Review: When Ardh Satya Met Himmatwala by Avijit Ghosh
In the popular imagination, Bollywood in the 1980s was all about garish aesthetics, frenetic editing, double entendres, and melodrama underlined by blaring sound effects. You might think of Sridevi wearing shiny outfits and shimmying amid matkas or Mithun karate chopping goons. The overwhelming feeling is that of cinematic flash and trash. As Baradwaj Rangan has noted in an essay “ perceived wisdom is that Hindi cinema in the 1980s sucked”. Mithun Chakraborty in Disco Dancer (Film still) 392pp, ₹599;…