Patrick Colm Hogan's new book Understanding Indian Movies: Culture, Cognition, and Cinematic Imagination not only adds significantly to the growing body of critical scholarship on South Asian cinema, but does so in a way that is pedagogically useful for those of us who teach undergraduates. He does this by initially identifying some of the historical obstacles to the serious treatment of Indian popular films, such as the “cross-cultural division between art and popular culture” (p. 2), and arguing against them, and then identifying three basic narrative types—heroic, romantic, and sacrificial—that he uses as he considers “the fundamental universals of narrative, theme, and emotion” (p. 7) in Indian film. Once Hogan has laid out his framework, he proceeds to examine particular issues in each of his five chapters as he analyzes a good selection of films in those various lights.

The specific films include such classics as Mother India and the earlier Umrao Jaan, selections from the parallel as well as popular cinema, and movies from the South as well as from the North. He brings to bear Indian aesthetic theory and Western cognitive science in his exploration of “the relation between universals and cultural particularity” (p. 7).

The author brings a novel approach to his study of these films. Others have studied Bollywood movies from a cultural studies perspective, but few take these popular blockbusters seriously. Hogan shows us why we should, exploring them in terms of rasa theory, on the one hand, and on the other, asking us to think about their musical interludes—which pose an obstacle to many Western viewers—in terms of provenance and reception. “The universal principles that give rise to the interlude do so because they manifest universal functions” (p. 161). To explain what he means, the author reminds us that stories are told in segments, “joined at points where there is some significant change” (p. 161), and it is at these junctures that we find the song and dance numbers for which Indian movies are best known. Cross-culturally, these junctures “are often marked by distinctive non-story features” (p. 162). The features may vary in different cultural contexts, but they are always marked. Just as Shakespeare shifts at key points from iambic pentameter to verse, so the shift from background (diegetic) music to nondiegetic (front-and-center) music, or even “paradiegetic” music, as Hogan suggests we call it, marks something important. It may be a change in relationship between the main characters, or a temporal shift or suspension, to name but two possibilities, and the musical interlude frequently “enacts a metaphor” (p. 166) about the lovers. In fact, Hogan's whole discussion of the recent film Kabhi Khushi, Kabhie Gham has compelled me to reconsider my previous view of the movie as perpetuating a particular nationalist viewpoint, to see instead the producers' strong stance against mindless adherence to social norms. The filmmakers' purpose may well be something quite the opposite.

Understanding Indian Movies is a book that I plan to use in a course on religion in South Asian cinema next fall. Its structure will work well in the classroom. The author keeps bringing the reader back to the important issues throughout the text, with references to other films and narrative themes that will be familiar to the Western reader, and this is very useful for undergraduates. Pedagogically even more compelling, he develops his arguments cumulatively so that we can very easily follow where he wants to lead us.

Central to the book is the idea that the universals in which Holm is interested “are the underlying, relatively abstract forms that are particularized socially and historically in films and other cultural practices and artifacts” (p. 254). The author insists that another culture does not have to be an enigma, that we can learn what is important in another time and place. “But, of course, to experience any degree of such internalization, we need to link the other culture with the universal principles, and we need to do this by way of cultural specificity, not making the error of assuming that universal principles are particularized in the same way from one society to another” (p. 254). This is a new way to look at South Asian cinema. Because Hogan's exposition is so clear, readers need prior experience of South Asia to make sense of the book. Those of us who work in the field will get all the more out of Hogan's very persuasive arguments. Understanding Indian Movies: Culture, Cognition, and Cinematic Imagination is a wonderful and welcome contribution.