This course explores Bollywood cinema’s nostalgic construction of Hinduism, even as it functions as a cultural forum for negotiating Hinduism’s moral, social, and political tensions. Focusing on questions of gender and sexuality, class, caste, family norms and notions of virtue, set against India’s shifting landscape of secularism, communalism, and Hindu nationalism, we will ask: how does Bollywood’s shimmering nostalgia make Hinduism feel timeless, even as it reinvents it for the modern screen?