Exoticized, Marginalized, Demonized: The Muslim “Other” in Indian Cinema.” Global Bollywood. Eds. Anandam Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar. New York: New York University Press. 2008. Print.

Deshpande, Satish. “Hegemonic Spatial Strategies: The Nation-Space and Hindu Communalism in Twentieth-Century India.” Public Culture 10.2 (1998): 249–283. Print.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co. 1903. Print.

Gehlawat, Ajay. “The Gori in the Story: The Shifting Dynamics of Whiteness in the Bollywood Film.” Topia 26 (2011): 105–126. Print.

Jiwa, Fazeela. “Vamps, Heroines, Otherwise: Diasporic Women Resisting Essentialism.” Topia 26 (2011): 127–144. Print.

Khan, Shahnaz. “Recovering the past in Jodhaa Akbar: masculinities, femininities, and cultural politics in Bombay Cinema.” Feminist Review 99 (2011): 131–146. Print.

Kumar, Shanti. “Hollywood, Bollywood, Tollywood: Redefining the Global in Indian Cinema.” Global Bollywood. Eds. Anandam Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar. New York: New York University Press. 2008. Print.

Mishra, Vijay. “Towards a theoretical critique of Bombay cinema.” The Bollywood Reader. Eds. Jigna Desai and Rajinder Dudrah. New York: Open University Press. 2008. Print.

Mishra, Vijay. The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary. New York: Rutledge. 2007. Print.

My Name is Khan. Dir. Karan Johar. 2010. Dharma Productions, 2010. Film.

Prashad, Vijay. The Karma of Brown Folk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2000. Print.

Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. “The ‘Bollywoodization’ of Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena.” Global Bollywood. Eds. Anandam Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar. New York: New York University Press. 2008. Print.

Soliman, Mounira. “The (Un)Wanted American: A Visual Reading of Arab and Muslim Americans.” American Studies 32/2 (2011): 175–196. Print.

Tully, Mark. “Tearing Down the Babri Mosque.” British Broadcasting Corporation. 5 Dec 2002. Electronic.