This is an excerpt from an article that was first published in AGI’s May/ June 2013 issue, which pays tribute to a century of Indian Cinema.
1) Bollywood a History by Mihir Bose
Every year the Indian film industry produces more than a 1,000 feature films; every day 14 million Indians go to a movie; and a billion more people a year buy tickets for Indian movies than for their Hollywood-produced counterparts. Bombay’s studios have taken the cinematic techniques of Hollywood and used them to produce features that have enthralled audiences throughout eastern Europe, the Middle East, and beyond. The result is the Bollywood movie, a film genre characterized by multiple song and dance routines, intense melodrama, and plots containing everything from farce to tragedy. This is the fantastic, diverse, and rich story of the social and cultural phenomenon of Bollywood and an up-close look at the men, women, and ideas that have fueled its incredible growth.
2) Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City by Ranjani Mazumdar
Cinema is not only a major industry in India, it is a powerful cultural force. This book is a major examination of the ways in which films made in Bombay mediate the urban experience in India. In Bombay Cinema, Ranjani Mazumdar takes a multidisciplinary approach to understanding Bombay cinema as the unofficial archive of the city in India. Combining the anecdotal with the theoretical, the philosophical with the political, and the textual with the historical, Bombay Cinema takes the reader into the heart of the urban labyrinth in India, revising and deepening our understanding of both the city and the cinema.In this analysis of the cinematic city, Mazumdar reveals a complex postnationalist world, ripped asunder by national crisis in the seventies, and globalization in the nineties.
3) First Day First Show by Anupama Chopra
First Day First Show is Anupama Chopra’s guide to the glittering world of Indian cinema, cameras and stars- and also the concomitant darkness that lie beneath the glamour. She takes us into the lives of the stars and into the sadder stories of those who never make it to centre stage. She takes us from the elites right down to the murky links with the underworld. There are also several entertaining anecdotes, including that of the royal bodyguard of Bhutan who became a scriptwriter, and of the embarrassed Pakistani soldiers at Wagah border who did not allow their favourite Indian superstars to shoot.
4)King Of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema by Anupama Chopra
Billed as the “astonishing true story of Bollywood”, this book is a sweeping portrait about a country finding its identity, a movie industry that changed the face of India and one man’s struggle to become a star. Shah Rukh Khan’s larger than life tale takes us through the colourful and idiosyncratic Bollywood movie industry, where fantastic dreams and outrageous obsessions share the spotlight with extortion, murder and corruption. As a Muslim in a Hindu majority nation, he has come to embody the aspirations and contradictions of a complicated culture tumbling headlong into US-style capitalism. His story views the greater Indian story and the underbelly of the culture of Bollywood.
5) The Art Of Bollywood by Edo Bouman, Paul Duncan (Editor), Rajesh Devraj Taschen
A collection of beautiful hand painted posters from Bollywood, this book captures the unique visual language of Indian film, articulated by these vivid hand-painted advertisements that have since become highly-desirable collectors’ items. While Bollywood poster artists produced a staggering number of these images, their ephemeral work has traditionally been presented unevenly, with shoddy reprints and re-release posters. The Art of Bollywood digs deeper into the tradition, presenting the original art in its true glory—from seldom-seen posters to rare images of street publicity and cinema displays. The text provides a detailed discussion of the works of key artists, in this comprehensive overview of a previously neglected and underrated artistic genre.
5) The Kapoors: The First Family of Indian Cinema by Madhu Jain
Journalist-columnist Madhu Jain takes the adventurous route of encapsulating the times and travails of nine of the Kapoors in some 343 pages of text, which is like striving to sprint through the Louvre in a single day.
There is no film family quite like the Kapoors. A family of professional actors and directors, they span almost eighty years of film-making in India, from the twenties to the present. Each decade in the history of Hindi films has had at least one Kapoor—if not more—playing a large part in defining it.
6)Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief: Inside the World of Indian Moviemaking by Stephen Alter
Bollywood movies are glorious, colorful spectacles of romance, action, drama, song, and dance. The biggest film industry in the world, Bollywood puts out some nine hundred movies a year, which are watched by passionate fans around the globe.Stephen Alter—a writer who grew up in India and has inside access to Bollywood acts as translator and tour guide in this firsthand look into the world of Bombay films. Following the making of a Bollywood version of Othello, he explores the enormous popularity of Hindi movies and reveals the actors, directors, musicians, and feats of artifice that make them so compelling and unique. From the blessing ceremony performed each time a movie starts shooting to the secrets behind the song- and-dance extravaganzas, Fantasies of a Bollywood Love-Thief is a beguiling introduction to the rituals and culture of a moviemaking industry so similar to and yet utterly different from our own.
7) Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema
India produces an impressive number of films each year in a variety of languages. Here, Monika Mehta breaks new ground by analyzing Hindi films and exploring the censorship of gender and heterosexuality in Bombay cinema. She studies how film censorship on various levels makes the female body and female sexuality pivotal in constructing national identity, not just through the films themselves but also through the heated debates that occur in newspapers and other periodicals. The standard claim is that the state dictates censorship and various prohibitions, but Mehta explores how relationships among the state, the film industry, and the public illuminate censorship’s role in identity formation, while also examining how desire, profits, and corruption are generated through the act of censoring.
Committed to extending a feminist critique of mass culture in the global south, Mehta situates the story of censorship in a broad social context and traces the intriguing ways in which the heated debates on sexuality in Bombay cinema actually produce the very forms of sexuality they claim to regulate. She imagines afresh the theoretical field of censorship by combining textual analysis, archival research, and qualitative fieldwork. Her analysis reveals how central concepts of film studies, such as stardom, spectacle, genre, and sound, are employed and (re)configured within the ambit of state censorship, thereby expanding the scope of their application and impact
