"Most of the facts in this book are gleaned from available sources, representing the most reliable ones we could find for each of India’s cinemas (the sources are listed below). Many of these are what we earlier called, somewhat dismissively, ‘official’. Given the nature of the Indian film industry, however, there were compelling reasons for drawing on this material alongside other, not always less ‘reliable’ sources. The editors of this book, quite deliberately and as a matter of policy, have refused to accept any single ‘authoritative’ source on any of India’s cinemas. On the contrary, we have endeavoured to produce a book providing the ‘most likely’ truth on the basis of often deeply conflicting sources. In this respect, what we offer here is not an authoritative source either (although these things are relative: we believe ours to be more authoritative than others simply because we were able to stand on the shoulders, so to speak, of the scholars who went before, even though none ever ventured to encompass as wide a field as we do in this project). Although this book will inevitably bear the scars inflicted by the unreliability of the sources used, we should like to believe that in consistently mapping India’s film histories on to a national canvas, we also present several new discoveries, such as the sheer contiguity of historical processes nationwide that most Indian regions persist in viewing as unique, the influences of film-makers from one region onto another, or even the trajectories of individual careers that transgressed boundaries sometimes decades before these boundaries came to be asserted." (Introduction, page 11)

"The book’s indices, filmographies and film entries have now been brought up to 1995. We present new entries on stars, directors and composers who have made their mark in the 1990s, and a vastly expanded section of film entries where we have especially covered mainstream productions from the 1970s-90s. These are films that are most likely to be in current circulation, on video, television or in your neighbourhood theatre. We have carried out many thousands of corrections on the first edition, some major, others mostly to do with spellings, dates - many film titles have now been re-dated in terms of their actual completion (rather than their dates of release) - and the identification of dubbed films and multilingual productions. We also include a new feature: an exhaustive index of names other than the ones featuring as independent entries." (Preface to the 2nd ed.)