Bollywood Trade News Network

Mihir Bose has recently been appointed as the first BBC sports editor and he has also just written a book called 'Bollywood - a History'. It is the first narrative history of Bollywood rather than a coffee table book. The book tells the Bollywood story from the introduction of cinema in India in 1896, a few short months after the first ever cinema show in Paris, coincidentally in a place called the Salon Indien. It describes how the industry has changed and adapted and includes some of the remarkable stories that are part of this complex Indian phenomenon.

For example there is an extraordinary story of the blonde British woman who was the great heartthrob of the Indian moviegoers. Born Mary Evans to a Scottish father who died in the trenches in the First World War and a Greek mother, she took the screen name Fearless Nadia. She became well known not only in India but also abroad. Her life could not have been more colourful. She did not speak a word of Hindi, the language of her films. She eventually learnt to speak Hindi like a foreigner but could not read the language. So her lines were written out for her in Roman script. She had an illegitimate child who was adopted by her Indian husband, the Indian director of her movies. Given that this was a time when India was fighting for freedom from white rule, her story is a remarkable one.

The book chronicles the lifestyle of Bollywood, of famous directors who did not hide their bigamy (one famous director had three wives, another had two living in adjacent homes) and actors who went through sham changes of religion to acquire a second wife.

The book also describes how Bollywood has in recent years breached the final frontier and reached the west, making movies, which appeal both to traditional Bollywood audiences and western ones. These have included the film LAGAAN based in the days of the Raj around a cricket match between the British and Indians. The British actors who were themselves little known club cricketers in England found themselves treated as if they were England internationals while filming in India.