Veteran journalist M.D. Soni (in picture below) has brought out a beautiful encyclopaedia of Rajasthani cinema, covering all the Rajasthani films made from 1942 to 2022. The Rajasthani Film Geet Kosh contains a huge amount of information and data making it unique.
The book, published in Hindi and Rajasthani, has 256 pages and has been published by Cine Virasat, Jaipur. It gives every information related to the Rajasthani film industry and is a database of the regional cinema of Rajasthan. It gives details of the 233 films produced in the 81 years from 1942 to 2022. It covers a total of 1,588 songs from these films, detailing the names of the music directors, lyricists and even choreographers. The book has exclusive pictures of stars and scenes from the films. The B & W encyclopaedia has 16 colour pages and also contains interesting trivia about the films, many of which would be a reader’s delight because they are exclusive. The foreword is by your editor, Komal Nahta.
The treasure trove of information which the book has turned out to be was possible thanks to the untiring efforts of M.D. Soni over the years. Its multiple indexes make the book very easy to refer to. So detailed is the Geet Kosh that it would not be wrong to conclude that if some information about a Rajasthani film is not included in this book, it is very likely that it would not be available anywhere else.
The book is priced at Rs. 2,999 ($36.01).