The Hindi film industry, known commonly as Bollywood, is arguably India’s most significant cultural export. Even within India itself, it is often considered to be the country’s “secular religion.” Then there is also the sport of cricket, which too has a “pan-Indian” appeal. Together, they serve as a sort of glue for nation-building in a country traversed by ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences.

The typical sentiments of traditional Muslims regarding Bollywood is that it serves as an assimilationist media machine, in the sense that, through its storytelling, it very frequently includes Hindu-centric themes, practices, music, and dance.

On the part of some Hindus, there is even a sense of triumphalism that is expressed. After all, Bollywood is succeeding where successive government policies have failed, i.e., in assimilating Muslims.

There is no doubt that Hindus have indeed shaped Bollywood… but what kind of Hindus, exactly?

The most influential actors and directors-producers who played a major role in shaping Bollywood belonged to the Arya Samaj, which is a reformist movement that was founded in the late 19th century by a Hindu ascetic, Dayananda Saraswati.

Arya Samajis account for around a mere 10 million in a total Hindu population of more than 1 billion, so they make up less than 1%. Nonetheless, they have been greatly over-represented in Bollywood. For instance, in the Hindi film industry, the three most important clans or families—from which there have hailed a countless number of well-known names over multiple successive generations—are the Kapoor (actors), the Deol (actors), and the Chopra-Johar (directors-producers-screenwriters).

Every one of these has an Arya Samaj background.

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Arya Samajis’ Modernist Reformism

This may seem like it could just be an innocent and interesting bit of trivia, but it isn’t. The Arya Samaji approach to reformism is particularly radical, enough in fact to alienate them from the rest of the Hindu majority. For starters, they reject all of the Hindu religious scriptures apart from the Vedas, and they are critical of what they consider to be superstitions, which includes the caste system and idolatry.

For example, we read in the FAQs section of an Arya Samaj website:

Q: What is Arya Samaj?

 

Arya Samaj is a Hindu reform movement, founded by Swami Dayanand Saraswati in 1875, in 1875. It was a movement that promoted Vedic doctrines and social change.

 

Q: What’s the main principles that are the core beliefs of Arya Samaj?

 

Arya Samaj believes in one God and that the Vedas are the only authority. Vedas and is opposed to idol worship as well as other non-vedic texts

Effectively, what this means is that essential Smriti (“written”) texts, as opposed to Shruti (“revealed”) texts, such as the Vedas (including the numerous and important Puranas or epics such as the Ramayana and the Maha-Bharata, which contains the most read Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita—all texts that made Hinduism a distinct faith), are diminished, relegated to history or even mythology, or they are outright rejected.

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Koenraad Elst, a Belgian Indologist who maintains a close relationship with Hindu nationalists, writes in a critical note from 2012:

Founded in 1875, the Ârya Samâj, in effect “Society of Vedicists”, was a trail-blazer of Hindu revivalism and anti-colonial nationalism until Independence. It worked bravely for the reconversion of Indian Muslims, the only humane solution to India’s communal problem. Some of its spokesmen gave their lives for speaking out on Islam, most notably Pandit Lekhram in 1897 and Swami Shraddahananda (co-founder of the Hindu Mahasabha) in 1926. The Arya Samaj also led the way in the abolition of caste discrimination and the acceptance of widow remarriage, both as a matter of Vedic principle and in order to free Hindu society of its weaknesses which its enemies were exploiting to their advantage.

 

Unfortunately, in its opposition to the predatory religions of Islam and Christianity, it interiorized some of their beliefs and attitudes. Foremost among these was the assumption that monotheism, the belief in a single God annex the condemnation of all worship offered to any being but Him, is the supreme form of religion. Hence, the Arya Samaj decreed that the Vedic religion had always been monotheistic, so that Islamic and Christian missionaries had nothing to teach the Vedicists about the true religion of the One God. If Hinduism now seemed like the polytheistic religion par excellence, this was partly due to post-Vedic degenerative developments and partly to textual misinterpretation of the seemingly numerous god-names in the Vedas. In reality, or so the Arya Samaj claimed, these many gods were only different faces of the One God.

Elst would appear to be somewhat disingenuous, as he applauds social reforms such as wrestling caste discrimination and allowing widows to remarry. On the other hand, he considers “Vedic monotheism” to be less legitimate simply because there “might” have been some direct influence from Christianity or Islam in this regard.

Among the many Hindu reformists who have been influenced by the Arya Samaj, we find a certain Har Bilas Sarda, a judge who is responsible for introducing the “Child Marriage Restraint Act” (1929) into Indian law, effectively outlawing the centuries-old Hindu tradition of child marriages. (I would highly recommend reading the following related Muslim Skeptic article: “The Scriptural Basis for Child Marriage in Hinduism.”)

Elst and Arya Samaji see no issues with “reforming” Hindu society when it facilitates closer alignment with liberal ideals. However, if it comes anywhere even remotely close to tawhid (pure monotheism), this would apparently be “deforming” the supposed “essence” of the Hindu faith.

Dayananda Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaj, wrote the following in chapter 11 of his most famous book, Satyarth Prakash (“Light of Truth,” 1875), wherein he deconstructs the usual defense of the Hindus who try and justify “murti-puja” (idol worship) by claiming they don’t worship the material object in and of itself but, rather, the divine attributes they are meant to represent:

If you believe Him to Omnipresent, why do you pluck flowers from the garden and offer them to the idol, make a thin paste of Sandal wood and apply this to it, burn incense, beat drums and cymbals, and blow trumpets before it? He pervades your hands why do you then stand before it with folded palms? He is in your head why should you then prostrate yourself before the image? He is in food and drinks, why should you then offer them to it? He is in water, why, should you the bathe it? God pervades all these things. What do you worship, the pervader or the pervaded? If the former, why do you then offer flowers, etc., to images made of stone or wood? If the latter, why do you then lay a false claim to the worship of God? Why don’t you say that you worship stalks and stones etc., which is the bare truth? Now tell us, whether your faith is always right or not?

These words would certainly cause a great deal of irritation to a significant majority of today’s Hindus, much unlike the Arya Samaji approach to societal issues like widows remarrying and child marriages.

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Bollywood’s Arya Samajis: Subtle Secularization

As we had mentioned earlier, the most notable families within the Hindi film industry (or Bollywood) have been associated with the Arya Samaj. With that in mind, let us take a closer look at the Chopra-Johar family in particular, since they were directors-producers-screenwriters and thus more influential in shaping the underlying ideology behind a movie than the actors (most of the Kapoor and Deol).

Within the Chopra-Johar family, the name that stands out the most perhaps is Yash Chopra (1932–2012). He is often viewed as having been the most influential Bollywood director, both for his longevity (from the late 1950s to the early 2010s) and his versatility (he directed “classics” in multiple genres—everything from romance to action-thrillers).

In her celebrated biography of Chopra, published in 2002 by the British Film Institute, Rachel Dwyer highlights in many places the importance that Arya Samaji reformism held for Chopra.

She writes towards the beginning (p.12):

The Arya Samaj, founded by Swami Dayananda, as part of its return to ‘Vedic values’, rejects caste (jati), but not social hierarchy or the dominance of high castes, arguing for the varna system, that is the division of society into four major classes: Brahmins, warriors, merchants and labourers. Its other major emphasis is on social reform, for although it criticises the Other (mainly Muslims and Christians), it admires European discipline and individualism. Although founded by a Gujarati, the Arya Samaj flourished in northwest India, where it is the dominant form of caste Hinduism. The Arya Samaj was also a proto-nationalist movement, and took an active role in stirring up anti-Muslim feeling during Partition, through its association with the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh/Association of National Volunteers) and with the move to ‘reconvert’ Muslims. However, these political associations do not resonate with many of its followers today, who regard it simply as a ‘modern’ reform version of Hinduism which emphasises a Vedic Golden Age.

This “reformist” approach is quite apparent in Yash Chopra from his very first movie, Dhool Ka Phool (“Flower of Dust”), released in 1959. The movie is all about inter-faith harmony. It features a Muslim man bringing up a Hindu child. Then, in the 1961 movie Dharmputra (“Religion’s Child”), the roles are reversed, and it is a Hindu raising a Muslim child instead.

It was steeped in the Nehruvian socialism of the day, but it was also Arya Samaji in spirit. It aimed to assimilate Muslims not through “outright Hinduism” but through Congress secularism, a far less obvious approach.

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And this is a recurring feature in the movies produced by the Chopra-Johar family, i.e., the idea that “romance” trumps social class and caste, with an explicit message of “female empowerment.”

This can be seen not only in the case of Yash Chopra but also his elder brother BR Chopra, his son Aditya Chopra, and his nephew Karan Johar. The latter two in particular are responsible for having imbued its identity into Bollywood since the 1990s, i.e., that of musical romance. In their movies, the protagonists, through romance, rebel against social conventions, either in a traditional manner, while still somehow remaining respectful of families and conservative values (Aditya Chopra); or in a more openly left-liberal way, by being openly dismissive of religion or the idea of relationships that are based on trust and faith (Karan Johar).

Yash Raj Films, headed by Yash Chopra’s son Aditya Chopra; and Dharma Productions, headed by Yash Chopra’s nephew Karan Johar, are production houses which, together, have produced or distributed the most impactful Bollywood movies of the last few decades, and, as would be expected, the young impressionable directors working under them follow their worldviews.

In this way, Bollywood’s Arya Samajis have ended up succeeding where the political Arya Samajis have failed. They reformed the modern Hindus, who are now antagonistic to all forms of tradition (caste or a certain idea of the woman) in the name of “romance,” whereas the previous Arya Samajis had mostly failed in doing so through their writings and legislative lobbying.

Arya Samaj: A Da’wah-centric Perspective

I have a feeling that many may be unable to appreciate or measure the importance of everything that has been discussed here. Imagine if, for years you believed that there is some sort of “Muslim representation” in some field, just to find out that this supposed “Muslim representation” is, in fact, that of the kafir “Qur’anists,” minoritarian and heretical.

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(Note: Just to clarify, there should of course be no “Muslim representation” to begin with in things which contain obviously haram elements (music, ikhtilat, lack of hijab, touching the opposite gender, haram relationships, zina, etc.) within them, like most movies, TV shows, and songs. This is certainly not something to be celebrated by Muslims. Such people are shamelessly committing sins publicly before the entire world, which itself is a very serious sin in Islam. They also normalize sinning and act as a social engineering tool to make Muslims less religious and more liberal.)

The Arya Samajis can be considered to be the Hindu equivalent of the Qur’anists—liberal reformists who radically review both their scriptures and society through the 19th-century European colonial experience.

The major difference is that, while Qur’anists are restricted to online forums and barely read “intellectuals,” the Arya Samajis have psy-oped the average Hindu by taking over Bollywood (or the Hindi film industry), which is arguably the most important “nation-building” industry for India. As such, they are directly shaping the religious life of hundreds of millions, subtly inoculating them with a liberal (and, at the very least, modernist) approach to caste hierarchization, class differences, gender dynamics, and even sexual ethics.

We can say that this is due to the lack of any metaphysical immunity from within Hinduism itself. After all, they have a “culturalist” view of who is Hindu, not a theological one. Therefore, accepting a group that rejects most of their authoritative scriptures and their idolatry is not something they struggle with.

As a final note, I’d like to mention something useful for those involved in da’wah specifically to Hindus: A lot of their arguments against Islam are rooted in and revolve around the old Arya Samaji tactics from a century or so ago. This means that they’re effectively assuming the position of liberal critics against Islam, not particularly that of Hindu critics.

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