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Bollywood: A History

Bollywood: A History
By Mihir Bose

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Product Description

The first comprehensive history of India’s film industry, one that now rivals Hollywood.
Hollywood may define our idea of movies but it is the city of Bombay on the west coast of India that is now the center of world cinema. Every year the Indian film industry produces more than a 1,000 feature films, every day fourteen million Indians go to a movie and, 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 remarkable. Bollywood takes the cinematic tech-niques 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 a century, has 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, a plot that contains everything from farce to tragedy, but always produces a happy ending. The men and women who create 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.
Bollywood movies may only recently have begun to be noticed in the west, but they have long defined the very concept of cinema for many millions across the globe. While the name Bollywood echoes and acknowledges its bastard American parentage the son has long since taken over from the father

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #662132 in Books
  • Published on: 2007-03
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 320 pages

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Mihir Bose is an award winning Indian-born writer and journalist who lives in London. He grew up in Bombay watching the story of Bollywood unfold long before it got the name Bollywood. Author of books ranging from history through sport and business to biography they include controversial biographies of the Indian nationalist Subhas Bose and the Aga Khans, which was banned by three countries. His History of the Indian Cricket was the first book by an Indian author to win the presti-gious Cricket Society Literary Award. A journalist for more than thirty years he has written for all the major British newspapers. He is currently the sports news correspondent for The Daily Telegraph. He lives in London.

Customer Reviews

I Love Bollywood4
My Bollywood viewing rampage teased my literary senses into finding a book about Bollywood and while at work I stumbled across Bose's A History. Though I've only seen a handful of Hindi films, I've struggled to accurately describe what I'm seeing as there really are few (if any) direct comparisons to Western films. Even the language of Western films seem to completely fail at describing exactly what Bollywood is at times. Bose starts the book at the beginning: film has just been invented and initially displayed in Paris it travels quite quickly to India.

However, Indian culture (still in the empire at this period) had to cultivate movies in a rather different way than Western (i.e. the U.S. film industry) films and these roots of the industry give Bollywood the flavor it has today. Some specific cultural nuances: going from an arm of the British Empire to an independent state, the massive amounts of cultures that reside, the Hindu and Muslim conflicts, somewhat strict and traditional sex/gender dichotomies, the language barriers of one country, etc.

An amazing read that I enjoyed but unless you're really into Bollywood or learning about Bollywood it's probably not for you (it's also a bit long winded in places). What I appreciated most about the novel in addition to the development of Indian film was (through necessity) the narrative development of the history of modern India.