“Bombay Cinema’s Islamicate Histories, edited by Ira Bhaskar and Richard Allen, highlights the centrality of Islam, Muslims, and ‘Islamicate’ forms and aesthetics in the history of the film industry in Bombay. In doing so, it not only reveals overlooked cinematic pasts, it also effectively demonstrates that modern Indian history is inextricable from the history of Islam. . . . Its novelty is due to the breadth of the contributions and their varied methodological and disciplinary perspectives. The editors seek to tie these contributions together not as a singular narrative, but as a series of intersecting interventions. . . . It is a significant contribution to the scholarship, not only for the ways that it resists contemporary Hindu nationalist narratives, but also because it highlights the potential intersections in multiple contemporary trends in the study of Islam, Muslims, and the Islamicate in South Asian film.”

Journal of Religion & Film

"A sense of corrective readings of not just Bombay cinema’s film history but of larger art history of South Asia informs these chapters. Such an exercise in contributing to the larger idea of Indian identity with the help of cinema will largely be welcomed for its weaving together of form and sociopolitical conditions that influence form. This indeed is the way art history can be envisioned to inspire film history – breaking it free from isolated formal-chronological treatment of evolution of cinema while giving it definitive prompts to explore the sociopolitical symptoms and consequences of changes in its form. [...] The volume will be of immense interest to scholars of Bollywood as examples of how to do history of the art of film keeping complex factors such as form and identity at the center of inquiry."
 

Soni Wadhwa | Studies in South Asian Film & Media

"This collection shows how Islamicate cultural forms have been absorbed so fully into Bombay cinema and Bollywood film that it is no longer apparent where certain influences have come from. Each essay unweaves a piece of the complicated tapestry that is Indian society today and it makes a strong and powerful statement: that the history of Islam in India cannot be erased or seen as antithetical to the core identity of the nation without destroying the nation itself."
 

Aamera Jiwaji | AwaaZ Magazine