Bollywood: A History

Hollywood may define our idea of movies but it is the city of Bombay on the west coast of India that is now the centre of world cinema. Every year the Indian film industry produces more than 1,000 feature films, every day 14 million Indians go to a movie than for Hollywood ones. The rise of Bombay as the film capital of the world has been both remarkable and amazing. Bollywood takes the cinematic techniques of Hollywood and uses them to produce movie that bear no relation to the original but have a compelling appeal that in the last half century has enthralled audiences throughout Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. The movies themselves are a self-contained world with their multiple song and dance routines, intense melodrama, and plots that contain everything from farce to tragedy but always produce a happy ending. The men and women who created these movies are even more remarkable and it is this fantastic, rich, diverse story, a veritable Indian fairyland, that Mihir Bose, a native of Bombay, tells with vivid brilliance in the first comprehensive history of this major social and cultural phenomenon.

About the Author

Mihir Bose was born in 1947, just before Indian independence, and grew up in Bombay. He went to England in 1969 to study and qualified as a chartered accountant. Almost immediately he took to his first love of journalism and writing. He has written for all the major newspapers in Britain, including the Sunday Times for twenty years and the Daily Telegraph since 1995. Having concentrated on business journalism in his early years he now specializes in investigative sports reporting, particularly the growing field of sports business and politics. He has won several awards for his newspaper writing, including Business Columnist of the Year, Sports Reporter of the year and Sports Story of the Year. His History of Indian Cricket was the first book by an Indian writer to win the prestigious Cricket Society Literary Award in 1990 His study of sports and apartheid Sporting Colours was runner-up in the 1994 William Hill Sports Books of the Year Award. He has so far written twenty-one books ranging from histories and biographies to books on business, cricket and football. He lives with his wife in west London.