Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Westminster
Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies
A 10-chapter monograph that offers an alternative history of 20th-century Bombay cinema. Three chapters are new and previously unpublished, the remaining seven are revised and updated versions of earlier essays. This REF output therefore comprises chapters 1, 7 and 10 (totalling 33,000+ words). Chapter One argues that Bombay’s fantasy and action films should be re-evaluated: Thomas produces new evidence for the importance of fantasy films throughout the decades, especially in the 1950s. She also asserts that histories of Bombay cinema should recognise cultural hybridity as well as nationalist essentialism, and continuities as well as change. The chapter synthesises, in a new argument, a body of research Thomas has undertaken over the past three decades. Chapter Seven draws on Thomas’s personal archive on Bombay’s film industry of the early 1980s, collected over 18 months fieldwork. This previously unpublished ethnographic material reveals how Bombay film production was organised at that time (drawing on insiders’ accounts that include ‘secrets’ of how financing, production and distribution operated); the role of the laboratories in regulating an apparently anarchic system; and how personal power was negotiated within the industry. Chapter Ten updates the saga of film star Nargis to the mid-1990s, the point at which India and the film industry began to change significantly. It provides a sequel to Thomas’s much-cited 1989 essay on Mother India and sketches in the remarkable crossovers between real life and screen fiction that allowed public debates about nationalist identities to continue through the figure of Nargis’s son, Sanjay Dutt. Thomas argues that by the 1990s, nationalist anxieties were being played out over a traumatised male, rather than female, body. She concludes with Dutt’s performances in two recent films (Aladin 2009; Agneepath 2012;) and speculates on the relationship between Dutt’s appeal today and the visceral pleasures of early B-circuit fantasy films.
