In this important book, Sudha Rajagopalan explores the consumption of Indian popular cinema in post – Stalinist Soviet society. In doing so, she highlights the enthusiastic response Indian popular films and their stars received from the Soviet audience, as well as the discursive and institutional context in which this consumption occurred from the mid-fifties till the end of the Soviet era in 1991.Drawing on oral history methodology and archival research in Russia, the author analyses the ways in which Soviet movie-goers, policy makers, critics, and sociologists responded to, interpreted and debated Indian cinema in the Soviet Union between 1954 and the end of the eighties. . this engaging book is also the first monograph on Indian cinema abroad non-diasporic audiences, is a must-read not only for students and scholars of film history ad cultural studies, but every such lay reader who has grown up on a regular diet of popular Indian cinema.
