ABSTRACT
In keeping with the growing global dissemination of Bollywood, this final chapter explores the study of this increasingly popular cinema within a Western academic context in which it remains paradoxically underrepresented. Combining my own experiences teaching Bollywood in American universities with a wider examination of how this cinema is incorporated into liberal arts curricula in Western institutions of higher learning, this chapter seeks to understand how a liberal Western pedagogy comes to terms with a global and innately hybrid cinema such as Bollywood. In this way, this chapter serves as a fitting conclusion to this book, exploring as it does how recent changes in this cinema – themselves, more often than not, reflecting an increased Westernization and an increasing thematic presence of the Indian diaspora – are in turn received by college audiences in the West. In the process, this chapter provides responses to many of the questions posed at the outset of this book, examining what particular components of this cinema are most frequently emphasized in such university courses, as well as how such courses’ framings of Bollywood rearticulate the parameters and attendant definitions of this cinema and its implied trajectories vis-à-vis the Indian diaspora. This chapter thus develops a more nuanced understanding of how students engage with Bollywood and how this cinema, in turn, rearticulates conceptions of ‘Indianness’ in the West.
