Bollywood: A History

Hollywood may define our idea of movies but it is the city of Bombay on the west coast of India that is now the centre of world cinema. Every year the Indian film industry produces more than a thousand feature films, every day fourteen million Indians go to watch a movie in the country, a billion more people a year buy tickets for Indian movies than for Hollywood ones. The rise of Bombay as the film capital of the world has been both remarkable and amazing. Bollywood takes the cinematic techniques of Hollywood and uses them to produce movies—that bear no relation to the original but have a compelling appeal—that in the last half century have enthralled audiences throughout Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. The movies themselves are a self-contained world with their multiple song and dance routines, intense melodrama, and plots that contain everything from farce to tragedy but always produce a happy ending. The men and women who created these movies are even more remarkable and it is this fantastic, rich, diverse story, a veritable Indian fairyland that Mihir Bose, a native of Bombay, tells with vivid brilliance in the first comprehensive history of this major social and cultural phenomenon.