Lauder Senior Lecturer Dr. Sudev Sheth weighs in on the good, bad, and ugly of Bollywood, especially its obsession with skin color and sexism in this new working paper from Harvard Business School. Dr. Sheth draws on two new oral history repositories to frame his observations. For example, noted Bollywood actress Shabana Azmi says “Violence against women was portrayed in a way which was absolutely shameful…and within the mainstream cinema where just the act for instance of a rape was so prolonged that it would become almost vicarious. The business of cinema is the business of images, and how the camera lingers over the female body decides whether it is commodifying or whether it is sensitizing.” How did the industry become so complicit in emboldening and contesting stereotypes? Read more to find out!
