**Data Description** The Institute Ethical Committee (IEC) of Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, approved this study. Prior to conducting experiments, all of the participants pro- vided informed consent. **Participants** The study involved 20 healthy (mean age: 26 years, 16 males, 4 females), right-handed students from Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. All participants were proficient in the Hindi language, which was also the language of the video clips. All participants were briefed about the task and asked to maintain their attention while watching the film clips. Small groups of subjects indepen- dently scored movie clips from each category of emotion. Only those clips were selected with the highest ranking for evoking a particular response for all categories. **Audio‑visual stimuli** Bollywood is popular Indian cinema based on the Hindi language. We selected nine Bollywood movie clips cover- ing four decades from the 1980s to recent. These movie clips depicted each Rasa and selection was based on the independent rating from a small group of participants. Each film segment had a different length because the clips contained narration that had to be shown for a certain time to evoke a specific Rasa . Film clips ranged in length from 42 s to 2 min 37 s. **EEG data acquisition** EEG recordings were collected while a participant was asked to watch the selected nine film clips correspond- ing to nine Rasa s. A high-density Geodesic system of 128 channels was used for this acquisition with a sam- pling rate of 250 Hz. A white fixation cross on a blank screen preceded each film clip for 10 s, and the order of the films was randomized for each participant. The com- plete experiment was designed and run in E-primeTM and recordings were captured using Net-stationTM.