Hello friend, I was wondering if you have book recommendations for 60s-80s Mumbai, the history of the city etc + any book/essay recs for the vintage Bollywood film industry
hii, how do you do. here you go!
Mumbai Fables by Gyan Prakash — just generally a good start; looks at the politics, the cultural shifts, crime, urban development etc in the city and also covers the development of cinema and arts in the city
Bombay: A Metaphor for Modern India, edited by Sujata Patel, Alice Thorner — an anthology of essays on the city; highly interdisciplinary so you'll find a very broad overview of the post-independence city
Bombay Cinema: Archive of a City by Ranjani Mazumdar — the cultural and political development of cinema in Bombay and how both the city and cinema sort of shaped each other
The Greatest Show on Earth: Writings on Bollywood, edited by Jerry Pinto — i don't know what exactly you're looking for, but this has essays on a good amount of diverse themes in Bollywood and across a considerable period of time
Ire in the Soul: Bollywood's Angry Years by Nikhat Kazmi — this is commentary on the "angry young man" trope from the 70s to vaguely the 90s; a little outdated now, but there's some interesting stuff about the trope itself
Bollywood by Tejaswani Ganti — on very early cinema and how it took off; there's also a chapter on bombay specifically i think
From Bombay to Bollywood by Aswin Punathambekar — this is a little more recent and it looks at how the industry went global, drawing on a nexus of postcolonial timing, diasporic networks, and state institutions
Aviation, Tourism and Dreaming in the 1960s Bombay Cinema —Ranjani Mazumdar
Re-embodying the “Classical”: The Bombay Film Song in the 1950s — Shikha Jhingan
Cinema from Bombay to 'Bollywood' — K Bhaumik
Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid From Bollywood to the Emergency — Ashish Rajadhyaksha
