Professor Ulka Anjaria looks at rows of books on her bookshelf while peppy music plays.
The scene shifts to Ulka sitting in an empty classroom speaking to the camera. Lower third reads “Ulka Anjaria, Professor of English.” She says, “There's so much in Indian literature and film, but there's so little scholarship on it. In English departments in India, often until very recently there's still even there been a focus only on European texts because, of course, the history of colonialism.”
Ulka’s voice continues off-camera while the shot focuses on her walking through a snowy quad outside: “There's a lot of work that should be done, that needs to be done on Indian literature: scholarship, dissemination, telling people about what's out there and, of course, teaching it, which is a great way to do that.”
The scene shifts to a montage of classroom shots with Ulka teaching at a white board in front of about 25 students in desks facing the front.
Ulka again speaks to the camera before the scene shifts to a voiceover on top of a slow motion pan backwards from a blue sign in front of a green building that says “Mandel Center for the Humanities.” She says, “My name is Ulka Anjaria. I am a professor of English here at Brandeis and I'm also the director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities. I teach Indian literature and film and also global fiction.”
The camera pans around Ulka outdoors in a brick academic quad while the text, “Ulka Anjaria, Citizens of the World” appears on the screen.
Students move into a classroom with a projector on a screen. Ulka says in a voiceover, “I hope my classes surprise students because they rarely fall into stereotypes of what people expect about India or Pakistan or other countries in south Asia.”
Ulka continues to speak to camera, saying: “From the U.S. perspective, if you look at media or you look at representations of India or anywhere else that's really not in the West, it's often very negative but I think when you read the books from the place, you watch the films and you study it closely, you get a much better understanding of the richness of a place.”
As she speaks about Bollywood films, a series of clips from Bollywood movies parade across the screen. These films are not named, but we see a man on horseback, a woman riding a caravan pulled by horses, a man shooting a gun, and a woman looking mournfully at the camera as a man walks away before he turns to look back at her over his shoulder, a woman belly dancing, and a couple in formal attire on a red carpet.
She says, “Bollywood is one of these subjects that a lot of people misunderstand because they think that it's just a cheesy plot that's formulaic and the same story is told over and over again. I have researched the grammar of Hindi cinema and I actually look at how Bollywood actually works, why are there song and dance sequences, why is it always a love story. My Bollywood class is really a class where you can love the films and analyze the films. It's a class about how you study something that you love. A lot of the students come away from that class really falling in love with Bollywood.”
Scene shifts to a classroom of rows of desks seating 25 students facing the front of the room as she speaks off screen: “I teach classes of a range of sizes. In my Bollywood class it's quite big. It's more of a lecture class. It sometimes can have 90 or 95 people in it but the majority of the classes that I teach at Brandeis are seminar classes [of] 15 to 25 people and that really is the ideal size for a classroom. I get to know the students, they get to know me and they get to know each other.”
Ulka continues to speak as a talking head with occasional interjections of closeups of students in the classroom or shots of Ulka teaching in the front of the classroom. She says. “I would recommend to students who come here to try out classes in departments that you didn't know anything about. Many of the students who come thinking they want to study one major, when they come here they take classes in lots of different departments and they really come to love something they hadn't really heard of before. I especially enjoy that at Brandeis students have such open minds and come in with a range of knowledge about India at all or Indian literature or film and they come away with a real understanding of things that they might not have known about before. The classroom is a great place for working out ideas. I mean I tell my students that coming to class is not just checking off a box but it's actually discussing and working through the ideas of something that you've read and that basic element of just openness and curiosity to what's happening in the rest of the world is something that I hope they get from my classes and I hope they take with them when they graduate.”
Final shot is Ulka outdoors looking into the distance as the music fades out and an end screen that says “Brandeis University” fades on.