This book analyses 100 years of Hindi cinema, India’s principal film industry, to explore how much space it has given to Mahatma Gandhi, the most prominent leader of the Indian struggle for freedom, and his principles. It compares films on Gandhi with the written literature on him, and juxtaposes the celluloid Gandhi with the man who walked on the earth ‘ever in flesh and blood’. From his childhood through his legal practice in South Africa to his non-violent struggle against the British Empire in India, the book covers all major events of his life and their portrayal on the silver screen.

Hindi cinema, ever since Independence, has revolved almost entirely around issues of sex and money. This may seem odd given the conservative taste of the times. But that we do not 'see' sex does not hide just how much sex there is in the cinema. As for money, a nagging theme is the impact of money - or the lack of it - on sex. Sanjay Suri argues that Hindi cinema was an unlikely offspring of the Father of the Nation - the product of Gandhi's celibacy and austerity. His heroic retreat from wealth and sexuality was written into the cinema and then elaborately filmed shot by shot. Suri draws on numerous examples - from Mother India to Do Bigha Zameen; Shree 420 to Pyaasa; Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam to Guide; and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge to Lage Raho Munnabhai - to show how cinema was made within well-defined moral fences that were built with dos and don'ts about sex and money. A Gandhian Affair is a history of India through the preoccupations of its cinema.

‘We are like the Corleones in The Godfather’—Randhir Kapoor There is no film family quite like the Kapoors. A family of professional actors and directors, they span almost eighty years of film-making in India, from the 1920s to the present. Each decade in the history of Hindi films has had at least one Kapoor—if not more—playing a large part in defining it. Never before have four generations of this family—or five, if you include Bashesharnath Kapoor, Prithviraj Kapoor’s father, who played the judge in Awara—been brought together in one book. The Kapoors details the professional careers and personal lives of each generation—box-office successes and failures, the ideologies that informed their work, the larger-than-life Kapoor weddings and Holi celebrations, their extraordinary romantic liaisons and family relationships, their love for food and their dark passages with alcohol. Based on extensive personal interviews conducted over seven years with family members and friends, Madhu Jain goes behind the façade of each member of the Kapoor clan to reveal what makes them tick. The Kapoors resembles the films that the great showman Raj Kapoor made: grand and sweeping, with moments of high drama and touching emotion. ‘Few books on Indian cinema have been written with such wit, clarity and sparkle’—Outlook ‘Jain writes in a language that is simple and pithy. . . it will keep alive public interest in the Kapoors who refuse to call it a day’—Telegraph ‘Immensely readable...will surely find a place in the Indian cineaste’s library’—Biblio