Publishing on various aspects of the Indian cinema has been a growth area in the past decade. Academic readers should look at M. Madhava Prasad’s landmark Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (Oxford University Press, 1998), Ravi Vasudevan’s The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema (Permanent Black/Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011), and Ranjani Majumdar’s Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Most of India’s several cinemas now have texts dedicated to their histories and some introducing film studies perspectives to the regions: e.g. S. V. Srinivas’s Politics as Performance: A Social History of the Telugu Cinema (Permanent Black, 2013) on Telugu, Anand Pandian’s Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation (Duke University Press, 2015) on Tamil film, and the anthology Women in Malayalam Cinema: Naturalising Gender Hierarchies (ed. Meena T. Pillai, Orient Black Swan, 2010).
Perhaps the most significant writing in recent years has been on the Bollywood phenomenon. For an overall introduction a useful read is Tejaswini Ganti’s Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (Routledge, 2013), and her Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Duke University Press, 2012), which could be read alongside the anthology Global Bollywood (ed. Anandam P. Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar, New York University Press, 2008).
This text on the Indian cinema largely complements the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2nd edn. 2001) that I edited with Paul Willemen, Much of the essential data for this text has been derived from there. The Encyclopaedia has recently been expanded, and updated, into an online version, http://indiancine.ma. Readers wanting to be clued into further reading/viewing may wish to visit the site which also now includes, along with data about the cinema, a crowd-sourced initiative to make available as many films as exist in the public domain.