Scholars argue that the relationship between film and literature is confrontational, transgressive, dialogic, and ambivalent. We will use those criteria for examining how postcolonial fiction and film mutually frame each other. Our examination of the traffic between film and literature will be organized around film adaptations and literary texts linked by genre, topic, and style. How do these works cross cultural, political and aesthetic boundaries? How are our understandings of "high" and "low" culture re-defined in this exchange? What are the particular implications of these crossings in South Asian postcolonial contexts for thinking about how the following concepts are defined: modernism, realism, and translation? How are vernacular, folk, and popular cultures recast in these texts? Finally, what role does Bollywood cinema play in inflecting the particular aesthetics of magically realist literature in the South Asian context? While the class will focus on South Asian texts, we will draw on film, literature, and theoretical frameworks from other postcolonial contexts to consider the licenses and limits of comparison for this study.