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ShareMumbai: A lot has been written about Bollywood, but the subjects available are still limited to the big stars. Trends and film genres have gone largely unexplored.
For something of its size, depth and popularity, Bollywood, as the Hindi film industry is called, is ill-served where books about it are concerned. There is a plethora of books on Hindi cinema out there, but most of them have been published only in the last decade or so. Before that, writers and publishers of English books gave Hindi cinema a wide berth, dismissing it as the opium of the masses. Even now, most of the books have concentrated on a handful of saleable stars and filmmakers; the wider aspects of cinema remain largely ignored, unless one counts the critical analyses done by NRI academics eager to see hidden meanings in popular culture.
Among the earliest books on a film star was one by journalist Vinod Mehta who wrote a biography of Meena Kumari for Jaico. The actress had died a few years before. Presumably it did not sell very well, because neither the publisher nor the writer attempted another film-star biography.
It was not until the 1990s that another book on a Hindi cinema personality was published. Nasreen Munni Kabir wrote a book on Guru Dutt, drawn mainly from her script on a documentary on the filmmaker. Kabir had made a series of films for Channel 4, focusing on some of the biggest names of Hindi cinema, alive and dead, ranging from Guru Dutt and Amitabh Bachchan to Lata Mangeshkar. Kabir can be credited with single-handedly drawing attention of the West to Hindi cinema in a serious yet accessible way. The documentary on Guru Dutt, which had interviews with his heroines and technicians turned the late producer-director into a cult figure by bringing him to the notice of a young generation of film-goers to whom he was largely an unknown quantity.
His writer Abrar Alvi recently talked about his 10 years with Dutt to journalist Sathya Saran.
In Kabir's book, members of Dutt's team, including Alvi and cameraman VK Murthy give fascinating insights into the way Dutt conceptualised his films and his shots. Kabir has also written other books including one on Javed Akhtar and a translation of the Mughal-e-Azam script, but her Dutt book remains the best.
Publicist-journalist Bunny Reuben, who was a film industry insider, wrote three books, one each on Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar and Pran. The writing was patchy and 'filmi', but the books give an inside glimpse of their professional and personal lives and even touched upon some of the scandal that surrounded the stars. All three are easy reads, but that's about it.
To get a more studied account of the Kapoors, Madhu Jain's book on the first family of Hindi cinema is a much better bet. Critics have said that the book runs out of steam after the chapters on Prithviraj Kapoor and Raj Kapoor, and younger readers may find the absence of Karishma and Kareena Kapoor (and now Ranbir) as jarring, but it is still an enjoyable account of how Prithviraj Kapoor spawned the film dynasty that has no parallel.
Lord Meghnad Desai, the economist and political scientist took a shot at writing about his childhood hero Dilip Kumar, placing him squarely in the middle of the secular Nehruvian project. An interesting idea which failed to take off because Desai limited himself to the films he had seen as a college student before he left India, the last one being Leader, surely one of Dilip Kumar's worst outings. Desai later set out to write on Nargis Dutt but the book was eventually written by his wife Kishwar. Several other books have been written on Nargis, including one by her daughter Priya, another by journalist TJS George in 1994 and a third by Anuradha Guha.
These are all stars of yesteryears. Many other more recent stars, such as Amitabh Bachchan, Hema Malini and Shah Rukh Khan have also been the subjects of biographies. Anupama Chopra tried to make Shah Rukh into a symbol of a liberalised India, using his endorsements and popular films as a metaphor, while Khan's friend Mushtaq Sheikh, who had access to the star's pictures and personal anecdotes, wrote a gushy book with a glowing account of his life. Bhawna Somaaya, the veteran film journalist has written several books including on Bachchan and Hema Malini but it was not till Khalid Mohammed's To Be Or Not To B that we really got a book worthy of him. Though the book was done with Bachchan's full cooperation (unlike another by Jessica Hines where he remained behind a wall), it avoided becoming hagiographic thanks to Mohammed's journalistic skills. Bachchan opened up like never before and perhaps never again. This remains one of the best books on an Indian film star ever done.
Getting stars to talk about their lives is difficult; indeed, even meeting them is not an easy task. The dancer Helen declined to meet her putative biographer Jerry Pinto -- he went ahead and wrote a book anyway. The weakness is apparent, because most of the details are through hearsay or secondary sources, and though Pinto analyses her roles, it all seems flimsy in the end.
The best bet, therefore, is for a star to write a book himself or herself. This has all the inherent dangers of autobiographies -- selective memory -- but if well done, can be an enlightening and entertaining read. Vyjantimala ruffled a lot of feathers when she wrote her memoirs, getting both Dilip Kumar's and Raj Kapoor's families fuming. But Dev Anand's delightful Romancing With Life, though no less candid, raised considerably less dust. Anand's book reflects the man's indefatigable lust for life, his optimism and his memories of Bombay in the 1940s and 50s, when the golden era of Hindi cinema was just dawning. Stars generally have not been inclined to write about themselves, though a few books are said to be in the offing.
Among the other interesting books on Hindi cinema are The Making Of Sholay by Anupama Chopra, an account of how one of the biggest blockbusters was made, a book on Yash Chopra by British Bollywood maven Rachel O'dwyer and a series of books on film personalities published by Rupa. There is a lot out there in the bookshops, but to reiterate, the range of subjects still remains limited. We do not, for example, have a credible book on the films on commercially successful directors like Shakti Samanta, Raj Khosla or Vijay Anand, almost nothing on art cinema and barely a couple of good books on Hindi film music. Film genres or eras too have gone unexplored. Many NRI academics have written serious and learned books examining subjects like "Auteurship and the lure of romance" and "The texts of Mother India," but these tend to be jargon-filled exercises. Bollywood has achieved intellectual legitimacy in courses on post-modernism and popular culture. This is all for the good, and the fervent fan can only hope that there will be more books on Hindi cinema, one of the truly Indian art forms of the 20th century, in the coming years.
