Directory of World Cinema: India

Every discussion of “Indian” cinema that begins under the signature of Bollywood, makes me recoil in anticipation of what I over the years have come to expect from such discussions: a puerile and wholesale reduction of the many different national and vernacular cinemas of the subcontinent under the singular designation of “Indian cinema,” to wit, Bollywood cinema. At work is a disavowal – we know very well about the heteroglossiac geopolitical contexts of India, yet there is no dearth in the publication of scholarly tomes reproducing the fallacy of Bollywood cinema as Indian cinema.