Constructions of Masculinity in Bollywood Promotional Content

Following a growing public discussion on violence against women in India, some commentators have turned their eye upon Bollywood. The film industry’s role in perpetuating models of courtship based on the stalking and harassment of women has drawn criticism from several quarters. While there has been much said about the depiction of women in Bollywood film, there has been relatively less said on portrayals of masculinity. The research that does exist focuses on textual analyses of films, or looks at masculinity through the lens of global capital flows. This thesis instead, analyzes trailers, posters, promotional pictures and social media for the film Raees (dir. Rahul Dholakia), to examine the construction of masculinity in Bollywood film promotional material. Promotional content tends to recreate masculine tropes that were found to be prevalent in textual analyses of Bollywood films. All promotional formats continued to reiterate male dominance, stereotyped Muslim men as violent and promoted nationalism. A new theme that emerged was the appropriation and commodification of Muslim masculinity, an outcome of Bollywood’s role in driving consumerism in India post economic liberalization

Representations of peace and conflict in Kashmir in Indian mainstream Bollywood cinema

This thesis explores the representation of peace and conflict in Kashmir through the mainstream Bollywood cinema. In the early 1960s, the breathtakingly beautiful valley of Kashmir was a preferred destination for Bollywood's love and romantic narratives filmed in beautiful locations of Kashmir. Films like Kashmir Ki Kali, Jab Jab Phool Khile, and Junglee are some of the examples that were highly acclaimed and top-rated films of those times. These narratives changed from love and romance to conflict, foreign infiltration and terrorism in the late 1980s and onwards with films such as Roja, Dil Se, LOC Kargil, Maa Tujhe Salaam, and Mission Kashmir. This research analyses the mediatized role of Indian cinema in Kashmir to understand the social, political, and artistic manifestations in each of these films. It further explores how each film characterizes the topic of peace and conflict with a particular emphasis on the way that each film narrative organization and aesthetic construction influence aspects of representation. The textual analysis of each preconflict and conflict film examines different approaches to narrative organization and the importance of integrating critical approaches that address questions of film style and interpretation

Generate Your Counterfactuals: Towards Controlled Counterfactual Generation for Text

Machine Learning has seen tremendous growth recently, which has led to larger adoption of ML systems for educational assessments, credit risk, healthcare, employment, criminal justice, to name a few. The trustworthiness of ML and NLP systems is a crucial aspect and requires a guarantee that the decisions they make are fair and robust. Aligned with this, we propose a framework GYC, to generate a set of counterfactual text samples, which are crucial for testing these ML systems. Our main contributions include a) We introduce GYC, a framework to generate counterfactual samples such that the generation is plausible, diverse, goal-oriented, and effective, b) We generate counterfactual samples, that can direct the generation towards a corresponding condition such as named-entity tag, semantic role label, or sentiment. Our experimental results on various domains show that GYC generates counterfactual text samples exhibiting the above four properties. GYC generates counterfactuals that can act as test cases to evaluate a model and any text debiasing algorithm.Comment: Accepted at AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2021