1. Introduction: A brief introduction to popular cinema in Bengal: genre, stardom, public cultures

Madhuja Mukherjee and Kaustav Bakshi

Part I: Styles, Stars and Popular Forms

2. Rethinking popular cinema in Bengal (1930s–1950s): of literariness, comic mode, mythological and other avatars

Madhuja Mukherjee

3. Kanan Devi: a Bengali star

Sharmistha Gooptu

4. Performing the region: Sadhona Bose and the modern Bengali film dance

Pritha Chakrabarti

5. A postcolonial iconi-city: Re-reading Uttam Kumar’s cinema as metropolar melodrama

Sayandeb Chowdhury

6. Filmfare and the question of Bengali cinema (1955–65)

Anustup Basu

7. From Teen Kanya to Arshinagar: feminist politics, Bengali high culture and the stardom of Aparna Sen

Kaustav Bakshi and Rohit K. Dasgupta

8. The action heroes of Bengali cinema: industrial, technological and aesthetic determinants of popular film culture, 1980s–1990s

Spandan Bhattacharya

Part II: Ray and Felu Mittir, the private detective

9. Feluda on Feluda: a letter to Topshe

Rochona Majumdar

10. Reviewing ‘Feluda on Feluda’: Maganlal Meghraj ‘Writes Back’ to Tapesh

Kaushik Bhaumik

11. Negotiating mobility and media: the contemporary digital afterlives of Feluda

Pujita Guha

Part III: Photo Essays: Public Cultures

12. A booklets sequence

Moinak Biswas

13. Inside a dark hall: space, place, and accounts of some single-theatres in Kolkata

Madhuja Mukherjee

14. Rituparno Ghosh, performing arts and a queer legacy: an abiding stardom

Kaustav Bakshi

15. A Rendezvous with the Ghosh Brothers: A Sneak Peek into Bengal’s Homegrown Exploitation Cinema

Subhajit Chatterjee

Popular Cinema in Bengal marks a decisive turn in studies of Bengali language cinema by shifting the focus from auteur and text-based studies to exhaustive readings of the film industry.

The book covers a wide range of themes and issues, including: generic tropes (like comedy and action); iconic figurations (of the detective and the city); (female) stars such as Kanan Bala, Sadhana Bose and Aparna Sen; intensities of public debates (subjects of high and low cultures, taste, viewership, gender and sexuality); print cultures (including posters, magazines and song-booklets); cinematic spaces; and trans-media and trans-cultural traffic. By locating cinema within the crosscurrents of geo-political transformations, the book highlights the new and persuasive research that has materialised over the last decade. The authors raise pertinent questions regarding 'regional' cinema as a category, in relation to 'national' cinema models, and trace the non-linear journey of the popular via multiple (media) trajectories. They address subjects of physicality, sexuality and its representations, industrial change, spaces of consumption, and cinema’s meandering directions through global circuits and low-end networks.

Highlighting the ever-changing contours of cinema in Bengal in all its popular forms and proposing a new historiography, Popular Cinema in Bengal will be of great interest to scholars of film studies and South-Asian popular culture. The chapters were originally published in the journal South Asian History and Culture.