Bollywood movies have long been known for their colorful song-and-dance numbers and knack for combining drama, comedy, action-adventure, and music. But these exciting and often amusing films rarely reflect the reality of life on the Indian subcontinent. Exploring the nature of mainstream Hindi cinema, the strikingly illustrated Bollywood’s Indiaexamines its nonrealistic depictions of everyday life in India and what it reveals about Indian society.
 
Showing how escapism and entertainment function in Bollywood cinema, Rachel Dwyer argues that Hindi cinema’s interpretations of India over the last two decades are a reliable guide to understanding the nation’s changing hopes and dreams. She looks at the ways Bollywood has imagined and portrayed the unity and diversity of the country—what it believes and feels, as well as life at home and in public. Using Dwyer’s two decades spent working with filmmakers and discussing movies with critics and moviegoers,Bollywood’s India is an illuminating look at Hindi cinema.

As the largest producer of films in the world, Indian cinema is both a major industry and a distinctive art form that permeates daily life in that country and shapes emerging global cultures elsewhere. While much has been written on the history of Indian cinema, its iconography and aesthetics have yet to be analyzed as reflections of national and cultural identities. In this important new work, Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel focus on the development of Bombay-based commercial cinema since 1913, exploring the symbolic role of settings and costumes in staging the nation and the function of makeup and hairstyles in defining notions of beauty, sexuality, and consumption. The authors also examine how factors such as ethnicity, modernization, and Westernization impact reception of film along caste, region, language, and religious lines.

The economic influence of advertising in actually determining film content and the dissemination of its imagery are also discussed. Film studies scholars recently have begun to investigate advertising in the film industry and this book makes an important contribution to this emerging subfield in its engagement with Indian cinema and the impact of advertising on the culture at large.