While Volume 1 covered the period from the silent era to the legendary Dilip Kumar, this volume depicts the evolution of the Hindi film hero from Amitabh Bachchan to the present. The author contends that the development of Hindi cinema as a powerful expression of popular culture has been largely centred round the frontal figure of the hero.
Beginning with the transition from Dilip Kumar to Amitabh Bachchan, Ashok Raj focuses upon the latter, whom he considers a colossus in Bollywood. He projects Bachchan as the dominant hero (mainly in the form of the angry young man) in the late 1970s and 1980s, along with the political and socio-economic scenario then prevailing that lent authenticity to such an image. Bachchan
Ashok Raj
Ashok Raj is a research coordinator based in New Delhi. An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, he has served as a consultant to several national and international organizations and NGOs in various spheres such as science, culture and the media. His significant work is a sixteen-part series on cinema, which was published in Screen.