Bollywood A History

The first comprehensive history of India’s film industry, one that now rivals Hollywood. 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 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 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.