Introduction

This book is about the ways in which the popular Indian cinema of North India recasts Indian literature, from epics and classical drama, over devotional songs, Urdu poetry and drama, to colonial and contemporary novels. While the relation of “film and fiction” has been studied extensively for Western films (see, for example, the bibliographies in McFarlane 1996, Stam and Raengo 2005), that is not the case for Indian popular cinema. Our focus is on the Hindi-language cinema of Bombay/Mumbai.1 We counter the stereotype that this cinema, recently (and controversially) labeled “Bollywood,”2 is a rip-off from Hollywood, by foregrounding its extensive engagement with Indian literary traditions.