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This chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which is to examine the historical and spatial flows of Indian popular cinema from Bombay (Mumbai) and other production centres in the Indian subcontinent to different spaces of consumption for nearly a century, culminating in the Bollywood-inspired-Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire. It then discusses the origins and travels of Bollywood cinema and how the rubric of national cinema, under which Indian cinema has been examined, is problematized by the transnationalized production, distribution, and consumption of South Asian cinematic texts in the present and its failure to account for cinematic flows. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Indian popular cinema is marked by many transformations. It has been subjected to the ‘constants’ found within the beliefs and worldview of the people of the Indian society and to the ‘variables’ associated with the changing social and cultural climate in India. This chapter traces the history of Indian popular cinema from the 1930s, particularly the approaches and methods employed. Also discussed are the critical approaches in the academic study of popular cinema and the drawbacks in the theoretical approach in examining and understanding the phenomena of a film. Later sections discuss the aims and goals of the book. Here, the narrative approach to Indian films and other means of codifying the methods of popular Indian cinema are discussed and detailed.

This chapter discusses Kannada cinema in the 1970s, covering both popular and art films. It explores the first Kannada art film —Samskara (1970), based on a 1965 novel by U. R. Ananthamurthy, about a Brahmin scholar driven into moral crisis and forced to question the tenets he has lived by. It describes how the years beginning with 1972 represent a new era for Mysore because of happenings at the national level influencing the local arena. It considers the roles played by Rajkumar in the 1970s, which always included a characteristic bit of moral rhetoric not usually found when other actors play the lead. It highlights three art films made in the 1970s — Girish Karnad’s Kaadu (1973), B.V. Karanth’s Chomana Dudi (1975), and Girish Kasaravalli’s Ghatashraddha (1977) — after Indira Gandhi’s Congress came to power in Karnataka under Devaraj Urs to illustrate how later Kannada art cinema differs from Samskara in its implications.

This chapter discusses Indian film criticism, with a particular focus on traditional modes of studying Indian cinema. It first traces the history of the development of the Bombay film industry from the 1910s to the 2000s, arguing that the 1960s and 1980s are decades from which we can best study Indian cinema's most popular form of filmmaking: the masala genre. It then considers traditional approaches to Indian film and some popular themes in Indian film studies, including nationalism, diaspora, postcolonialism and cultural identity. It also examines introductory guidebooks and other literary sources that it accuses of having misled readers towards restrictive (if not outmoded and derogatory) definitions of the cinema they seek to understand. The chapter concludes with an overview of categories used to explore Bollywood's current manifestation, namely, third cinema, world cinema, Asian cinema, global contemporary Indian cinema and transnational cinema.

This chapter examines Kannada films of the 1980s, a period in which some genres in Kannada cinema — the mythological film, the historical film — died out and new genres like the youth film appeared. These new genres were, however, not ‘stable’ like the mythological film, the historical drama, and the family melodrama, and faded away almost immediately. While most films of the late 1980s abandon the traditional signifiers associated with Mysore, there is still evidence in the Kannada films of the late 1980s that it once existed.

This chapter suggests that the discourse formulated in relation to the dominant south Indian cinemas in Tamil or Telugu can prove to be homogenizing when used to analyse other regions, such as Kannada, which emerged before the linguistic organization of the states. It argues that Kannada films of the 1950s — which trace a separate trajectory by displaying a preference for the mythological, folklore, or saint films abandoned in Hindi cinema in the early 1940s — did not address a Kannada identity but one belonging exclusively to ‘old Mysore’.

This introductory chapter traces how critical discourse on Indian cinema has evolved over the last ten years. It addresses some of the factors that have played a part in accelerating the breadth of research on Indian cinema, particularly the proliferation of new media such as the Internet, YouTube, blogging, and DVDs. The chapter then provides some wider context to the current state of Indian cinema and how it has changed considerably in the new millennium. The term Bollywood, ‘a slang term for the commercial side of the Indian movie business’, continues to be a term of contention among those who work in the Indian film industry, conjuring up unpleasant connotations of low culture and trashy escapism. Yet there is no denying that Bollywood has entered the lexicon of film language and that, at least in the West, this derogatory term points to the film industry based in Mumbai (formerly Bombay). Like ‘world cinema’, Bollywood has become a catch-all term and a marketing-friendly one, but it fails to cover the sheer diversity and specificities offered by what is one of the world's leading film industries.

This chapter examines Kannada films from the 1990s. It discusses how from the late 1980s onwards, Kannada cinema becomes depleted because of a lack of signifiers — the cinema does not ‘mean’ in the way it had done hitherto. The region is absent as an imagined community in these Kannada films and this perhaps accounts for them being unable to ‘mean’. It considers one aspect of Kannada cinema that has distressed its avid followers — the vulgarity that appears to overwhelm it in the early 1990s. It also looks at the treatment of women in these films, specifically the notion of feminine promiscuity. It discusses the attitude of Kannada cinema towards Bangalore and how a large number of films are either ‘framed’ as stories being related by filmmakers or involve the process of filmmaking in some way.

This chapter examines Kannada cinema in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It begins by reviewing the author’s findings with regard to the shape taken by Kannada narrative from the 1930s onwards, up till the new millennium. It then discusses how Bangalore played a greater role in the Kannada film after 2000, including how the motif of the migrant in Bangalore became stronger in the new millennium. It analyses two remakes in Kannada of films made in another language: Sanjeevi’s Swetha Naga, about a researcher in zoology who is skeptical about the mythology around the cobra who ventures into a forest; and P. Vasu’s Apthamitra, a ghost story about a road construction engineer who acquires a palace rumoured to be haunted.

This chapter focuses on pedagogic practices and newer approaches to contemporary Bollywood cinema. It begins with a discussion of Satyajit Ray's views on popular Indian cinema and the reasons for Indian cinema's cursory appearance in film studies courses. It then considers student responses to studying popular Indian films, the current status of Indian film education and academia's alleged failure to do much good for popular Indian cinema. It also examines postmodern practices in contemporary Bollywood cinema and outlines new directions in Indian film research. The chapter argues that many of the academic approaches towards, and much critical journalistic writing on, Bollywood have worked against Bollywood's interests in securing international appeal.

This chapter examines how the postmodern, as an aesthetic style and fluid cultural practice, manifests in contemporary Bollywood film texts. Drawing upon the various concepts and traits identified by postmodern theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard and Hayden White, as well as postmodern film theorists such as Linda Hutcheon, Peter and Will Brooker, and M. Keith Brooker, the chapter reveals a variety of postmodern strategies and conventions operating within contemporary Bollywood cinema. It also analyses the films Om Shanti Om, Koi...Mil Gaya and Abhay, as well as several features of postmodernism that are present in them, including depthlessness, blank parody, intertextuality, hyperrealism, metahistory, and the sublime. The chapter concludes by explaining how films such as Abhay may help resolve the conflict between art cinema and mainstream popular Indian cinema.

This chapter examines postmodern aesthetics in the contemporary Bollywood remake through an in-depth analysis of one of the genre's earliest, most prominent examples: the Devdas lineage. Two of the most popular and widely regarded versions of Devdas are discussed: Bimal Roy's 1955 classic and Sanjay Leela Bhansali's 2002 version. The chapter considers how Bollywood uses figural excess to rework and distinguish itself aesthetically from previous canonical Indian film texts, drawing upon Scott Lash's views on postmodernism as a ‘regime of signification’. It also explores how Bollywood cinema hybridises with Hollywood modes of filmmaking in order to de-authenticate and dismantle both American and its own cinematic codes and conventions. Finally, it describes synaesthesia in Indian cinema and offers a reading of two more films, Dil Chahta Hai and Kaante.

This chapter explores 1950s discussions of realism in India as catalyzed by what filmmakers and audiences described as the eye-opening experience of watching the three Italian neorealist films that were screened at the first International Film Festival in India, held from January 24—February 1, 1952. Specifically, it considers this festival’s impact, and its echoes in cinematic and journalistic discourse in the early 1950s. Within the discourse of realism, one can find a continuum of films ranging from mainstream studio products such as Footpath (Zia Sarhady, 1953) to hybrid independent and studio films such as Do bigha zamin (Two Acres of Land, Bimol Roy, 1953) to state-supported independent films such as Pather panchali.

This book examines changes in Bollywood's film production during the twenty-first century, and particularly after its economic liberalisation, giving rise to a ‘New Bollywood’. It shows how the Indian cinema has acquired evidently postmodern qualities and explains what postmodernism means in the context of Bollywood cinema. It also considers what postmodernism tells us about the change and function of Bollywood film language after the twenty-first century. The book describes Bollywood's ‘postmodern turn’ as a form of transformation that reworks or revisits previous aesthetic trends in order to produce a radically different aesthetic. ‘New Bollywood’ refers to contemporary films characterised by a strong postmodern aesthetic style which was not as present in the 1990s. This introductory chapter discusses the meaning of ‘contemporary Bollywood’, postmodernism as a means of reading and interpreting films, and the structure of the book.

This chapter discusses the cinema of Raj Kapoor. Raj Kapoor's key role in helping to popularise Indian cinema proves to be a worthy starting point in tracing the origins and development of popular narratives and genres. The Kapoor dynasty was paramount in the evolution of mainstream Indian cinema. Indeed, the international success of Awaara (The Vagabond) in 1951 marked the beginning of a decade that would produce some of Indian cinema's most memorable films. The chapter considers a range of areas, comprising of Raj Kapoor's status as an auteur, ideological representations, visual styles ranging from noir to expressionism, the use of song and dance as a narrative tool, and the film's relationship with the wider context of post-partition India under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru.

This chapter shifts the focus to Indian art cinema with the Marxist work of Bengali director and iconoclast Ritwik Ghatak. The impressive Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud Capped Star, 1960) is his best-known film. Dealing directly with the trauma of partition and its effects on a Bengali family, Ghatak's cinema is bold, uncompromising, and occupies a unique position in Indian cinema. Although his work is still somewhat overshadowed by that of Satyajit Ray, another masterful Bengali film-maker, and though many of his films are still sadly unavailable on DVD in the UK, Megha Dhaka Tara is now recognised as one of the key works of Indian art cinema. The chapter discusses numerous aspects, including Ghatak's position as a film-maker; the wider historical context such as the partition of Bengal; the relationship between melodrama and feminist concerns; the film's categorisation as an example of 1960s counter cinema; and the thematic importance of the family to the film's narrative.

Chapter 1 introduces the field of Indian cinema, its public culture characterized by diversity and the diversity of its audiences. It also introduces Bangalore city, the field setting for the study. The chapter argues that Indian cinema and filmgoing culture as a non-European cinematic tradition provides a strategic site for a 'field-view' and in-depth ethnography that can address much of what has been overlooked in film studies. Where cinema exists as spectacle and cultural performance and draws on the aesthetics of festival, ethnographic study shows that purely filmic or textual analysis misses the complexities of cinema on the ground. The chapter critiques the Eurocentrism of film studies, describes the difficulties of conducting audience research and the challenges of ethnographic fieldwork as it calls for understandings of cinema and its experience that are grounded in the immediate contexts and institutional settings as well as the broader participatory culture in which cinema exists, is made and recast. It proposes new analytical approaches that are located in cinema’s social world and in settings in which films are made, appropriated and elaborated.

Any responsible claim for the existence of Indian film noir must waver with critical uncertainty. Nevertheless, while crime stories, as elsewhere, have been an unsurprisingly common component of Indian popular cinema, contemporary critics have, if only in passing, increasingly attributed a ‘darker’ aspect to a portion of India’s vast corpus of films, thereby affiliating these recently retrieved examples with Hollywood and other commercial national cinemas, in effect constructing a comparative perspective that retrospectively ‘corrects’ the absence of popular Indian cinema from most historical accounts of world cinema until the 1990s. A cycle of popular Hindi films, almost all set in (then) contemporary Bombay, regularly featured many of the characteristic elements of Hollywood film noir, including heroes (most consistently embodied throughout the period by the suave star Dev Anand) who skirt the border of legal and illegal activity; like their counterparts in American film noir, these are men who are streetwise but can confidentially negotiate swanky nightclubs featuring alluring femmes fatale (often explicitly Westernized through signifiers such as clothing, smoking, and the use of English) as well as the semi-illicit temptations of alcohol and gambling. Even somewhat earlier, since the mid-1970s, representations of Bombay’s criminal underworld and the glamorous if doomed lives of gangland ‘dons’ and ‘goondas’ (gangsters) had become staples of Hindi cinema. The latter half of the decade was especially dominated by a series of films featuring superstar Amitabh Bachchan in his wildly popular ‘angry young man’ persona.