Cinema is a major industry in India. It is also the country’s most powerful cultural form. Yet until now there has been no major examination of the ways in which Bombay’s films serve as a medium for the experience of urban India. Mazumdar’s book reveals a complex modern world convulsed by social crises and transformed by globalization. It leads us into the heart of India’s urban labyrinth, changing and deepening our understanding of a country, its cities, and its cinema.

‘Investigating urban types—angry young men, dangerous psychotics, street loafers, prostitutes, yuppies and gangsters—Ranjani Mazumdar shows how recent Indian cinema provides an archive of urban spaces and of the trauma of a deep social disillusionment ... an urban space imploding under the pressure of globalization and new technology’, says the film critic Tom Gunning.

‘Bombay Cinema is an inspired account of Hindi films as a rich and textured archive of modern urban life in India ... A true gem’, says the historian Gyan Prakash.