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.

Rosie Thomas is Professor of Film, Faculty of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster, UK. She is also Director, Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), and Co-director, India Media Centre at Westminster.

List of Tables and Figures

Publisher’s Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

1. Bombay before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies

PART ONE

Introduction to Part One

1. Thieves of the Orient: The Arabian Nights in Early Indian Cinema
2. Distant Voices, Magic Knives: Lal-e-Yaman and the Transition to Sound in Bombay Cinema
3. Not Quite (Pearl) White: Fearless Nadia, Queen of the Stunts
4. Zimbo and Son Meet the Girl with a Gun
5. Still Magic: An Aladdin’s Cave of 1950s B-Movie Fantasy

PART TWO

Introduction to Part Two

1. Where the Money Flows, the Camera Rolls
2. Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity
3. Sanctity and Scandal: The Mythologisation of Mother India
4. Mother India Maligned: The Saga of Sanjay Dutt

References and Select Bibliography

Index