INDIA, July 19, 2018 (The Youth): [HPI note: this is an old story, but remains relevant.] As someone who’s not an avid movie goer, Dheeraj Sharma – a professor at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad, says he watched the Salman Khan-starrer Bajrangi Bhaijaan after much persuasion. “I was surprised at the director’s treatment of the subject. The majority of Indians were projected as narrow-minded, conservative, and discriminating, whereas a majority of the Pakistanis were shown as open-minded and non-discriminating”, said Dheeraj. According to him, this prompted him to conduct a factual and data based research, upon whether this is just an exceptional misrepresentation, or is this kind of stereotyping common in Bollywood films. This was important as various researches in America and Europe regarding the effect of movies on young impressionable minds, have inferred that films significantly influence the behavior, thoughts and emotions of the viewers.
It has been factually verified that movie scripts and their on–screen presentation increase physiological arousal resulting in a tendency to copy the behaviors of characters, as observed. To put this in an Indian context, stereotyping of characters belonging to a particular religion or caste, affects the audience’s perception towards that particular religion or caste. Dheeraj says, this interested him to check for stereotyping in Bollywood’s scripts and its presentation. The results were shocking! 58% of the corrupt politicians in films were Hindu brahmins, 62% of the corrupt businessmen were from the Hindu vaishya caste. Not just Hindus, but in around 78% of films, women with loose characters happened to be Christians. While around 74% of films presented Sikh characters as laughable. However, 84% of Muslim characters were shown as strongly religious and honest (even when their character in the movie, was that of a criminal).
More at source.
https://www.theyouth.in/2018/07/19/bollywood-silently-working-against-hindus-sikhs-revealed-by-iim-professors-research/
see also:
https://indiafacts.org/bollywood-passive-aggressive-attitude-towards-hinduism/