Indian Cinema The Bollywood Saga

The Hindi film industry, commonly dubbed 'Bollywood', was born with the release of a single film, Raja Harishchandra in 1913. By the end of the 20th century, it had grown into a multi-million-pound business, producing more than 800 films a year and entertaining billions of fans all over the world.

In international cinema, there is one culture that reigns supreme: Bollywood-the Hindi-language film industry centered in Mumbai. Bollywood has captured the hearts and minds of cinephiles around the world. In Bollywood Saga...Revelations, author Kavita Khurana, PhD, transports readers to movie sets that are alive with song and dance. She celebrates the vivid history of Hindi cinema and provides expert analysis on the ever-changing motifs and themes of South Asian film. Khurana has structured her book around the journey of a young Indian student, Abnash, as he visits the theater, chats with filmmakers, and learns about the foundations and mechanics of Indian cinema. Topics covered include the evolution of classical Sanskrit drama into modern film, the beginnings of Indian cinema, the origins of the Bollywood style, the pioneering filmmakers of the genre, the manifestation of Hindi aesthetic theory in film, the intricacies of film finance and distribution, Bollywood's influence on international directors, and the future of South Asian film. In addition to providing historical background and cultural context, Khurana incorporates Jungian psychoanalysis and philosophical theories into her work. Through many different lenses, she gives readers a remarkable view of a cultural phenomenon that shows no sign of slowing down.

Bollywood movies have long been known for their colorful song-and-dance numbers and knack for combining drama, comedy, action-adventure, and music. But these exciting and often amusing films rarely reflect the reality of life on the Indian subcontinent. Exploring the nature of mainstream Hindi cinema, the strikingly illustrated Bollywood’s Indiaexamines its nonrealistic depictions of everyday life in India and what it reveals about Indian society. Showing how escapism and entertainment function in Bollywood cinema, Rachel Dwyer argues that Hindi cinema’s interpretations of India over the last two decades are a reliable guide to understanding the nation’s changing hopes and dreams. She looks at the ways Bollywood has imagined and portrayed the unity and diversity of the country—what it believes and feels, as well as life at home and in public. Using Dwyer’s two decades spent working with filmmakers and discussing movies with critics and moviegoers,Bollywood’s India is an illuminating look at Hindi cinema.

'Bollywood' is the dominant global term to refer to the prolific Hindi language film industry in Bombay (renamed Mumbai in 1995). Characterised by music, dance routines, melodrama, lavish production values and an emphasis on stars and spectacle, Bollywood films have met with box-office success and enthusiastic audiences from India to West Africa to Russia, and throughout the English-speaking world. In Bollywood, anthropologist and film scholar Tejaswini Ganti provides a guide to the cultural, social and political significance of Hindi cinema, outlining the history and structure of the Bombay film industry, and the development of popular Hindi filmmaking since the 1930s. Providing information and commentary on the key players in Bollywood, including directors and stars, as well as material from current filmmakers themselves, the areas covered in Bollywood include: history of Indian cinema narrative style, main themes, and key genres of Hindi cinema significant films, directors and stars production and distribution of Bollywood films interviews with actors, directors and screenwriters.

Provides a road map of the scholarship on modern Hindi cinema in India, with an emphasis on understanding the interplay between cinema and colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. This book attends to issues of capitalism, nationalism, orientalism, and modernity through understandings of race, gender and sexuality, religion, and politics.

Bollywood film is the national cinema of India, describing movies made in Mumbai, distributed nationally across India and with their own production, distribution and exhibition networks worldwide. This informative screen guide reflects the work of key directors, major stars and important music directors and screenplay writers. Historically important films have been included along with certain cult movies and top box office successes. No guide to Hindi film would be complete without discussing: Mother India, the national epic of a peasant woman's struggle against nature and society to bring up her family; Sholay, a 'curry western' where the all-star cast sing and dance, romance and kill; Dilwale Dulhaniya le jayenge, the greatest of the diaspora films, in which two British Asians fall in love on a holiday in Europe before going to India where they show their elders how to incorporate love into family traditions; Junglee, showing how love transforms a 'savage' (junglee) who yells 'Yahoo!' before singing and dancing like Elvis, creating a new youth culture; Pyaasa, dramatically shot in black and white film with haunting songs as the romantic poet suffers for his art in the material world; Fans of Bollywood film can debate Rachel Dwyer's personal selection of these 101 titles while those new to the area will find this an invaluable introduction to the best of the genre.

While 'Indian popular cinema', as if by default, has come to mean Bollywood, there are other cinemas in India which are at least as rewarding to study, the largest and perhaps most intriguing among them coming from South India. Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada cinemas have their own colourful histories, megastars and political trajectories. This anthology is an attempt to do justice to the bewildering variety there is in the body as a whole and addresses this diversity in the only way deemed possible, which is to open out the study to different approaches, at the same time to get a comprehensive look at South Indian cinema as never before undertaken.

This work provides an introduction to the enormously successful world of Bollywood - the biggest film industry on the planet. It includes a selection of writings by some of the most prominent voices in Indian film writing and criticism.