Description
Orient Blackswan Pvt. Ltd. Bombay Before Bollywood Film City Fantasies by ROSIE THOMAS
Bombay Before Bollywood offers a fresh, alternative look at the history of Bombay cinema. Eschewing the conventional focus on India’s social and mythological films, it foregrounds the subaltern genres of the ‘magic and fighting films’—the fantasy, costume and stunt films popular in the B- and C-circuits in the decades before and immediately after independence. It explores the influence of this other cinema on the big-budget masala films of the 1970s and 1980s, before ‘Bollywood’ erupted onto the world stage in the mid-1990s. The book reminds us that a significant stream of Bombay cinema has always revelled in cultural hybridity, borrowing voraciously from global popular culture and engaging with transcultural flows of cosmopolitan modernity and postmodernity. This volume will be a welcome addition to the fields of film studies and cultural studies. It will also be of interest to the general reader.