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 8. IN D IA N FILM N O IR

Corey K. Creekmur

Has the Indian film industry - often identified as the world’s largest - pro
duced film noir? Pursuing an answer to this seemingly straightforward ques
tion may require, like the tangled plots of many noir films, tracing a forward
path through a series of flashbacks and unexpected detours. Most claims for
the existence of non-Hollywood film noir are relatively recent, reinforcing the
fundamental historical circumstance succinctly emphasised by Tom Gunning:
‘Film noir may be the great achievement of film studies’.1Indeed, any attempt
to expand the international purview of film noir, once viewed as distinctly and
exclusively American (despite recognisable European roots), cannot ignore the
nagging reminder that film noir was discovered - if not wholly invented - by
film critics rather than the Hollywood studio filmmakers making movies they
and their initial audiences would have readily identified as thrillers, detective
stories or mysteries, among other more familiar genre terms.2 As has been
the case elsewhere, the designation or categorisation of a group of films as
‘Indian film noir’ is emphatically retroactive, a critical act of explicit historical
reclassification that may ultimately be as misleading as illuminating. In fact, as
Nikki J. Y. Lee and Julian Stringer have warned, the larger, now commonly
invoked category of ‘Asian noir’ may be no more than a ‘dubiously unifying
concept’, ‘a mere category of convenience behind which lurk a range of more
stubbornly complex stories concerning the historically specific characteristics
of multiple regional film industries’.3 If we belatedly locate examples of Indian
film noir, we must also acknowledge the historical and cultural conditions that
now allow us to do so, decades after the films we seek to make comprehensible

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through this category were made and enjoyed: in short, any responsible claim
for the existence of Indian film noir must waver with critical uncertainty.
Nevertheless, while crime stories, as elsewhere, have been an unsurprisingly
common component of Indian popular cinema, contemporary critics have, if
only in passing, increasingly attributed a ‘darker’ aspect to a portion of India’s
vast corpus of films, thereby affiliating these recently retrieved examples with
Hollywood and other commercial national cinemas, in effect constructing a
comparative perspective that retrospectively ‘corrects’ the absence of popular
Indian cinema from most historical accounts of world cinema until the 1990s.
Now that popular Indian cinema has secured a place in this expanded history,
perhaps, it appears, there once was Indian film noir too. For instance, in the
groundbreaking Encyclopedia o f Indian Cinema (first published in 1994, and
revised in 1999), the Hindi film Baazi (Wager, Guru Dutt, 1951) is described
as ‘a confident assimilation of the Warner Bros, noir style, esp. in the lighting,
the camera placements and the editing’.4 Elsewhere, the Encyclopedia says,
of Bambai Ka Babti (Gentleman from Bombay, Raj Khosla, 1960), ‘After
the film’s noirish beginning, as in so many Dev Anand starrers, it turns into
a romance’.5 Such claims are infrequent and notably hesitant assertions of
the approximation of film noir in Indian cinema, allowing at most ‘noirish
assimilation’ rather than the real thing. Similarly tentative claims can be found
throughout the first wave of serious scholarship on Indian popular film, which
was simultaneously attentive to a large body of previously neglected examples
while in dialogue with the Western cinephilia that had canonised film noir
in the development of the discipline of film studies. Thus Ravi Vasudevan,
emphasising the symbolic function of the city street in 1950s Hindi cinema ‘as
the space of the dissolution of social identity’, links key Indian examples of
what he labels ‘crime melodramas’ to ‘the glistening rain-drenched streets so
familiar from the American film noir’.6 Jyotika Virdi is similarly circumspect
when noting ‘noir lighting’ in Bimal Roy’s Madhumati (1958),7 or when she
claims that Raj Khosla’s C.I.D. (1956) is ‘fashioned after noir thrillers both
in form and content’ and ‘visibly influenced by noir films’.8 Such claims are
telling in their willingness to acknowledge the evident influence of film noir on
Hindi cinema, but they also stop short of declaring as film noir these specific
Indian films.
More recently, however, as the possibility of viewing film noir as a genu
inely transnational phenomenon has been more widely asserted and accepted,
it seems that such hesitation is fading. For instance, in a recent book centred
upon Mumbai’s history as a prominent film location, Ranjani Mazumdar
briefly cites a few historical precursors from the 1940s and 1950s featur
ing ‘the expressionistic lighting common to noir’, before crediting a cycle of
contemporary (post-1989) Hindi crime and gangster films with instantiating
‘Mumbai Noir’, a term that, she notes, ‘only gained currency in the 1990s

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after the release of a few landmark films that directly drew on the stories of the
underworld’.9 (I, perhaps pedantically, think these films may more accurately
be identified as ‘neo-noir’, and will discuss them as such later in this chapter.)
Another recent volume, the lavishly illustrated Bollywood Posters, with com
mentary by the prominent Indian film journalist Jerry Pinto, contains a section
on crime films, among other prominent genres. After summarising earlier
Indian sound films as ‘morality plays’ that ‘gave cinematic expression to the
idea of the struggle between good and evil’, Pinto boldly announces: ‘When
film noir arrived, things began to change somewhat’. After citing Kismet
(1943), an important and wildly popular pre-independence crime film, as a
prototype, Pinto asserts that ‘It was only in the 1950s that Bollywood began to
develop the outlines of its own version of noir’.10 In these more recent exam
ples of criticism, Indian film noir is more confidently asserted than hesitantly
pondered, ostensibly confirming what others have wondered: whether film
noir, even in its early, ‘classical’ phase (roughly 1941-58), was already a trans
national cultural phenomenon, extending not only to somewhat expected loca
tions like France, Great Britain and Germany but even to South Asia. Whether
earlier, in the Indian film industry, or only lately, in Indian film criticism, film
noir appears to have finally ‘arrived’.
However, perhaps the sort of caution glimpsed in earlier criticism is still
warranted: to simply, belatedly affirm the existence of Indian film noir too
easily avoids implicit and crucial questions regarding the ways we understand
the cultural functions of film styles or genres, the shaping role of film criti
cism upon film history and especially the ideological implications of locating
transnational film genres within the larger bodies of national cinemas, with the
latter an especially complex category in relation to India, which has produced
both art and popular cinema from its multiple regions and in multiple lan
guages, both under colonial rule and, since 1947, as an independent nation.11
What conceptual negotiations are involved in at last locating a form of
popular American cinema first identified by French critics within South Asian
cinema, otherwise marked by distinct cultural traditions and stylistic conven
tions? Claims for non-Hollywood film noir tend to challenge older models of
cultural imperialism that viewed the international circulation and impact of
Hollywood cinema as unidirectional and simply oppressive: rather, as Andrew
Spicer writes with reference to European cinemas, ‘although European film
noirs have characteristics that are specific to their national cultural formation,
each has been profoundly affected, in various ways, by American noir, in a
complex, two-way process that ranges from imitation to radical originality via
all shades of hybridity’.12 Similarly, Jennifer Fay and Justus Nieland argue ‘that
film noir is best appreciated as an always international phenomenon concerned
with the local effects of globalization and the threats to national urban culture
it seeks to herald’.13 If (to raise the persistent question) film noir is a genre,

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 IN DIA N FILM N O IR

and an international or transnational genre at that, then how does it intersect

with the ‘local’ genres most often associated with popular Indian cinema, espe
cially the ‘social’, the broad category for films concerned with the problems of
contemporary life (as opposed to the ‘historical’, centred on the past, or the
‘mythological’, depicting the ‘eternal’ stories of Hindu gods and goddesses)?
If it is no longer common to view film noir as fundamentally or exclusively
an American genre, the specific characteristics of an Indian strain of film noir
remain rather elusive.

F i l m N oi r in B ombay
At first glance, the most obvious evidence for a ‘vernacular’ Indian film noir
would seem to rest with a number of films themselves, produced simultane
ously with the later phase of Hollywood film noir, during the period now
mythologised as the ‘golden age’ of Hindi cinema. A cycle of popular Hindi
films, almost all set in (then) contemporary Bombay, regularly featured many
of the characteristic elements of Hollywood film noir, including heroes (most
consistently embodied throughout the period by the suave star Dev Anand)
who skirt the border of legal and illegal activity; like their counterparts in
American film noir, these are men who are streetwise but can confidentially
negotiate swanky nightclubs featuring alluring femmes fatales (often explic
itly Westernised through signifiers such as clothing, smoking and the use of
English) as well as the semi-illicit temptations of alcohol and gambling. Such
films often take the time to foreground the luxury objects that signalled cos
mopolitanism and (Western-style) sophistication in the decade following inde
pendence, including telephones, whisky, cars and Western fashion. Perhaps
even more significantly, a large number of these films employ many of the sty
listic elements associated with noir, such as location shooting (with prominent
Bombay icons featured), chiaroscuro lighting producing expressive shadows,
unusual camera angles and tangled plots that rely upon narrative devices such
as flashbacks and dream sequences (often in the form of the elaborate song
sequences, or ‘picturisations’, that became a defining feature of popular Indian
cinema, across all genres, with the arrival of sound). Simply put, a significant
number of popular Hindi films from the Bombay industry in the first decade
or so following independence look a lot like the distinctive American examples
that motivated French critics to isolate film noir as a distinctive type of movie.
Indeed, as in Hollywood cinema, even Hindi films preceding and those most
readily aligned with American film noir suggest precedents and ‘family resem
blances’ rather than a complete overlap with the genre: producer-director-
actor Raj Kapoor, the key figure of post-independence Hindi cinema, launched
his successful career as a director with a series of fiims - Aag {Fire, 1948),
Barsaat {Rain, 1949) and Aivara {The Vagabond, 1951) - that rely extensively

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on moody, expressionistic black-and-white cinematography, even if their

narrative elements don’t suggest film noir as much as its close Hollywood
relatives, the Gothic romance or melodrama. The slightly later, now-classic
films of producer-director-star Guru Dutt, especially Pyaasa (Thirst, 1957)
and Kaagaz Ke Phool (Paper Flowers, 1959), also rely extensively on ‘noirish’
dramatic high-contrast lighting and expressionistic camerawork, as well as
elaborate flashback structures, but again do not otherwise evoke the familiar
content of film noir, although the intensely self-reflexive Kaagaz Ke Phool,
the story of a film director’s rise and fall, suggests a Bombay variation on self
reflexive and cynical Hollywood-centred film noir such as Billy Wilder’s Sunset
Blvd. (1950).
More direct support for identifying a cycle of Hindi film noir arrives on the
heels of Raj Kapoor’s first films, with prominent examples like Baazi (Wager,
1951), Guru Dutt’s debut as a director for the production company Navketan,
launched in 1949 by brothers Chetan Anand and Dev Anand as the latter was
developing a screen persona that offered Bombay’s closest equivalent to the
image of Humphrey Bogart. Like Bogart, Dev Anand often portrayed a loner
without evident family ties - almost unthinkable for previous Indian heroes -
whose moral compass was allowed to waver and even step outside the law if
social justice could not be served otherwise. Baazi opens with a deck of cards
being cut and dealt in a seedy gambling den, but quickly elevates its lucky hero
Madan (Dev Anand) into a more elegant - but still dimly lit - nightclub run by
a mysterious ‘Boss’ who (like Dr Mabuse) remains obscured in deep shadow
for most of the film. Cars, cigarettes, Western clothing and a singing vamp
(Geeta Bali) who literally ensnares the hero in her web are all prominently
displayed within the first few minutes of the film, providing an aura of both
unsavoury urban decadence and titillating, illicit pleasures.

Figure 8.1 Dev Anand listens to Geeta Bali play in Baazi.

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Eventually, Madan will be falsely accused of the murder of the sympathetic

vamp, and the identity of the ‘Boss’ will be exposed in a surprising revelation
that will allow Madan’s courtship of a beautiful doctor after he serves a short
prison sentence for his minor transgressions. In effect, Baazi, like many other
films to follow, resembles Hollywood film noir on its surface but not at its
heart (dil, a key term in Hindi cinema): for reasons that will be touched upon
shortly, the grim and cynical plots and shockingly ‘unhappy endings’ that often
made Hollywood film noir appear to violate the conventions of the very system
that produced it remain generally inconceivable in post-independence India.
The goals of creating rather than destroying the romantic couple, and restoring
rather than undermining social order drive films like Baazi, even if they revel in
the dangers of modern urban India along the way.
Following Baazi, the crime film become a speciality at Navketan, whose
titles throughout the 1950s - Taxi Driver (Chetan Anand, 1954), House
No. 44 (M. K. Burman, 1955), Kala Pani (Black Water, Raj Khosla, 1958),
and Kala Bazar (Black Market, Vijay Anand, 1960) - solidified the banner’s
association with stories set in stylish urban settings. Other notable ‘noirish’
crime films from other production houses during the period include C.I.D.
(Raj Khosla, 1956), Howrah Bridge (Shakti Samanta, 1958), Post Box 999
(Ravindra Dave, 1958), Guest House (Ravindra Dave, 1959), Bambai Ka
Babu (Gentleman from Bombay, Raj Khosla, 1960), Jaali Note (Counterfeit
Bill, Shakti Samantha, 1960) and China Town (Shakti Samanta, 1962). As
M. K. Ragavendra notes, the ‘strange fascination’ with the city central to all of
these films ‘is also evidenced by the numerous films of the period that proclaim
themselves through English titles, terms with urban associations’.14 Indeed, the
persistent, everf fetishised urban setting of such films is arguably the element
that links them most significantly to the transnational tradition of film noir:
their regular location in Bombay (with some exceptions, including Calcutta)
might even justify the specification of ‘Bombay film noir’ as a more accurate
term than a broader ‘Indian’ film noir. Again, frequent location shooting
or at least inserted documentary footage (often used explicitly to introduce
the location) of prominent Bombay landmarks is a common attraction. As
Raghavendra emphasises, this love-hate relationship with the city of Bombay
both relies upon and challenges the common assumption that ‘authentic’
Indian tradition and identity are associated with the village, not the city where,
again, English often marks the space as ‘foreign’. Although a vision of the
future Indian city was central to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s ambitious
plans for the modernisation of the newly independent nation, Bombay retained
an aura of worldly decadence and inevitable corruption that could be exploited
by filmmakers throughout the ‘Nehruvian’ period. Movement from the village
to the city frequently serves as a moral test for characters in Indian cinema of
the period, with the typical film hero carefully balanced between the ‘timeless’,

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traditional values of the village and the undeniably attractive modern style
of the city - much like the position of cinema itself in its frequent attempt to
invoke authentic ‘Indian’ narratives within a medium and technology that was
inevitably modern, urban and Western.
If the regular focus on Bombay grounds Indian gestures towards film noir,
the postwar ennui that underlies the darkest Hollywood film noir (so often
noted by scholars attempting to explain the genre’s social origins) and the
semi-official, nationalist optimism of India in the wake of independence under
the influence of Nehruvian progress are starkly opposed. Whereas Hollywood
film noir is often striking in its rejection of Hollywood’s penchant for happy
endings that join (rather than destroy) romantic couples, Hindi cinema pro
duced in the same era cannot so readily displace optimism with cynicism.
More often than not in popular Indian cinema of the period, heroes triumph
and couples overcome the obstacles that have prevented their happiness until
the final reel. The corruption that is often revealed at the heart of the city is
exposed and presumably vanquished for a brighter future. In this regard, the
assimilation of film noir in 1950s Hindi cinema arguably reaches its ideological
limit and inevitably appears naive when placed against Hollywood’s increas
ingly brutal products.
There is also, perhaps, another important way in which the darkest moods
of Hollywood film noir could not be wholly imported into popular Indian
cinema: in summarising the early sequences of Baazi earlier, I neglected to
add that, a short while into the narrative, a wholly expected thing in popular
Indian cinema happens: the gambler hero of the film sings a song. (More accu
rately, the hero mimics a song performed by an unseen but more often than not
famous ‘playback singer’, a formal arrangement known to all Indian audiences,
in contrast to Hollywood’s rigorous obscuring of the traces of such dubbing
practices.) Moreover, he sings a song about money while wandering among
the city’s sleeping pavement-dwellers, a ‘realistic’ element indicative of modern
urban life that provides a vivid contrast to the choreographed stylisation of
the performed musical number. Among the most important and lasting con
ventions of Indian popular cinema, the organisation of film narratives around
a series of choreographed song sequences disallows any straightforward
transposition of Hollywood genre categories to Indian film. Films that might
otherwise be identified as socials, historicals or mythologicals, or via Western
terms such as thrillers, romances or comedies, all contain songs (a ‘require
ment’ that moreover renders any distinct genre of the musical unnecessary in
India). While song performances are, in fact, fairly common in Hollywood
film noir, they are usually reserved for ‘realistic’ locations like nightclubs, and
are rarely featured more than once in a film. Whereas Indian viewers expect
songs in virtually all popular films as a primary attraction, many Western
viewers are startled to encounter, for instance, singing and dancing detectives

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or gangsters in Indian crime films. However, if the inclusion of song sequences

can be reconciled with crime narratives, one recognises that Indian filmmak
ers often approached this apparent discordant mix with wit and ingenuity (as
well as more formulaic sequences, of course). Indeed, 1950s Indian crime films
provided some of the era’s most popular hit songs: if film noir can be located
in India, it is song-filled. If a song-filled movie cannot be acknowledged as film
noir, then, once again, the claim of Indian film noir may be untenable.

M umbai N eo -noi r

If the status of film noir in the ‘golden age’ of Hindi cinema necessarily remains
unstable, confirming the active presence of neo-noir in contemporary Indian
film seems secure. India’s increasingly globalised media landscape and rela
tively easy access to diverse examples of international cinema (whether legal or
not) via a range of video formats has permitted Indian filmmakers as well as
their audiences to view many of the American, East Asian and European crime
films critics have identified as neo-noir.!5 (Among other things, Indian cinema
paralleled most of the rest of the world by making the virtually complete shift
from black-and-white to colour film stock by the end of the 1960s.) Even
somewhat earlier, since the mid-1970s, representations of Bombay’s crimi
nal underworld and the glamorous if doomed lives of gangland ‘dons’ and
‘goondas’’ (gangsters) had become staples of Hindi cinema.16 The latter half
of the decade was especially dominated by a series of films featuring superstar
Amitabh Bachchan in his wildly popular ‘angry young man’ persona. Although
a populist anti-hero and even a sympathetic criminal in most of his key films,
his breakthrough role was as a wronged police inspector in Zanjeer (Chains,
Prakash Mehra, 1973), while he was unambiguously a gangster in Deewar
(The Wall, Yash Chopra, 1975) and a petty thief in Sholay (Flames, Ramesh
Sippy, 1975), among the most successful and influential films in the history of
Hindi cinema. However, even Bachchan films set more directly in the under
world, such as Don (1978), where he plays the double role (an Indian film
tradition) of a crime lord and his innocent doppelganger, seem only vaguely
affiliated with the stylistic elements of film noir that can be located in earlier
Hindi cinema: indeed, the Bachchan vehicles of the 1970s are a reminder
that the gangster film, in India and elsewhere, has typically been viewed as a
distinct genre, lacking many of the elements associated with film noir despite
their shared basis in crime stories. The ‘Bachchan phenomenon’ - the virtual
domination of the cinema by the star during an especially volatile period in
Indian history, most notably Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s ‘Emergency’ from
1975 to 1977, when elections and civil liberties were suspended - has received
extensive commentary within Indian film studies, but seems on the whole a
tangential link to any ‘tradition’ of Indian film noir.17 Rather, after decades of

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popular romantic films featuring female leads, the massive success of his films
seems to have solidified the centrality of the male star in action-driven films,
often but not necessarily built around crime elements, in the last decades of
twentieth-century popular Indian cinema.
Neo-noir thus arrives in India more fully following the period of Bachchan’s
dominance, through a remarkable series of gangster films that re-energised the
genre in India. Beginning with director Mani Ratnam’s influential Tamil film
Nayakan {Hero, 1987), starring South Indian superstar Kamal Hassan and
partially inspired by The Godfather (1972), and followed by Vidhu Vinod
Chopra’s Parinda (Bird, 1989), the contemporary gangster film signalled by
these examples immediately appeared more realistic and more brutal than
its predecessors. Soon thereafter, a loose trilogy of stylishly directed films by
Ram Gopal Varma - Satya (1998), Company (2002) and the less successful D
(2005) - were built upon their audience’s knowledge that the characters and
events onscreen closely resembled the well-publicised and notorious offscreen
gangsters and crimes that had in some cases infiltrated the film world: among
other self-reflexive moments, Satya features a shooting at a crowded cinema
and Company depicts an assassination on a film set. Whereas the gangsters in
Satya are on the lower or perhaps middle rungs of the underworld hierarchy
(albeit with links to powerful political figures), Company and D (named after
the infamous D-Company led by actual crime boss Dawood Ibrahim, the
model for a number of recent cinematic interpretations) are more ‘globalised’,
as dangerous for the killings they arrange via their mobile phones as with guns.
(Satya is the film often cited as the first example of ‘Mumbai noir’. Once again,
I am arguing that the historical specificity of the now widespread term ‘neo-
noir’ is more appropriate for such post-classical examples.) Again, as in critical
discussions of the Hollywood cinema that has sometimes inspired such films
- both Parinda and Ram Gopal Varma’s Sarkar (2005) and its sequel Sarkar
Raj (2008) borrow rather obviously, if often inventively, from The Godfather
- the gangster film might be distinguished from most examples of film noir,
despite family resemblances. Amidst this revival of the Hindi gangster film,
among the more inventive recent examples is a pair adapted from Shakespeare:
Vishal Bharadwaj transforms Macbeth into Maqbool (2004) and Othello into
Omkara (2006), with surprisingly effective connections between the original
characters and their contemporary underworld avatars. Other contemporary
Hindi neo-noir films typically rely on less elevated and more recent sources: the
heist film Kaante (Thorns, 2002), directed by Sanjay Gupta and shot entirely
in Los Angeles with a cast of prominent male stars, draws rather obviously
upon Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), Bryan Singer’s The Usual
Suspects (1995) and Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) to construct its convoluted
bank robbery plot: such ‘borrowing’, which often skirts the legal niceties of an
official remake, has become common in contemporary Hindi cinema, and is

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often cited by critics to decry the industry’s lack of originality: in other cases,
the act of ‘translation’ results in witty and perceptive hybrids. Perhaps the
full arrival of an arguably more creative, highly self-reflexive, postmodernist
variation on neo-noir is best represented by Johnny Gaddaar (Johnny Traitor,
2007), directed by Sriram Raghavan.18 The flamboyantly stylised film, organ
ised in an intricate but playful flashback structure, is packed with allusions to
both Hindi cinema - the title invokes Vijay Anand’s Johny Mera Naam (My
Name is Johnny, 1970) - as well as Hollywood film noir, including Stanley
Kubrick’s The Killing (1956). Much like Quentin Tarantino’s collage-like neo-
noir films, Johnny Gaddaar presumes an increasingly cine-literate viewer, not
only familiar with the ‘classics’ it quotes relentlessly, but equally attentive to
the hyperkinetic and foregrounded formal techniques in the film. Most signifi
cantly, the film assumes viewers whose cinephilia is global as well as ‘local’,
as adept at catching a witty reference to Brian De Palma’s Scarf ace (1983)
or Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) as to Jyoti Swaroop’s Hindi thriller
Parwana (Moth, 1971), which featured Amitabh Bachchan in one of his first
villain roles. Such films, increasingly common from younger Indian filmmak
ers, increasingly take for granted that their audiences (at home and abroad) are
savvy consumers of a wide range of global media, rather than the mass audi
ence which filmmakers once seemed to treat as naive spectators of the exotic,
unattainable world on Indian screens.

N o t es
1. Tom Gunning, ‘More than night: Film noir in its contexts’ (book review),
Modernism/modernity 6(3) (1999), 151.
2. The argument for identifying non-Hollywood film noir (and neo-noir) in five
European countries is outlined carefully in the editor’s ‘Introduction’ to Andrew
Spicer (ed.), European Film Noir (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007),
while Jennifer Fay and Justus Nieland, Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the
Cultures o f Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2010) centres on ‘film noir as an
always international phenomenon concerned with the local effects of globalization
and the threats to national urban culture it seems to herald’ (p. ix). Their study
locates examples of film noir in the United States, Europe, Asia (including India, via
a single film) and Latin America. On the other hand, Spencer Selby, The Worldwide
Film Noir Tradition (Ames, IA: Sink Press, 2013) lists films from almost two dozen
countries (including India, with six titles) as examples of film noir, but provides
virtually no critical justification for its selections.
3. Nikki J. Y. Lee and Julian Stringer, ‘Film noir in Asia: Historicizing South Korean
crime thrillers’, in Andrew Spicer and Helen Hanson (eds), Companion to Film
Noir (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), p. 502. In the same volume, Lalitha
Gopalan’s illuminating essay on what she terms ‘Bombay Noir’ begins with an even
more bold warning: ‘Looking for film noir in India is to miss the point of Indian
cinema altogether’. See Lalitha Gopalan, ‘Bombay Noir’, p. 518.
4. Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen (eds), Encyclopedia o f Indian Cinema:
New Revised Edition (London: British Film Institute, 1999), p. 322.
5. Ibid., p. 362.

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6. Ravi S. Vasudevan, ‘Shifting codes, dissolving identities: The Hindi social film of
the 1950s as popular culture’, in Ravi S. Vasudevan (ed.), Making Meaning in
Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 110.
7. Jyotika Virdi, The Cinematic ImagiNation: Indian Popular Films as Social History
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), p. 51.
8. Ibid., pp. 100-1. Virdi mistakenly identifies producer Guru Dutt rather than Raj
Khosla as the director of C.I.D., although claiming Dutt’s influence on the style of
the film seems reasonable.
9. Ranjani Mazumdar, ‘Mumbai Noir: An uncanny present’, in Helio San Miguel
(ed.), World Film Locations: Mumbai (New York: Intellect, 2012), p. 68.
10. Jerry Pinto and Sheena Sippy, Bollywood Posters (Mumbai: India Book House,
2008), pp. 60-1. As has become common in writing on Hindi cinema, Pinto retro
actively names the earlier film industry ‘Bollywood’, a practice I and other critics
find historically misleading.
11. This essay concentrates on the large popular Hindi-language cinema produced in
Bombay (now Mumbai), now commonly and somewhat controversially identified
as ‘Bollywood’. (The retroactive designation of earlier Hindi cinema as ‘Bollywood’
cinema is an especially misleading historical inaccuracy.) I also refer to Bombay
for the period before 1995, when the name of the city was officially changed to
Mumbai, although the older name remains in common use. Increased critical atten
tion is now being paid to India’s many so-called ‘regional’ cinemas, including the
Tamil and Telugu industries, which are often as large as the Hindi cinema: whether
early examples from these cinemas might be reasonably associated with film noir
remains to be argued.
12. Andrew Spicer, European Film Noir, p. 1.
13. Jennifer Fay and Justus Nieland, Film Noir, p. ix.
14. M. K. Raghavendra, Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Indian
Popular Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 134.
15. On neo-noir as an international phenomenon, see David Desser, ‘Global noir:
Genre film in the age of transnationalism’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre
Reader IV (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press), pp. 628-48, and a number of
the essays in Mark Bould, Kathrina Glitre and Greg Tuck (eds), Neo-Noir (London:
Wallflower, 2009). Neither of these texts includes examples from Indian cinema.
16. I discuss contemporary Hindi gangster films in Corey K. Creekmur, ‘Bombay
Bhai: The gangster in and behind popular Hindi cinema’, in Corey K. Creekmur
and Mark Sidel (eds), Cinema, Law, and the State in Asia (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), pp. 29-43. For illuminating analyses of Nayakan and Parinda,
see the full chapters devoted to each film in Lalitha Gopalan, Cinema of
Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: British
Film Institute, 2002). Also see Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive
o f the City (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), especially
Chapter 5, ‘Gangland Bombay’, pp. 149-96, and Ranjani Mazumdar, ‘Friction,
collision, and the grotesque: The dystopic fragments of Bombay cinema’, in Gyan
Prakash (ed.), Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 150-84.
17. Among many treatments of Amitabh Bachchan’s significance in the 1970s, see
the chapter in Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples o f Desire (New York:
Routledge, 2001), pp. 125-56.
18. For an ingenious and detailed analysis of Johnny Gaddaar, see Gopalan, ‘Bombay
Noir’, pp. 504-10.

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