Gender Bias, Social Bias and Representation: 70 Years of BHollywood

With an outreach in more than 90 countries, a market share of 2.1 billion dollars and a target audience base of at least 1.2 billion people, Bollywood, aka the Mumbai film industry, is a formidable entertainment force. While the number of lives Bollywood can potentially touch is massive, no comprehensive NLP study on the evolution of social and gender biases in Bollywood dialogues exists. Via a substantial corpus of movie dialogues spanning a time horizon of 70 years, we seek to understand the portrayal of women, in a broader context studying subtle social signals, and analyze the evolving trends in geographic and religious representation in India. Our argument is simple -- popular movie content reflects social norms and beliefs in some form or shape. In this project, we propose to analyze such trends over 70 years of Bollywood movies contrasting them with their Hollywood counterpart and critically acclaimed world movies.