List of Tables and Figures Credits Acknowledgments 1. Bombay before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies Part One Introduction to Part One 2. Thieves of the Orient: The Arabian Nights in Early Indian Cinema 3. Distant Voices, Magic Knives: Lal-e-Yaman and the Transition to Sound in Bombay Cinema 4. Not Quite (Pearl) White: Fearless Nadia, Queen of the Stunts 5. Zimbo and Son Meet the Girl with a Gun 6. Still Magic: An Aladdin’s Cave of 1950s B-Movie Fantasy Part Two Introduction to Part Two 7. Where the Money Flows, the Camera Rolls 8. Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity 9. Sanctity and Scandal: The Mythologisation of Mother India 10. Mother India Maligned: The Saga of Sanjay Dutt References and Select Bibliography Index

"In this powerful account, Rosie Thomas opens out filmic artifacts to an array of dazzling reflections shedding new light on the movement and circulation of popular culture in India. With a remarkable body of research conducted over a period of time, Bombay before Bollywood decisively challenges certain assumptions about India, its cinemas, and its audiences." — Ranjani Mazumdar, author of Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City"This is the archaeology of media performed with intellect, wit, and passion. Rosie Thomas pioneered this field and she remains its most brilliantly iridescent critic and advocate. If only all film studies were this revelatory and this enjoyable!" — Christopher Pinney, author of Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs"Rosie Thomas's body of research over the last twenty-five years has set up key discourses in the study of Indian popular cinema. This book brings together her pioneering fieldwork into film industry categories and practices, and her more recent bid to resurrect a history made well-nigh clandestine by official narratives: the significance of Arabian Nights fantasies, stunt films, and visceral attractions in Bombay cinema. Pleasurably crafted and provocatively argued, Bombay before Bollywood is an important intervention in Indian and world cinema studies." — Ravi Vasudevan, author of The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema