Paper Title
Masala Mix: Refashioning Alice Munro for Bollywood’s Audience in Dear Maya

Abstract
The 2017 Bollywood film Dear Maya does not consider itself an adaptation. The director Sunaina Bhatnagar is credited with the writing and any mention of it being an adaptation is notably missing. Yet the script shares too many similarities with Canadian Nobel Laureate Alice Munro’s short story Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage which was published in her 2001 collection of short stories of the same name. It was later adapted into a Hollywood film in 2013 under the less cumbersome title of Hateship, Loveship. This paper will first delineate and document the similarities between the short story and the film. Secondly, it will examine how despite the similarity of plot, Munro’s psychological realism has been adapted and converted into melodrama for the Indian public. And lastly, it will examine whether this melodramatic approach detracts from the effectiveness of the story. Keywords - Bollywood, Realisme, Townsfolk Spin Tales, Gothic Romance