Khwaja Ahmad Abbas was a screenwriter, film director and journalist. Among the films he directed are Saat Hindustani, Do Boond Pani and Shehar aur Sapna. A pioneer screenwriter, he wrote scripts for several acclaimed and popular films, among them Neecha Nagar, Jagte Raho and Naya Sansar. His most successful association was with the actor-director Raj Kapoor, for whom he wrote Awara, Shri 420, Mera Naam Joker, Bobby and Henna.
Rachel Dwyer is professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema at SOAS, University of London. Besides Yash Chopra, her published books include Bollywood’s India: Hindi Cinema as a Guide to Modern India, Filming the Gods: Religion and Hindi Cinema, What Do Hindus Believe? and One Hundred Bollywood Films.
Connie Haham teaches English as a Foreign Language in France and USA, studies at the University of Texas and researches Indian cinema. Enchantment of the Mind: Manmohan Desai’s Films (with a foreword by Amitabh Bachchan) was published in 2006.
Ram Kamal Mukherjee is a film journalist and columnist, and vicepresident of Pritish Nandy Communications.
Kidar Sharma was a director, producer, screenwriter and lyricist. As a director, his most successful films were Neel Kamal, Bawre Nain and Jogan. He is best remembered for launching the careers of Bollywood legends like Geeta Bali, Madhubala and Raj Kapoor.
Vinod Mehta is one of India’s best-known editors and journalists. Currently editor-in-chief of the Outlook group of magazines, he was editor of Debonair and the Indian Post, and was founder-editor of India’s first Sunday paper, the Sunday Observer. Besides Meena Kumari, his books include a biography of Sanjay Gandhi and Bombay: A Private View. His memoirs are due to be published by Penguin India in late 2011.
Bunny Reuben is widely regarded as a pioneer among Indian film journalists. He was also a film historian, producer, screenwriter, publicist and author. His published books include Dilip Kumar: Star Legend of Indian Cinema and Pran: A Biography.
Ashraf Aziz teaches at the Howard University, Washington. Hindustani film music is a lifelong passion with him and he has been writing extensively on the subject for many years.
Pritish Nandy is a poet, painter, journalist, media person, and film and television producer. He has published nineteen collections of poems. He has been publishing director of the Times of India and editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, the Independent and Filmfare. He was a member of the Rajya Sabha for six years.
Bhupen Khakhar was a leading Indian artist. His works are in the collections of many galleries across India and the world—notably in the collections of the British Museum, the Tate Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art. Khakhar also wrote stories in Gujarati.
Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most celebrated authors. His books include Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Satanic Verses, Shalimar the Clown and Haroun and the Sea of Stories.
Ismat Chughtai is widely regarded as a master of the modern Urdu short story. A committed feminist, outspoken and often controversial, she has inspired a generation of writers and intellectuals. Author of several short stories—including the iconic ‘Lihaf’ (‘The Quilt’) which earned her as much notoriety as fame—she also wrote novels, including Tehri Lakeer (Crooked Line), Ziddi (The Stubborn One), Maasuma (The Innocent) and Dil ki Duniya (The Realm of the Heart). She also wrote for Hindi cinema, including scripts for M.S. Sathyu’s Garam Hawa.
Dada (Krishna) Kondke was a Marathi actor and film producer. One of the most popular personalities of the Marathi stage and film industry, he was also famous for his risqué productions full of double entendres.
Kobita Sarkar was the pen name adopted by Rita Ray, a noted film critic and a long-time member of the Central Board of Film Censors.
Nasreen Munni Kabir is a television producer based in UK. Her work includes the documentaries Movie Mahal, In Search of Guru Dutt, Follow That Star (a profile of Amitabh Bachchan) and The Inner and Outer World of Shah Rukh Khan. She has also published books on Hindi cinema, including Talking Films, Bollywood: The Indian Cinema Story, Guru Dutt: A Life in Cinema, Lata Mangeshkar … In Her Own Voice and A.R. Rahman: The Spirit of Music.
Khagesh Dev Burman belongs to the royal family of Tripura, and shares the same heritage and lineage as the legendary music composer Sachin Dev Burman. A poet and novelist in Bengali, he has written, among other works, biographies of S.D. Burman and R.D. Burman. English translations of both books are forthcoming from Penguin India.
Adil Jussawalla is one of India’s finest poets in English. His published works include two books of poems, Land’s End and Missing Person. He also edited the anthology New Writing in India for Penguin in 1974.
Naresh Fernandes is a journalist and writer, currently editor-in-chief of Time Out magazine, in charge of the Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore editions. He has co-authored The Murder of the Mills, an examination of Mumbai’s textile mills, and co-edited Bombay Meri Jaan: Writings on Mumbai. He has also authored the title essay for Bombay Then, Mumbai Now, a photographic book on the city.
Dev Anand is a legendary Indian Bollywood actor and film producer. In his heyday as a star, he was considered the epitome of the suave, urban gentleman. His autobiography, Romancing with Life, is the first-ever fullfledged memoir written by a leading Bollywood star.
Saadat Hasan Manto is the most widely read and the most controversial short-story writer in Urdu. In a literary, journalistic, radio-scripting and screenwriting career spread over more than two decades, he produced twenty-two collections of short stories, one novel, five collections of radio plays, three collections of essays, two collections of personal sketches and many scripts for films.
Bhagwan Das Garga is one of India’s most eminent film scholars and a founder-member of the National Film Archive, Pune. He has written, directed and produced over fifty documentary films. He served as a member of the Film Advisory Board for many years and was honoured by the Film Federation of India for his contribution to the growth of cinema in the country. In 1996, Garga received the first V. Shantaram Award for Lifetime Achievement in the field of documentary films at the Mumbai International Film Festival. He is the author of So Many Cinemas: The Motion Picture in India and The Art of Cinema: An Insider’s Journey through Fifty Years of Film History.
Khushwant Singh is India’s best-known writer and columnist. He was founder-editor of Yojana, and editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, the National Herald and the Hindustan Times. He is also the author of several books, including the novels Train to Pakistan, I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale, Delhi, The Company of Women and The Sunset Club, the classic two-volume A History of the Sikhs, and a number of translations and non-fiction books on Sikh religion and culture, Delhi, nature, current affairs and Urdu poetry. His autobiography, Truth, Love and a Little Malice, was published in 2002. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1974 but returned the decoration in 1984 in protest against the storming of the Golden Temple by the Indian army. In 2007, he was awarded the Padma Vibhushan.
Bhisham Sahni was born into a devout Arya Samaj family in Rawalpindi. While working at his father’s import business he began teaching, staging plays, writing stories and becoming involved in the activities of the Indian National Congress. After Partition, he and his family settled in Delhi, where he was a lecturer at a Delhi University college and took to writing more earnestly. His writings include seven novels, nine collections of short stories, six plays and a biography of his brother, the actor and writer Balraj Sahni. Many of his books have been translated into numerous foreign and most major Indian languages. In 1999 he received the Shlaka Award, the highest literary award from the Delhi government.
Madhu Jain studied French literature at the Sorbonne in Paris before she began her long career in journalism. She has worked for the Statesman, the French national daily La Croix, India Today, Outlook and The Hindu, writing on politics, foreign affairs, culture, contemporary life, art and cinema. She has curated two art exhibitions—Kitsch Kitsch Hota Hai, on kitsch and the contemporary imagination, and the other on the painter Viswanadhan.
Suketu Mehta is a fiction writer and journalist based in New York. For his fiction he has won the Whiting Writers Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Mehta’s work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, Granta, Harper’s, Time, Condé Nast Traveler, and the Village Voice, and has been featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Mehta also co-wrote the film Mission Kashmir. Maximum City has won the 2005 Kiriyama Prize for Non-fiction, was short-listed for the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Book Prize for Non-fiction 2005, and chosen as Book of the Year for 2004 by the Economist. Suketu Mehta was also a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize.
Mukul Kesavan teaches history at Jamia Millia Islamia, blogs on cricinfo.com and writes fiction when he can. He has written a novel, Looking through Glass; a political tract, Secular Common Sense; and a collection of essays on cricket, Men in White: A Book of Cricket.
Dorothee Wenner is a freelance writer and film-maker based in Berlin. She also works as a curator for the Berlin International Film Festival. Her passion for Indian cinema has made her a frequent visitor to Mumbai, working on various projects. She made a documentary on ‘The Ladies Special’ train in Mumbai, has been co-curator of an exhibition, Bollywood– Indian Cinema and Switzerland, in Zurich’s Museum of Design. Her latest project is a multimedia exhibition on cultural transfer called ‘Import/Export’, which explores the mutual perception between India and Germany/Austria in times of globalization.
Vir Sanghvi is probably the best-known Indian journalist of his generation. In 1978 he became the youngest editor in the history of Indian journalism when he was appointed editor of Bombay at the age of twenty-two. He became editor of Imprint at twenty-six and of Sunday at thirty. From 1999 to 2004 he was editor of the Hindustan Times. He is also one of India’s leading television anchors.
R.K. Narayan is the renowned author of Swami and Friends and its successor, The Bachelor of Arts, two of the twelve novels based in the fictitious place Malgudi. In 1958 Narayan’s work The Guide won him the Sahitya Akademi Award for English, the country’s highest literary honour. In addition to his novels, Narayan has authored five collections of short stories, two travel books, two volumes of essays and a volume of memoirs.
Shobhaa Dé is an obsessive-compulsive writer of books. Her columns are ubiquitous, appearing in nearly every newspaper and magazine of note. They carry her customarily edgy observations on matters of politics, the economy, business and commerce, the heart and the hearth. Best-selling author, jet-setting commentator and honest critic, she is most at home in Mumbai—a city which is also a recurrent ‘character’ in much of her work.
Manna Dey began his career as a playback singer with the film Tamanna in 1943. Since then he has recorded over 3500 songs in a number of languages. A versatile singer with in-depth knowledge of classical music, he has enthralled listeners the world over with his dulcet voice and impeccable command over the medium. He has received several awards including the Lata Mangeshkar Award of the Government of Madhya Pradesh (1985), the Padma Shri (1971) and the Padma Bhushan (2005). He has also been honoured with the title of National Singer of India by the Government of India.
Kamini Mathai was born in Vellore, Tamil Nadu. She began her career in journalism as a features writer for the New Indian Express in 1998, where she continued to work for close to ten years. She now works with the Times of India. She is the author of A.R. Rahman: The Musical Storm.
Anupama Chopra has lived in and written about the Mumbai film industry for the last twenty years. Her articles bring Bollywood alive for her reader; they are not only a study of an industry but also a tribute to a nation’s obsession.
Susmita Dasgupta has a PhD on Amitabh Bachchan from Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has been a Senior Fellow at the National Film Archive of India, Pune, where she worked on the history of ideas of Indian popular cinema since its inception. Susmita teaches film appreciation in management schools and also works as deputy chief economist with the economic research unit of the ministry of steel. She has over seventy publications in journals that cover issues of sociology, media and political economy. Her forthcoming book is an appreciation of the film Deewar.