‘One Eye for Worship and One Eye for Entertainment’: Engaging with Islam in Hyderabad’s Production Locations

Abstract

Hyderabadi cinema or Deccani cinema refers to films produced in the South Indian city of Hyderabad in the Deccani language, and the Muslim-dominated region of the city serves as its narrative centre. Combining interviews and field notes from ethnographic data, this piece reflects on the perspectives of Muslim filmmakers in Hyderabad on their everyday practices of Islam and filmmaking. In the Indian context, where language acts as an adjective for film, these Deccani films are produced in a language similar to Urdu, which is popular among various Muslim communities in South India. Too small to call an industry, this production culture developed in close proximity to the Telugu film industry, one of the leading film industries in India, which has its capital placed in the same city of Hyderabad. Based on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between December 2021 and November 2022, this article takes the reader to Sensation Insomnia, a movie theatre in Hyderabad that acts as a major production location for multiple low-budget films made after the pandemic. While travelling through production locations with Siraj Ahmed, one of the leading producers and exhibitors of Hyderabadi cinema, and conversing with some actors and crew members from Hyderabadi films, in this fieldwork piece, I try to understand how they view their Muslimness and their engagement of film production as Muslims in the context of Islamic principles and everyday acts.