Opinion Bollywood in the classroom

Cinema (we didn’t call it “Bollywood” back then) was not a subject ever discussed in the classroom when I was in school over 25 years ago. It was something of a forbidden topic,reserved for idle conversations among friends,and never for any serious discussion with our teachers. I still recall a diatribe our Class IX science teacher launched into about our alleged preference for “dirty cinema star magazines” over science magazines. I would imagine that teachers today have more serious distractions to contend with than mere magazines and students too have a more challenging sensory and cultural environment to navigate. That is precisely the reason why,more than ever,the classroom should become a place where students are not desperately (and vainly) insulated from popular culture,but are taught to confront it intelligently.

The growth of media studies has popularised the idea that at least some sort of critical media awareness is an essential part of citizenship in a modern democracy. A good media studies curriculum at the university level teaches not only practical production skills,which students often seek to get jobs in the media industries,but also the importance of thinking critically about the media. Even if the realities of working in the media may seem far from the idealism students are encouraged to cultivate,the fact remains many people in India today are aware of what it means to academically engage with media and popular culture. While this is a good beginning,a more important and vital task is to translate the insights and practices of critical media studies into a curriculum that could prove meaningful to students at a much younger age. For that,nothing is more necessary than putting Bollywood in the classroom while students are still in school.

Teaching Bollywood would not simply mean showing students how movies are made but how movies are making us. There is often a knowledge gap among us as media consumers between the scale of our emotional investment in media culture and our ability to engage with that culture. Simply put,the way students might talk about a movie in class may seem no different from how they talk about it with friends,online or face-to-face,with references to celebrity gossip and mere likes and dislikes. But if the classroom can turn Bollywood into a window into students’ own lives,hopes and dreams,and encourage them to see that as a social narrative using readings and ideas from media studies and other appropriate subjects,then a Bollywood curriculum could prove engaging and insightful. For example,a history of independent India could be taught not merely as names and dates to memorise,but as a story marked eloquently through the stories in our popular cinema. Students could be encouraged to engage with important ideas in the humanities and social sciences,even at the school level,through examples from cinema. It is one thing,for instance,to watch Devdas as a movie about what today’s youth might call a loser,but quite another to see the character as a symbol of India’s stranded journey between village and city,its mixed modernity,as scholars have observed. It is one thing to talk about consumerism as a mere slogan,and quite another to show it in the dazzling movies of the 1990s,where everyone was Raj or Prem and wore ubiquitously branded clothes. Teaching our movies will help us do more than merely teach concepts. Ultimately,by engaging students on the terrain they are most familiar with,we will have a chance to teach them about life,and to train them to think of life not as an individual journey but as a social and historical phenomenon in which each one must make ethical,and directly or indirectly,political commitments too. Our classroom must prove to our students as meaningful a source of ideas about the self and others as a movie like Hum Aapke Hain Kaun.

Juluri,professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco,is author of ‘Bollywood Nation: India through its Cinema’