Includes bibliographical references.

These are interesting times in the history of Indian cinema, particularly because the established aesthetic conventions and modes of production of the Hindi film industry are being challenged, as are the boundaries between what is alternative and what is mainstream. This book is an attempt to contextualize the upsurge in this form of cinema in Bollywood/Hindi film industry. It also aims to promote an academic enquiry into the works of these filmmakers, their religious beliefs, social moorings, cinematic influences, attitudes towards filmmaking and experiences of making movies. It will be an important reading for serious students of South Asian studies, film studies and media studies as well as the general reader who has an interest in cinema.

Brave new world: an introduction -- Dibabkar Banerjee: Of milieu, technique and the dialetic of anti-dumb cinema -- Kiran Rao: the personal as the voyeur- the aesthetics of meaning -- Reema Kagti: collaboration and commerce-treading the thin line -- Zoya Akhtar: Urban and unapologetic-the cinema of Zoya Akhtar -- Shonali Bose: loss and survival-the cinema of meaning -- Anusha Rizvi: Content as king-how stories create filmmakers -- Onir: the politics at the margins-being an alternative filmmaker in Bollywood -- Tigmanshu Dhulia: the alternative as mainstream-blurring boundaries in cinematic tradition -- about the authors.