2025-2026 Academic Catalog

Jun 27, 2025

2025-2026 Academic Catalog

SCRN 225 - Bollywood & Beyond

This course will provide an overview of a diverse range of film production and consumption practices associated with Bollywood, the mainstream Indian film industry, and examine its development since 1950. We will primarily look at popular Hindi cinema from the Bombay film industry but also at films produced by diasporic and auteurist filmmakers. Through exploration of aesthetics within historical and cultural contexts, we will engage with questions like: What is the aesthetic appeal of Hindi popular cinema? Why does Hindi popular cinema have a mass appeal in a multi lingual and multi-cultural country like India, and assumes the position of national cinema, both within the subcontinent and outside of it? How is gender deployed alongside ideologies of the nation and implicated with other ideological concerns like caste and religion as the cinema developed from post-independence (1950s) era to the liberalization (1990s) and post-liberalization periods (after 2000)? How do these ‘song and dance’ movies challenge our Hollywood-based perceptions of narrative forms? How do Indian films negotiate the polarities of tradition and modernity? What role do phenomenon like globalization, diaspora, neo-liberal economic policy, consumerism, and transnationalism play in the evolution of Hindi cinema and its genres over the decades? We will also interrogate the implications, and connotations of the transformation of Hindi popular cinema into “Bollywood.” Is this linguistic change an index of social and economic transformations, such as globalization? Is it expressive of an attempt to indicate a difference internal to the dominant idiom, a variation that is related to but distinct from the globally hegemonic Hollywood?

The course fulfils the Global Comparative Perspective.

Course Designation/Attribute: GP

Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every other year