From Publishers Weekly
Drawing on postcolonial and film theory, Vijay Mishra (The Gothic Sublime), a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Australia's Murdoch University, sees Indian cinema as an effort to cut across the country's numerous communities and achieve a pan-Indian culture. In Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire, Mishra explores film from Bombay in light of national and international cultural and aesthetic proclivities, including the prevalence of epics, the relegation of female actors to supporting roles, film representations of the Indian diaspora and sexual subtexts in the Indian gothic. Always sticking close to the countless films themselves (e.g. Mother India, Kismet, Zanjeer) and other texts (fanzines, a Salman Rushdie novel, film reviews), Mishra offers an erudite, scholarly and hip tribute to Indian cinema in all its glory, folly and abundance. 38 b&w photos.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Review
...the particular strength of
Bollywood Cinema, indeed, is the plurality of critical perspectives brought to bear and the author's ability to synthesize them into a coherent whole.
James Chapman, Film International...the book...rewards the reader with provocative ideas on a dozen topics: anticolonial and postcolonial struggles, melodrama, gender roles, patriarchal power, androgyny, gothic style, diaspora, and of course particular movies (like
Mother India) and stars (like Amitabh Bachchan)..
CHOICE, P.H. Stacy, University of HartfordA masterly synthesis of existing scholarship on Bombay cinema as well as a timely exploration of the growing importance that this cinema is assuming in the Indian diaspora. . . . an engaging study.
Sumita Chakravarty, New School UniversityHere, finally, is a book on Bollywood that is written for those who have experienced Bollywood as well as those who are strangers to that phenomenon. Mishra's analysis of Bollywood cinema is a considerable one within a handful of such analyses emerging today from within academe. It has in it something for the film historian, the curious newcomer, the fan, and the critic.
Sonora Jh-Nambiar, Seattle University, Communication Research Trends, 2004