The New York Review of Ideas » Breakthrough Books | June 2009
Books on Bollywood
We asked four experts to recommend the best recent books on Bollywood film. Corey Creekmur, Associate Professor of Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa, coauthor with Mark Sidel of Cinema, Law, and the State in Asia. It’s now common to view the Partition of India as the most significant, and traumatic, event in modern [...]
By Anna Bak-Kvapil
We asked four experts to recommend the best recent books on Bollywood film.
Corey Creekmur, Associate Professor of Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa, coauthor with Mark Sidel of Cinema, Law, and the State in Asia.
It’s now common to view the Partition of India as the most significant, and traumatic, event in modern South Asian history, and a few critics have noted its muted presence or striking absence in popular Indian cinema, but Bhaskar Sarkar’s Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Duke University Press) is the first full-scale study of the deep impact of the Partition—whether treated directly or, more often, repressed—on Indian film.
Another, quite different, exploration of the cultural politics of representation in popular Indian cinema is the project of Neepa Majumdar’s Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!: Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s-50s (Indiana University Press). Arguably, the star is the most important feature of Indian cinema, and Majumdar’s book is a long-overdue account of the debates and negotiations around the controversial creation of female stars in Indian film. Her study is even more remarkable because it creates a vivid sense of an era from which many key films no longer survive. While contemporary “Bollywood” film gets increased scholarly attention, works like these—both genuinely ground-breaking works of historical interpretation—provide the necessary background to think about popular Indian cinema in its present incarnations.
Tejaswini Ganti, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Culture & Media at New York University and author of Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema.
Though the near ubiquity of elaborately choreographed and lavishly produced song sequences have become the marker of popular Indian cinema’s distinctiveness in the global media landscape, the significance of music in Indian cinema had not warranted much scholarly attention until recently. Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance (Minnesota 2008) edited by Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti redresses this serious gap in the scholarship. What I appreciate about this volume is that it examines film music from a variety of dimensions—production, consumption, economic, narrative, musicological, and performative. Though I was aware of the circulation and influence of Hindi film songs on local music in sites like Nigeria and Greece, I was surprised and intrigued to learn from this volume that the Israeli state used Hindi song and dance sequences in a series of promotional commercials in the mid-1990s.
Another book that also deals with an understudied aspect of Indian cinema is Preminda Jacob’s Celluloid Deities: The Visual Culture of Cinema and Politics in South India (Lexington Books 2008). Most of the scholarship on Indian cinema has focused on Hindi cinema—aka “Bollywood,” to the neglect of the rich diversity of filmmaking in other languages in India – and primarily on the narrative elements and thematic significance of these films rather than their associated material and visual culture. Jacob’s book deals with the vibrant visual culture associated with Tamil cinema and its very intense culture of celebrity by focusing on the production and reception of the gigantic, hand-painted billboards that advertise films and the towering portraits of political leaders that dominate the urban landscape of Chennai.
Rachel Dwyer, Professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema, SOAS, University of London, and author of 100 Bollywood Films.
I’ve just started to edit two series of books on South Asian Cinemas. They largely overlap although some titles will appear only with Oxford University Press, Delhi, and others only with Indiana University Press. The first book in the series with Oxford University Press is Valentina Vitali’s book on action cinema, Hindi Action Cinema: Industries, Narratives, Bodies. It looks at the economic factors working in India at various times, their implications for the film industry—chiefly production, distribution and exhibition – and how this impacted specifically upon films of the respective periods as cultural products. The approach reconciles an account of the economy of the film industry with an analysis of cinema.
The second book is Greg Booth’s Behind the Curtain. Although Hindi film music is India’s popular music, there has been little serious academic research into this unique form until the recent work of a handful of ethnomusicologists (Arnold, Manuel, Morcom). In Behind the Curtain, Greg Booth presents a fascinating oral history of the Hindi film music industry, allowing the words of the musicians who performed this music to be heard for the first time. Behind the Curtain cannot be ignored by any student of Indian cinema, public culture or the history of film music.
Sudhir Mahadevan, Assistant Professor in the Film Studies Program and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington.
I would recommend Priya Jaikumar’s Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (Duke University Press, 2006). I’m increasingly convinced that the history of Indian cinema, or of the cinema in India (are they the same? I think not, at least at the level of historical method) cannot be narrated without a foot in Britain and one in the U.S. Although its focus is primarily on what she calls “the intertwined histories of British and Indian film policy and culture in the 1930s”, what the book actually does is to narrate the dynamics of a triangulation—India, Britain and the U.S. Jaikumar reveals the extent to which British and Indian film policies were entangled in the 1930s, when Hollywood dominated both British and Indian screens.
Drawing on a variety of archival sources—memoranda, legislative bills, policy proposals and publicly recorded debates—Jaikumar exposes the fractious and sometimes incoherent architecture of imperial bureaucracy. What makes Jaikumar’s book essential reading? At a historical moment when the British empire was being questioned in public opinion on the home front, and was subject to nationalist agitation in India, Jaikumar shows how British film policy—beleaguered by Hollywood’s dominance—sought to recast empire as a space of proto-global trade rather than as territories conceived as fixed points of production. This should be of enormous interest to those who are interested in debates on globalization and its history, as well as film historians seeking a comparative history that is productively dispersed across multiple locations. ♦