When a young and callow Yousuf Khan met his mentor Devika Rani, the formidable chief of Bombay Talkies, she told him she had selected a new screen name for his debut—Dilip Kumar. “She went on to tell me that she foresaw a long and successful career for me in films and it made good sense to have a screen identity that would stand up by itself and have a secular appeal,” the thespian writes in his autobiography The Substance and the Shadow. That was in 1942. The country was in the throes of political upheaval and social turmoil. In the film industry, the heroes were all Hindu, the heroines almost all Muslim. Yousuf Khan would have been a standout name. For decades after that, barring Feroz Khan and Amjad Khan, the names of the male stars remained Hindu.