Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies

This book 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 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, engaging with global popular culture and transcultural flows of cosmopolitan modernity and postmodernity.