Vinay Lal, January 2006
N.B. A fuller, though quite skewed, bibliography until 2000 can be found in the Rajadhyaksha and Willemen volume, Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, cited below.
*Recommended (though not always without reservations)
Ahmed, Akbar S. “Bombay Films: The Cinema as Metaphor for Indian Society and Politics.” Modern Asian Studies 26, no. 2 (1992), pp. 289-320.
Aziz, Ashraf. Light of the Universe: Essays on Hindustani Film Music. New Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2003.
Barnouw, Erik and S. Krishnaswamy. Indian Film. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1980.
*Chakaravarty, Sumita S. National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema 1947-1987. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.
Chatterjee, Gayatri. Mother India. London: British Film Institute, 2002.
Chowdhry, Prem. Colonial India and the Making of Empire Cinema: Image, Ideology and Identity. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000.
Cooper, Darius. In Black and White: Hollywood and the Melodrama of Guru Dutt. Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2005.
Dasgupta, Chidananda. The Painted Face: Studies in India’s Popular Cinema. New Delhi: Roli Books, 1992.
Desai, Jigna. Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film. New ed. London: Routledge, 2003.
Dissanayake, Wimal and M. Sahai. Sholay: A Cultural Reading. New Delhi: Wiley Eastern, 1992.
Doraiswamy, Rashmi. “Changing Narrative Strategies.” Cinemaya 23 (1994), pp. 4-12.
Dudrah, Rajinder Kumar. Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies. Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006.
Dwyer, Rachel. All You Want is Money, All You Need is Love: Sexuality and Romance in Indian Cinema. London: Cassell, 2002.
Dwyer, Rachel. 100 Bollywood Films. BFI Screen Guides. London: British Film Institute, 2006.
*Dwyer, Rachel and Divia Patel. Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film. London: Reaktion Books; Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
*Dwyer, Rachel and Christopher Pinney, eds. The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India. Delhi: Oxford UP, 2001; Oxford India Paperbacks, 2002.
Gangar, Amrit. “Films from the City of Dreams”, in Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner, eds., Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1996), pp. 210-224.
Ganti, Tejaswini. Bollywood: A Guide to Popular Hindi Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Gokulsing, K. Moti and Wimal Dissanayake. Indian Popular Cinema: A Narrative of Cultural Change. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1998.
*Gopalan, Lalitha. Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 2002.
Government of India. Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee 1927-28. Delhi: Central Publications Branch, 1928.
Government of India. Report of the Film Inquiry Committee. New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1951.
Haggard, Stephen. “Mass Media and the Visual Arts in Twentieth-Century South Asia: Indian Film Posters 1947-Present.” South Asia Research 8, no. 2 (May 1988), pp. 71-87.
Hardgrave, Robert L, Jr. “When Starts Displace the Gods: The Folk Culture of Cinema in Tamil Nadu.” In idem, Essays in the Political Sociology of South India (Delhi: Usha Publications, 1979), pp. 92-124.
Kabir, Nasreen Munni. Talking Films: Conversations on Hindi Cinema with Javed Akhtar. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1996.
Kabir, Nasreen Munni. Guru Dutt: A Life in Cinema. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1996; Oxford India Paperbacks, 2003.
Kapur, Geeta. “Mythic Material in Indian Cinema.” Journal of Arts and Ideas, nos. 14-15 (July-December 1987), pp. 79-107.
Kaur, Raminder and Ajay J. Sinha, eds. Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005.
Kazmi, Fareed. The Politics of India’s Conventional Cinema: Imaging a Universe, Subverting a Multiverse. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999.
*Lal, Vinay and Ashis Nandy, eds. Fingerprinting Popular Culture: The Mythic and the Iconic in Indian Cinema. Delhi: Oxford UP, 2006.
Mandel, Peter. Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Manto, Saadat Hasan. Stars from Another Sky: The Bombay Film World of the 1940s. Trans. from Urdu by Khalid Hasan. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1998.
Mishra, Vijay. “Towards a Theoretical Critique of Bombay Cinema.” Screen 26, nos. 3-4 (May-August 1985), pp. 133-151.
Mishra, Vijay. “Decentring History: Some Versions of Bombay Cinema.” East-West Film Journal 6, no. 1 (January 1992), pp. 111-155.
*Nandy, Ashis, ed. The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema. Delhi: Oxford UP; London: Zed Books, 1996.
Prakash, Sanjeev. “Genres in Indian Cinema.” Journal of Arts and Ideas, no. 9 (Oct-Dec 1984), pp. 23-33. [Review of Vasudev and Lenglet, below.]
*Prasad, Madhava. Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1990.
_____. “Cinema and the Desire for Modernity.” Journal of Arts and Ideas, nos. 25-26 (December 1993), pp. 71-86.
Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. “Neo-Traditionalism: Film as Popular Art in India.” Framework, nos. 32-33 (1986), pp. 20-67.
_____. “The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology.” Journal of Arts and Ideas, nos. 14-15 (July-Dec 1987), pp. 47-108.
_____. “The Epic Melodrama: Themes of Nationality in Indian Cinema.” Journal of Arts & Ideas, nos. 25-26 (December 1993), pp. 55-70.
*Rajadhyaksha, Ashish and Paul Willemen. Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema. London: British Film Institute; Delhi: Oxford UP, 1994; 2nd ed., Oxford UP, 2001.
Sanghvi, Malavika Rajbans. “Where Doubles Dare.” Sunday (13-18 November 1998), pp. 76-80.
Thomas, Rosie. “Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity.” Screen 26, nos. 3-4 (May-August 1985), pp. 116-131.
Thoraval, Yves. Cinemas of India (1896-2000). New Delhi: Macmillan, 2000.
Torgovnick, Jonathan. Bollywood Dreams. New ed. London: Phaidon, 2004.
Vanita, Ruth. “Dosti and Tamanna: Male-Male Love, Difference, and Normativity in Hindi Cinema”, in Diane Mines and Sarah Lamb, eds., Everyday Life in South Asia (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002), pp. 146-58.
Vasudev, Aruna, ed. Frames of Mind. Delhi: UBS Publishers, 1996.
Vasudev, Aruna and Philippe Lenglet, eds., Indian Cinema Superbazaar (Delhi: Vikas, 1983).
Vasudevan, Ravi. “Film Studies, New Cultural History and Experience of Modernity.” Economic and Political Weekly (4 November 1995), pp. 2809-2814.
*Vasudevan, Ravi, ed. Making Meaning in Indian Cinema. Delhi: Oxford UP, 2000; Oxford India Paperbacks, 2002.
Vinnels, Daniel and Brent Skelly. Bollywood Showplaces: Cinema Theatres in India. London: E & E Plumridge, 2002.
*Virdi, Jyotika. The Cinematic ImagiNation: Indian Popular Films as Social History. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 2003.