Bombay before Bollywood

At the University of Westminster in the United Kingdom,Rosie Thomas is Professor of Film, Faculty of Media, Arts, and Design, Director of the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media, and Co-Director of the India Media Centre.

• List of Tables and FiguresCreditsAcknowledgments1. Bombay before Bollywood: Film City FantasiesPart One Introduction to Part One2. Thieves of the Orient: The Arabian Nights in Early Indian Cinema3. Distant Voices, Magic Knives: Lal-e-Yaman and the Transition to Sound in Bombay Cinema4. Not Quite (Pearl) White: Fearless Nadia, Queen of the Stunts5. Zimbo and Son Meet the Girl with a Gun6. Still Magic: An Aladdin’s Cave of 1950s B-Movie FantasyPart Two Introduction to Part Two7. Where the Money Flows, the Camera Rolls8. Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity9. Sanctity and Scandal: The Mythologisation of Mother India10. Mother India Maligned: The Saga of Sanjay DuttReferences and Select BibliographyIndex

"In this powerful account, Rosie Thomas opens out filmic artifacts to an array of dazzling reflections shedding new light on the movement and circulation of popular culture in India. With a remarkable body of research conducted over a period of time, Bombay before Bollywood decisively challenges certain assumptions about India, its cinemas, and its audiences." — Ranjani Mazumdar, author of Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City"This is the archaeology of media performed with intellect, wit, and passion. Rosie Thomas pioneered this field and she remains its most brilliantly iridescent critic and advocate. If only all film studies were this revelatory and this enjoyable!" — Christopher Pinney, author of Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs"Rosie Thomas's body of research over the last twenty-five years has set up key discourses in the study of Indian popular cinema. This book brings together her pioneering fieldwork into film industry categories and practices, and her more recent bid to resurrect a history made well-nigh clandestine by official narratives: the significance of Arabian Nights fantasies, stunt films, and visceral attractions in Bombay cinema. Pleasurably crafted and provocatively argued, Bombay before Bollywood is an important intervention in Indian and world cinema studies." — Ravi Vasudevan, author of The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema