142529 BA The urban experience - Indian cities in film and literature (2020S)

The Indian city is a place of desire and misery at the same time. The contrasting experiences which various people process in their memoirs, travel stories, essays and other literary forms which is the focus of this seminar. We will not only encounter Mumbai, Delhi, Lucknow and other Indian cities first-hand experiences redacted in their original language, but also deal with the conceptual ideas or themes that bring us closer to the city in modern India from different perspectives.
In this seminar, we will use examples from Hindi and English literature as well as Indian films to make “the city” our subject. We will not only use these primary sources in Hindi but also the academic literature to investigate our topic. We will together discuss the artistic engagement of writers and filmmakers with the city; and at the same time, use the work of anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, and political theorists to immerse ourselves in the complex, contradicting and controversial stories of South Asian cities in the crucial decades between the 1920s and the present.
The seminar thus consists of two focal points: on the one hand with film and literary studies approaches that deal with materials in Hindi, and secondly, a cultural studies critique that deals with the cultural, social and historical contexts of these works.