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Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency by Ashish Rajadhyaksha. Indiana University Press 2009. $75.00 hardcover; $27.95 paper. 432 pages
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, coeditor of the wellknown Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema,1 has produced another encyclopedic work of great breadth and depth (over 400 pages long). However, as the author acknowledges, this book is more an intellectual autobiography than an encyclopedia because it brings togetiier much of Rajadhyaksha's thinking and many of his writings from the early 1980s to the 2000s. He extensively updates the earlier materials For the book, includes more recent empirical evidence,, and recasts it all in a new theoretical light for the present.
The book is divided into three sections; the first section, "The Argument," consists, of the Introduction. The second section, "The Evidence," is divided into four parts: "'Bollywood' and the Performing Citizen"; "The Cinema-Effèct and the State"; "1970s Questions: The 'Cinema Effect,' the National-Symbolic and the Avant-Garde"; and "The Practice: Two Films and a Painting." The third section, 'Airerword," consists of one chapter titled "The Cinema-Effect: A Concluding Note." The book is richly illustrated, and the images provide important visual references to many old and new Hindi films; extratextual evidence like posters, photographs, and publicity materials; and "minor" texts like art, paintings, and avantgarde films that Rajadhyaksha examines in various chapters.
It would not be easy to summarize in a short review the contents of a book that traverses many intellectual journeys over several decades in the life of a prolific writer like Rajadhyaksha. Perhaps it is also unnecessary, given mat many of the chapters in the book are updated versions of very well known essays mat have received wide circulation over the years. For instance, the first section on "'Bollywood' and the Performing Citizen" includes revised versions of the arguments made by Rajadhyaksha m a much-cited essay tided "The Bollywoodization of Indian Cinema." Similarly, Rajadhyaksha's take on the theory of looking - which is covered in sections two and tiiree of the book - is...