"Bollywood" for Beginners and Beyond: Introductions to Popular Hindi Cinema Studies

Kajol and Shahrukh Khan in  Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge / The Big Hearted Will Take the Bride (Aditya Chopra, 1995)

With a wary eye on the fast-approaching (in many places at least) and not-so-mellow fruitfulness of a new academic year, Film Studies For Free today brings you its handy guide to online introductions to popular Hindi cinema.

Not all of the wonderful, openly accessible resources linked to below the embedded video are designed for those new to this core academic film studies subject, but all are clearly written, and thus very accessible, as well as highly informative to those at many different stages in their scholarly fascination with this most popular of world cinemas.

Talking of fascination, a nice place to start might be Jonathan Torgovnik's wonderful online portfolio of photographs: Bollywood Dreams (Phaidon Press, 2003).

 

The Seductive World of Indian Cinema (2007)

Discussion between author Anupama Chopra, leading filmmaker Vidhu Vinod Chopra, and Bollywood expert and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at NYU Tejaswini Ganti. The discussion is moderated by Richard Allen, Chair of Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts.

• A Guide to South Asian Cinema, ImagineAsia: British Film Institute, 2002
• Anustup Basu, Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema, PhD e-thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2005
• Gregory D. Booth, 'Traditional Content and Narrative Structure in the Hindi Commercial Cinema', Asian Folklore Studies, Volume 54, 1995: 169-190
• Devon Burk, 'What's A Kiss: The Unchaste Chastity of Bollywood', The Virginia Review of Asian Studies, Vol. XI, Fall 2008
• Corey Creekmur, 'The Devdas Phenomenon', Philip's fil-ums, University of Iowa (date unknown)
• Patrick Colm Hogan, 'Hindi Cinema as a Challenge to Film Theory and Criticism', Projections, Volume 3, Number 2, Winter 2009 , pp. v-ix(1)
• Aniruddha Dutta, 'Nation, Liberalisation And Film Songs: Technology And Hybridisation In Contemporary Hindi Film Music', Wide Screen Journal, 1.16, April 2009
• Faiza Hirji, 'When Local Meets Lucre: Commerce, Culture and Imperialism in Bollywood Cinema', Global Media Journal 4.7, Fall 2005
  
• Wendy F. Hsu, 'Between Narrative and Expressive, Fantasy and Melodrama in Bombay (Bollywood) Film', Virginia Review of Asian Studies, July 2003
• Tabish Khair, 'The ironies of Bollywood', 16:9,  7.31, April 2009
• Mark Lorenzen and Florian Arun Taeube, 'Breakout from Bollywood? Internationalization of Indian Film Industry', DRUID Papers, 07-06
• Philip Lutgendorf with Corey Creekmur, Philip's Fil-Ums: Notes on Indian popular cinema, University of Iowa (date unknown)
• Vijay Mishra, 'Bollywood Cinema: A Critical Genealogy', Asian Studies Institute, 2006
• Anna Morcom, 'The Cinematic Study of Hindi Film Songs', Hindi Film Songs and the Cinema (Ashgate Publishing, 2007) 
• Shammi Nanda,'Censorship and Indian Cinema: The Case of War and Peace', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 38, November 2002
• Sheila J Nayar, 'The values of fantasy: Indian popular cinema through Western scripts', Journal of Popular Culture; Summer 1997; 31, 1  
• Ally Ostrowski, 'Found in Translation: From Hollywood Hits to Bollywood Blockbusters', Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 11, No. 2 October 2007
• Heidi Pauwels, '“The Woman Waylaid at the Well” or Paṇaghaṭa-līlā An Indian Folk Theme Appropriated in Myth and Movies', Asian Ethnology, Volume 69, Number 1, 2010, 1–33
• Aswin Punathambekar and Anandam Kavoori, 'Introduction', Global Bollywood, edited by Anandam P. Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar (NYU Press, 2008)
• Anjali Ram, 'Framing the feminine: diasporic readings of gender in popular Indian cinema', Women's Studies in Communication, March 22 2002
• Shakuntala Rao, 'The Globalization of Bollywood: An Ethnography of Non-Elite Audiences in India', The Communication Review, 10: 57–76, 2007
• Amrita Sen, 'Maqbool and Bollywood Conventions', Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue, edited by Alexander C. Y. Huang, Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009)
• Brian Shoesmith, '[Review of] Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti (eds), Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008', Screening the Past, Issue 25, 2009
• Sangita Shresthova, 'Strictly Bollywood? Story, Camera and Movement in Hindi Film Dance', MSc e-thesis, Princeton, 2003
• Neelam Sidhar Wright, Bollywood eclipsed : the postmodern aesthetics, scholarly appeal, and remaking of contemporary popular Indian cinema, DPhil Thesis, University of Sussex, 2010 
• Neelam Sidhar Wright, '"Tom Cruise? Tarantino? E.T.? ...Indian!": Innovation through Imitation in the Cross-cultural Bollywood Remake', Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation, edited buy Iain Robert Smith, Scope, Issue 15, 2010
• Lakshmi Srinivas, 'The active audience: spectatorship, social relations and the experience of cinema in India', Media, Culture & Society, Vol. 24: 155–173, 2002