This little book by Tejaswini Ganti is the ideal introduction for anyone who wants to get to know Bollywood. Smart, concise, it's a very easy and informative read.
After an historical introduction to Indian cinema from the beginnings (just after the invention of cinema) to the glossy new millenium Bollywood of ZeeTV and NRI romances; Ganti procedes to a general presentation of the inner workings of the Hindi Film Industry (name usually prefered by scholars to the term Bollywood): how is a film made in Bombay ? who produces, how? who distributes, where? who has the power? This part along with the long historical introduction are the core material of the book, short but truly essential.
NB Ganti focuses on Bollywood (located in Bombay). for beginners who think that Indian cinema is Bollywood, take note: it's not. Therefore the book acknowledges Middle cinema, art cinema, tamil, telugu, bengali cinema but never deals with these topics.
After the "technical" part of the book, the rest is dedicated to an overview of the major films and personnalities of the profession. The major films chapter provides a very useful filmography that gives the neofit a very interesting selection of films to get to know Bollywood thru the ages. Each film has a detailed summary that sometimes includes historical insights or important trivia. Then there is the chapter about who's who in Bollywood, she lists major directors (although for most recent cinema many names are missing, as she herself underlines in the end notes), music and lyrics writers, actors and actresses (here again many recent actors and actresses box office sweethearts are overlooked but it's difficult to keep up with the star system and not all stars deserve such academic attention anyway, so if you're a Bollywood geek get over the absence of Salman Khan or Rani Mukherjee in that section).
The end of the book is a series of interviews with directors, actors, producers... and this is where you will eventually find the "new comers" such as ShahRukh Khan (in a really cute itw for that matter) ...
Ganti provides a short bibliography which is also very needed since ressources on Bollywood are not necessarily the easiest to find.
Overall a great little guide that can prove essential to any world cinema class or even (in my case) anthropology class.
as a complement to that guide I recommand Prasad's book Ideology of the hindi film a historical construction, a very insightful book with detailed analysis of such classics as Deewar for instance.
