Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema

'Bollywood' is the dominant global term to refer to the prolific Hindi language film industry in Bombay (renamed Mumbai in 1995). Characterised by music, dance routines, melodrama, lavish production values and an emphasis on stars and spectacle, Bollywood films have met with box-office success and enthusiastic audiences from India to West Africa to Russia, and throughout the English-speaking world.

In Bollywood, anthropologist and film scholar Tejaswini Ganti provides a guide to the cultural...