Indian Films in Soviet Cinemas

Understanding the Soviet public's love of Indian popular film

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Indian films and film stars were immensely popular with Soviet audiences in the post-Stalinist period. Sudha Rajagopalan provides the first detailed social and cultural history of this phenomenon, exploring the consumption of Indian popular cinema in the USSR from the mid-1950s until the end of the Soviet era. Drawing on oral history and archival research in Russia, Rajagopalan analyzes the ways in which Soviet movie-goers, policy makers, critics, and sociologists responded to, interpreted, and debated Indian cinema.