Realisms, Melodrama, and beyond in the Study of Indian Cinema

With Meheli Sen

From its very inception, questions of realism and melodrama—broadly understood—have informed studies of Indian cinema. With a few exceptions, critics and scholars have seen these aesthetic and analytical frameworks as hermetically sealed off—aligned to India’s Art and Popular cinemas respectively. In this seminar we will focus on the porosities and promiscuities between these categories in an exploration both epistemological and historical. An array of so-called “Art” and “Popular” films will be used as examples, including the works of Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Ajay Kar, Tapan Sinha, Manmohan Desai, and Karan Johar.

Meheli Sen is Associate Professor in the department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures, and the Cinema Studies program at Rutgers University. She has co-edited Figurations in Indian Film (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013), and her book, Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema was published in 2017 by The University of Texas Press.

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