15 Best Books About Bollywood, Ranked by Who Paid for Access

Chopra went back to almost everyone still alive and rebuilt the making of Sholay: the script sessions with Salim and Javed, the casting arguments, the years of scattered schedules at Ramanagara where a whole village was constructed for the shoot. The best parts are the failures. The trade reaction after release, the sniffy reviews, the producers watching an enormous budget sit in half empty halls while nobody said the obvious. Then word of mouth turns, and the book becomes about how a country adopts a film and keeps it.

Kabir moves through Guru Dutt's career film by film, using long interviews with his collaborators, his cameraman, his writers and his family, along with close attention to what is actually on screen. You get the behaviour of light in Pyaasa, the commercial failure of Kaagaz Ke Phool and what that failure did to a man who had bet everything on it, the studio economics of the fifties, and a life that ended before forty. She refuses the tragic genius shorthand everybody else reaches for, and the sad parts land harder for it.

This is one long interview, edited into a book, with the screenwriter who was half of Salim and Javed. Akhtar is among the best talkers in India and he spends it here on mechanics: why a Hindi film scene needs a turn every few minutes, how the angry young man of the seventies was assembled out of the mood of the country, what a lyricist actually does when handed a tune that already exists. He is candid about the end of the partnership and about his drinking years. Current editions bundle a second conversation about songs.

Mazumdar looks at how the city keeps showing up on screen: the angry young man of the seventies as the product of a specific urban crisis, the enormous glossy interiors of nineties family films and what they were quietly selling, the street, the tapori, the skyline shot that stands in for having arrived. It is a university press book and reads like one, with theory in the joints. Push through that and it does something nothing else here manages, which is to hand you a way of seeing rather than a bag of stories.

Chopra tells the story with the industry built around it: a Delhi boy with no film family and both parents gone early, the television years, the run of romances that made him, and a studio system that reorganised itself around one man's face. It was written for an American publisher, so it stops to explain things an Indian reader already knows, which slows the middle. What saves it is the reporting on how star power actually gets built, priced and defended in a business that has almost no formal structure.

Waheeda Rehman worked with Guru Dutt on Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool, with Vijay Anand on Guide, and then spent decades declining to explain herself in public. Kabir got her talking about the work: how a shot was set up, what a director asked for, how a young woman in the fifties negotiated a contract and a reputation at the same time and in the same room. She refuses to be dramatic about any of it. The book is short, plainly transcribed, and the restraint is most of the pleasure.

Usman is a television journalist who went through the magazine archive of the seventies and eighties and rebuilt a life out of what Rekha and everyone around her said at the time. The book is built from that printed record rather than from fresh access. What he ends up with is partly the portrait of a woman who was mocked, hunted and reinvented several times over, and partly a portrait of the film press that did the hunting. The second of those is what makes the book worth your money, and he knows it.

Bose runs the whole story: Phalke and the silents, the studio era, the arrival of sound and the careers it ended overnight, the underworld money of the eighties and nineties, then corporatisation and the multiplex. He is a British Indian journalist writing partly for a foreign reader, so the tone is explanatory and the pace is quick. Covering a century in one volume, it goes thin in places and specialists argue with some of the detail. As a first map of the territory, nothing else in English does the job this clearly.

Dwyer, a British academic who has spent her career on Hindi cinema, works through Yash Chopra from the social dramas of the fifties and sixties, through Deewaar, into the romances that hardened into a house style: Kabhi Kabhie, Silsila, Chandni, Lamhe. She is interested in why the films look the way they do, what the songs are doing structurally, and how a family production house builds a brand that outlives its founder. He cooperated, so the criticism is gentle, but she is a scholar and does not simply take his word about his own work.

Kundan Shah's 1983 film about two photographers, a corpse and a Mahabharata performance that will not end has become the thing every Indian film buff quotes at parties. Singh went back to the crew and put together how it happened: a film school generation with no money, a shoot that kept inventing itself, actors who were nobodies then and household names now, and an ending that had to be argued into existence. It is slim and it is a fan's book, but it is honest about which famous stories have grown in the retelling.

Rishi Kapoor, working with the journalist Meena Iyer, writes about growing up inside the most famous family in Hindi cinema, the odd loneliness of being Raj Kapoor's son, the run of romantic hits that followed Bobby, the long stretch when the industry moved on and he had not, and his relationship with his own son's generation. What separates it from the pack is the confessing. He is blunt about his drinking, about envying Amitabh Bachchan's rise, about being difficult on set. The prose is plain and the candour is anything but.

Usman takes the archive method he used on Rekha and turns it on Sanjay Dutt: the addiction that started around his first film, a mother who died days before that film opened, the investigation after the 1993 Bombay blasts that ended with a conviction under arms laws, prison, release, and an industry that kept casting him through all of it. He is careful with the legal facts, which matters more here than usual. What comes out is less a bad boy story than a study of how much a famous family can absorb.

Johar, with Poonam Saxena, writes about being a soft, film obsessed only child in a producer's house, the making of his first films, his father's illness, therapy, depression, and a private life he discusses in outline rather than in detail. He is genuinely good on the emotional weather of the industry: who calls you after a flop and who does not, what a friendship there costs, how the nepotism argument feels from inside the house being accused. He is also carefully unspecific whenever specificity would have a price.

Dev Anand wrote this himself, late in life, and it reads exactly like a man talking without pausing for breath: arriving in Bombay as a young man with almost nothing, founding Navketan with his brothers, making Guide, the affairs, the flops he declines to concede were flops, the late films nobody watched that he financed anyway. Nobody has smoothed the prose and nobody has trimmed the self regard. That is the appeal. You are hearing an unmediated voice from an era every other writer here can only reconstruct.

Chaudhuri gathers the kind of Hindi film knowledge that usually lives inside a family WhatsApp argument: recurring character names, actors who played the same part twice, dialogue writers nobody credits, strange runs of coincidence across decades. It is organised as lists, so you can open it anywhere and read for four minutes while the rice cooks. He is a real obsessive rather than a copy and paste merchant, and where a piece of trivia is disputed he says so. There is no thesis and no attempt at one.