Behind the magic

Pickings

After Bollywood Dreams the musical, it's time for Bollywood Dreams the book (Phaidon, $ 39.95).

The distinction is that lensman Jonathan Torgovnik's images for his pictorial essay do not follow Andrew Lloyd Weber's script, allowing for an independent journey that takes him on location to the sets of Bollywood blockbusters in India.

From a combat photographer in the Israeli army to Bollywood has been an award-laden route, yet his pictures in the volume under discussion give pause for thought.

For one, it captures not the glamorous edge of the Mumbai film industry but its tawdier underside that shows the peeling paint behind Makesville.

Nothing is more representative of this than filmstars Bobby Deol and Karishma Kapoor posing for a publicity still in a studio over-run with wires, oil stains and a general sense of decay.

His take is not, however, just on the seamy side of the world's largest industry, but also a social essay that brings alive the provincial romance of the touring cinema for rural audiences, where under a patched-up grand top, audiences of a thousand-plus sit uncomfortably through the magic of celluloid.

The gaudy make-up of the stars, including the extras, and the extravaganza of film sequences and action sequences offers an insight into a segment that has been otherwise popularly documented.

There is predictably the occidental outlook that tends to seek the "exotic" through these images, which may surprise many Indians who tend to take it more naturally in their stride as merely "normal". The images of the audience, in the last section of the book, are far more evocative.

In the end, though, the book is like a hastily cobbled together cut-and-paste job that barely manages to add another link to the documentation of Indian cinema.

Nasreen Munna Kabir's two page introduction is grossly inadequate, and the choice of magenta for the writing does not quite match the book's claim to be "an exploration of the motion picture industry and its culture in India".