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Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art." Halleluiah, amen and thank you, thank you, thank you Mr Oscar Wilde for rescuing us from the "tell-it-like-it-is" bloody boring, bloody realists. Although he has long dissolved in his grave in Paris, Wilde's philosophy has found its natural expression not amongst the salons of Europe but in Filmistan, aka India. Let's face it; this sentence could have easily been written by Hindi cinema's own Mr Soundbite, Manmohan Desai. Although he would probably have been a bit more emphatic, just in case we didn't get the point, "I will never tell the truth on screen.

CINEMA INDIA: THE VISUAL CULTURE OF HINDI FILMS By Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel Oxford Price: Rs 650 Pages: 240

If it happens in real life then it's not cinema" would have been more his style. And boy did he have style, despite what the keepers of India's Cultural Capital thought as they hung their heads in despair at the revolving restaurants and the outlandish costumes, the man had style sparkling off his ugly brown specs. He had filmi style.

POSTER PERFECT: Dwyer and Patel celebrate the barmy, the brilliant and sometimes breathtaking films that Mumbai produces

Cinema India finally gives filmi style its due, acknowledging it as creating and reflecting the "visual culture" of modern India. Whether modern Indians like it or not. At the start of their book Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel quote Satyajit Ray, a man who has been put on more pedestals than Lenin. He urged that a "truly Indian film should steer clear of such inconsistencies and look for its material in the most basic aspects of Indian life, where habitat and speech, dress and manners, backgrounds and foreground, blend into a harmonious whole." Hello? Which India did he live in? Does anyone know of anyone, Indian or otherwise, the aspects of whose life blended into a harmonious whole? Inconsistencies are our world. Modern life chucks a large amount of, well, stuff, at us to process with little or no help from our family and friends, we need popular culture to help us through the foggy swamp. Any real attempt to order the chaos is futile, but there is no harm in having some fun trying, surely?

Dwyer and Patel look at these "inconsistencies" that have gone into creating the ever-shifting cultural register of Hindi film's visual lexicon. The two authors have pooled their respective expertise to be able to look in detail at the different aspects that make up the visual culture. Firstly Dwyer discusses the visual components of a film, the different locations, and costume as well as the distinctive styles of editing and camera work. Then Patel explores how film advertising and promotional materials have been developed and what is communicated to the potential audiences by them. It is a fascinating journey through the development of India's relationship with its visual cultures-of its shifting attitudes towards its past as well as the future and how to project a modern India. How it has visually projected and assimilated the inconsistencies.

The two voices work well together and the different knowledge complement each other. By recognising their limitations they also afford the subject the respect that it deserves. So often when a Hindi film is written about, the writer writes about all aspects at once, whether they are qualified to do so or not. Perhaps the continuing growth of its stature on a global level will allow each part to be explored thoroughly. And you do get the feeling by the end of the book that now Hindi film and the creators of the visual culture that reflects and informs our lives have taken on a new feeling of confidence. Gone is the sometimes almost apologetic stance when describing the popular cinema. Gone is its sense of cultural inferiority. It no longer has to skulk about in the film suburbs of north Mumbai, justifying its existence by the conspicuous consumption of a few million "taxi drivers" or harking back to the past, to the so-called Golden Age. It has marched forth into the global arena with its designer gear-clad head held high. Perhaps it is continuing its role as the space where issues of modernity are played out, it is leading India's way out of its sometimes myopically insular self-image and into a place where it can see itself as others do, as a potential world power. In a global cultural economy where shallow is the new deep, the shimmering surface of Hindi cinema's visual culture tells a lot of beautiful, untrue things, Dwyer and Patel's book allow us to see the work and the craftsmanship that goes into the creation of India's most popular of arts.