Bollywood: Popular Indian Cinema, edited by Lalit Mohan Joshi (editor) <br></br>Bollywood Boy, by Justine Hardy <br></br>Balham to Bollywood, by Chris England

Behind the dazzling Hindi-movie dream factory lies crime, corruption - and some comedy.

You just can't get away from Hindi movies these days: everyone loves big, brassy Bollywood with its kitsch tunes, wet sari dances and chaste boy-meets-girl storylines. A trickle of Bollywood films are now released in mainstream British cinemas, Bollywood awards are presented in big London venues like The Dome, and a jollied-up Bollywood in-store theme has run in Oxford Street at Selfridges. A subliminal hum of relentless pre-publicity for Andrew Lloyd Webber's production of the Bollywood musical Bombay Dreams (finally about to open) has been droning on for over a year.

Some Indian writers have even detected a colour-saturated Bollywood gloss in new "Hollywood" movies. In the illustration-rich, encyclopaedic Bollywood: Popular Indian Cinema, critic Madhu Jain purrs that singalong films like Moulin Rouge are "nothing if not pure Bollywood" – before adding in an incredulous whisper, "only white". A couple of British writers have gone in search of the essence of Bollywood.

Bollywood Boy is by Indiaphile Justine Hardy and constitutes an enjoyable celebration of Mumbai (aka Bombay) gossip and glamour. Although mainly about a playful, year-long journalistic pursuit of Bollywood hunk Hrithik Roshan, it contains plenty of details of the seamier side of the Indian film industry.

While not quite the book we really want to read, in other words "Bollywood Babylon" (pace Kenneth Anger), this is the next best thing. As an industry, Bollywood is still reactionary in tone, conservative to its core. If moralising in the louchest of art forms isn't an open invitation to luxuriant hypocrisy, nothing is. An observation by one of the eight featured writers in Bollywood seems to sum up the oppressive morality that the system happily promulgates, when discussing the 1995 release of Kuch, Kuch, Hota Hai. This film, says the writer, "accords legitimacy to a second marriage, a phenomenon that has only recently gained respectability among Indian middle-classes". Well, whoopee.

As in post-Soviet Russia, the film industry in India has attracted the attention of the mafia, drawn to its glamour, and to its money-laundering and extortion possibilities. According to Hardy, an underworld don called Dawood Ibrahim still wields power in the film business, despite his exile to Karachi. In 1996 his minions made an attempt on a director's life, forcing him abroad; in 1997 a music distributor was killed for not giving preferential treatment to a mafia-endorsed producer; in 1999 a film distributor was beaten to within an inch of his life in Bandra, and in the same year film labs were targeted for extortion.

When, in 1998, the producer Rakesh Roshan announced plans for his movie Kaho Na Pyer Hai, he immediately received a phone call requesting 50 million rupees in protection money. After ignoring them, Roshan was shot and wounded just after the opening night, leaving his son – the film star Hrithik – to quit the business at the peak of his career, sickened by what he witnessed. Never mind that in two of his three famous films he had actually played an Islamic terrorist. This handsome, green-eyed matinee idol had had enough of violence.

Not that you'd get any sense of this underbelly from Bollywood, which assumes its main job is to cheer-lead a national industry. "One can say that the Hindi movie is a super-genre that combines within itself all the genres," puffs one writer, proud as a peacock. The writing's not all like this, thankfully: there's plenty of solid information for the devotee, even if it does assume an ability to navigate the hundreds of actors and directors and dozens of dynasties that produce the 800 or so movies every year. But when it gets to talk about Hrithik, it's without so much as mentioning his controversial retirement, or those rumours of an affair on the London set of Yaadein with Kareena Kapoor. And it doesn't touch on other uncomfortable themes explored elsewhere in Bollywood Boy: actresses who end up in prostitution, the arrest of Fardeen Khan for cocaine use, the closeted stars who are secretly gay.

One film that Bollywood does happily trumpet is Lagaan, a big recent international success. Chris England has written up his experience of filming it in Balham to Bollywood. Now England is a funny chap, a jobbing actor and a perfectly skilled writer to boot, who had some success on the London stage by writing the comedy An Evening with Gary Lineker. Lagaan is also about sport – an uptight English army cricket team visiting a village in 1893 and being thrashed there in a match. Filmed in Bhuj, an hour's flight from Mumbai, it was unusual in that it required actors to make a six-month commitment (Indian actors, like joiners, seem to have three jobs on the go at once) and was to be the first Indian film using natural sound (the sound is usually post-dubbed).

It also happened to be headlined by one of the biggest stars in Bollywood now, Aamir Khan, who has largely replaced Hrithik as the crown prince of Indian cinema. The actual shoot is amusingly recounted, but perhaps the most telling thing comes later, after England returns home.

Not only does he find out that a serious drought had hit the region of Bhuj while he was there (he recalls with a "wince of embarrassment" the copious use of water to mimic rainstorms in the filming), a fact to which he had been completely oblivious. But the entire 500-year-old city where they made Lagaan was flattened by a massive earthquake just after filming ended. It's a telling image: a Bollywood heart-throb, pursued by teen fans, being drenched in water while all around the parched countryside burns and the people suffer, returning to a multi-storey hotel destined to be flattened by an earth tremor.

I'm rather satisfied to report that when the English cast played the Indian cast in a cricket match, they reversed the narrative of the movie: England beat India. At least some things are better in fantasy. Let's just hope there were no chants of "Vindaloo" in the changing rooms afterwards.