ABSTRACT
Much like the Mahabharata and the Odyssey, the hit Bollywood films, too, were assembled like a Chinese puzzle with its boxes within boxes. Of course, when it comes to a commercial industry like Bollywood, we need also ask, as critics often did, if financial incentives might have motivated the films' piecemeal assemblage. In fact, the films' regular deployment of the flashback provides the reader in part the clue that their episodic structure may have had more to do with the oral derivation of the masala formula than with that formula's profitability for producers. In one of the most famous blockbusters in Indian film history, Sholay, we are made privy through flashback to how a police chief met the two thieves whom he now plans to hire to execute vengeance on behalf of his family. Hollywood storytelling also often acknowledges and avails itself of the power inherent in traveling back in time through word of mouth.
