Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India, I930s-1950S

Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India, I930s-1950s by Neepa Majumdar. University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2009. Hardcover US$ 65, softcover US$ 25. The excitement with which Neepa Majumdar s book has been anticipated in the networks of Indian film studies is telling. The early decades of cinema in India have only recently received serious academic attention. Some quick facts might help explain this situation: Of more than 1,300 silent films known to have been produced in India, less than 20 survive; the National Film Archives of India was set up as recently as in 1964; and even basic institutional histories or celebrity biographies are scarce. In such a scenario, works like Priya Jaikumar s Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (2007) and Prem Chowdhry's Colonial India and the Making of Empire Cinema: Image, Ideology, and Identity (2001) have been significant moves to document and analyse the industrial, governmental, and cultural negotiations of the initial decades of cinema in India. Here one must also mention Kaushik Bhaumik's doctoral dissertation, The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry (2001). Wanted Cultured Ladies ... is a timely and engaging work that weaves together rigorous archival trawls and an engagement with socio-political currents of the period between the 1930s and '50s.