Although I can think of only one popular film (Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Anand, 1970) that credits the “City of Bombay” in its opening titles, it has often seemed to me that western India's great metropolis (now officially styled Mumbai) and the headquarters of its Hindi cinema industry is also an implicit subject of a great deal of the latter's output. It is not simply that local production companies constantly use the city and its environs as a convenient source for location shooting, or even that the distinctive cosmopolitanism of this polyglot and multiethnic port figures so prominently in the mise-en-scène of numerous films. Rather, what has been striking about Hindi cinema throughout the postindependence era has been its preoccupation with urbanism itself, presented in both utopian and dystopian registers, and with the metropolis—and above all, Bombay/Mumbai in its many moods—as a key backdrop for the dominant cinematic genre of “social” film. This omnibus category, referring loosely to any melodrama with a contemporary setting (and hence not “historical” or “mythological”), and encompassing many of the most successful films of the past six decades, has regularly highlighted dilemmas of “tradition” versus “modernity,” of “India” versus the “West,” and of sharp contrasts between wealth and poverty, morality and corruption, and gender roles. All these themes have been played out preeminently within an urbanized landscape, and the modern and postmodern Indian city, real and imagined, has both shaped and been shaped by them. Drawing on scholarship in film and literary criticism, cultural studies, architecture and urban design and on interviews with actors, directors, and screenplay writers, Ranjani Mazumdar's groundbreaking book explores the complex relationship between Hindi cinema and the city and applies the resulting insights to innovative readings of a number of important films of the past four decades. Although the analysis proceeds roughly chronologically, beginning in the 1970s with deepening popular disillusionment with the Congress Party mandate in the face of rising economic woes and lingering social problems, this is less a systematic history of urban representations in film than a thematic study posited on the assumption that the post-1970 period has been marked by distinctive trends in the cinematic portrayal of urban life.

The preface offers a pleasantly unapologetic “apology” for Mazumdar's approach to popular cinema, which, although critical and scholarly, acknowledges the power of (what some have called) this “modern technological folk form” to fascinate, entertain, and inspire viewers, including the author; she rightly eschews the narrow “ideological dismissal” favored by some other recent authors (pp. x–xi). This is followed by a fine introduction that examines what she terms “the imagined city of cinema” (p. xviii) and its evolving portrayal in the postindependence period. Here she argues that, because anticolonial Indian nationalism had especially valorized the (imagined) village, the waning of postindependence euphoria during the 1970s found its clearest reflection in Bombay cinema's urban allegories, and this trend continued, albeit in different registers, in the post- (economic) liberalization and globalization era of the 1990s and beyond. In critical reflections supplemented by brief passages from Hindi poetry, she introduces the concept of the “footpath” as an emotionally charged urban space, (Unfortunately, she never properly defines this key Indian-English term, which may be inadequately rendered “sidewalk,” but that more properly refers to the vague margins of the street, which are not merely thronged by pedestrians but are also the locus of diverse informal commercial activities as well as the literal home to vast, semitransient populations.)

Each of the five numbered chapters that follow explores a theme in urban representation, introduced through an insightful (and mostly jargon-free) discussion of pertinent scholarship and then developed through extended analysis of several key films. Chapter 1, “Rage on Screen,” focuses on the cinematic representation of anger, revenge, and fear against the backdrop of the “unintended city”—the dark, subaltern shadow of the planned metropolis of Nehruvian development—as epitomized in the Amitabh Bachchan films of the 1970s and early 1980s (Deewar, 1975, receives special attention) with their iconic “angry young man” as hero (pp. 8–28; unaccountably, Mazumdar omits the adjective “young” from this well-known formula). She then jumps two decades to consider several films featuring revenge-driven “psychotic” antiheroes (notably Baazigar, 1993, which helped make Shahrukh Khan a major star) who incarnate urban anxiety regarding the “stranger” (pp. 32–40).

Chapter 2, “The Rebellious Tapori,” draws on Mazumdar's fine research, both as a scholar and documentary filmmaker, into the representation of the fast-talking street tough especially associated with actor Aamir Khan. Khan's tapori celebrates a subaltern identity particularly through the performative use of Bambayya Hindi, a hybrid dialect associated with the city's underclass, and endears himself to audiences through a “combined projection of cynicism and innocence” (p. 51). As Mazumdar effectively shows (pp. 53–78), this colorful hero lends ideological complexity to even such predictable masala films as Rangeela (1995) and Ghulam (1998).

The third chapter, “Desiring Women,” provides a useful synopsis of shifting female representations in popular cinema, from the heroine-vamp dyad that dominated films until well into the 1980s, to the more recent trend toward an integral heroine whose acknowledged sexuality presents a spectacular embodiment of globalized consumer culture. This discussion is also notable for its detailed analysis of the choreography and camerawork of several song sequences (pp. 102–8)—key components of popular cinema that are mostly neglected in scholarly writing.

Chapter 4, “The Panoramic Interior,” turns to another neglected topic—set design—using it as a thematic wedge to crack the glossy surface of such postliberalization mega-hits as Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (1994), Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1999), and Dil Chahta Hai (2001). Drawing on studies of advertising and consumer culture, and again paying welcome attention to camera placement and movement, Mazumdar shows how the hyperbolic sets of these films reflect a fantasied (and sometimes actual) upper-middle-class flight from India's chaotic urban spaces.

Equally impressive is the treatment in chapter 6 of “Gangland Bombay,” which combines a short history of the city's criminal underworld, insights from scholarship on film noir, and Anthony Viddler's notion of “the architectural uncanny” in support of penetrating analyses of Vidhu Vinod Chopra's Parinda (1989) and Ram Gopal Varma's Satya (1998) and Company (2002). Again, Mazumdar gives notable scrutiny to spatial mise-en-scène as well as to the contributions of lighting, sound effects, and editing in creating an atmosphere of terror and urban decay. The book's Conclusion, subtitled “After Life,” focuses on three recent (2000–2004) low-budget films that (in the author's view) highlight urban women and suggest fresh possibilities for both gender dynamics and cinematic experience.

No book is perfect, and Mazumdar's has some notable lacunae. Her (defensible) decision to start with the 1970s leaves the task of analyzing the no less important representations of urbanism during the previous two postindependence decades to others; landmark films such as Shree 420 (1955) and Pyaasa (1957), cited in passing, seem to anticipate a number of the trends analyzed here in a manner that deserves more focused attention. And despite the author's refreshingly uncondescending approach to popular cinema, her emphasis on “crisis” definitely highlights the dystopian side of urban representation, as suggested in her repeated invocation (beginning on p. xxi) of “urban delirium.” That India's stressed cities somehow continue to represent hope and possibility to millions of migrants, as well as an experience of “urban euphoria” that is often represented cinematically (one thinks of, e.g., the recent Munna Bhai gangster comedies) is rarely acknowledged here. The book also takes for granted considerable knowledge of both Indian culture and cinema; a number of key terms (as in my example of “footpath”) are not well defined, and references to historical events as well as to important directors and films include little contextual information to guide the novice. Yet, on balance, these are small quibbles with a landmark study—carefully researched, well organized, and offering refreshingly uncondescending and strikingly insightful discussions of mainstream films—that deserves to be read by anyone interested in India's popular cinema or its contemporary urban life.