What makes an Indian film iconic? Is it box office collections? Not necessarily, thought Saugata Mukherjee, who was the managing editor and rights director with the publishing company HarperCollins Publishers India. With nostalgia for Hindi cinema on the rise and many people turning to the cinema of the past with fondness and sometimes affectionate exasperation, Mukherjee, who is now the publisher of Picador and Pan Macmillan India, commissioned a few writers to write on “iconic films” and what make them iconic even today.

Published under the HarperCollins India Film Series, the first three monographs — short, single-subject books — cover Deewaar (1975) by film scholar and academic Vinay Lal, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983) by blogger Jai Arjun Singh and Disco Dancer (1983) by a screenplay writer and playwright Anuvab Pal. Amar Akbar Anthony by Siddhartha Bhatia and Pakeezah by Meghnad Desai are the next two titles expected to be out soon.

“The idea was to grow the list of cinema books. We have had scholarly books on cinema, glossy books about film starts and coffee-table photography books. The films chosen to be written about are something that people remember with some amount of nostalgia,” said V K Karthika, publisher and editor, HarperCollins India.

For Lal, a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and who is now teaching at Delhi University, the approach remains scholarly. “You have to unsettle conventional views of the subject at hand. I wanted to make complex arguments accessible. Deewaar is a film that has entranced me for the longest time, and about which I’ve wanted to write for the past seven or eight years”.

In fact, he had written a paper where Deewaar was one of several films, which was discussed around the mid-1990s. In this book, the tone is different and not academic in nature, but the ideas remain in currency. He elegantly argues in the book about how the film reflects a culture’s changing textual traditions and changing social relations in independent India.

When Pal got a call from the publishers about writing a book on a seminal Indian film, he suggested Disco Dancer. “You can write or talk about good films because presumably all the messages and aesthetic choices that you see woven into the film have been put there by choice by the filmmaker. But for me, writing about film was a chance to write about one of my favourites, and the worst movie of all time, Disco Dancer,” said Pal.

Pal treats Disco Dancer as a “comedy in five parts”. The book contains interviews wi­th Babbar Subhash and the soundtrack composer Bappi Lahiri as well as an English transcription of the screenplay. “I did not try to rewrite the script in English, but stuck to a faithful description of the story’s twists and turns, translating the aphorism-riddled Hindi dialogue without alteration,” he said.

According to Pal, over the years, many things happened with Disco Dancer that explain why this “badly made but still entertaining” movie is “iconic” today.