Bollywood is not Indian cinema: it is only the Hindi-language slice
People say Bollywood when they mean all Indian film, but the name covers only Hindi-language movies made in Mumbai. Even so, that slice is the biggest: of 1,986 Indian features in 2017, 364 were in Hindi, and Hindi films took a third of the national box office in 2022.
The word itself fuses Bombay, the older name for Mumbai, with Hollywood. It sits inside a much broader Indian industry that includes South Indian cinema and several smaller regional traditions. In 2022 Telugu and Tamil films earned 20 and 16 percent of box office revenue, behind Hindi's 33 percent. Hindi films sold roughly 341 million tickets at home in 2019. Their language has drifted too: older pictures used a Hindustani that Hindi and Urdu speakers could both follow, while newer ones lean increasingly on Hinglish.
Moving pictures arrived early. In 1897 a Professor Stevenson staged a show at the Star Theatre in Calcutta, and the photographer Hiralal Sen, using Stevenson's camera, filmed scenes from it as The Flower of Persia in 1898. Dadasaheb Phalke's silent Raja Harishchandra of 1913 was the first Indian feature, carrying intertitles in English, Marathi and Hindi. Sound came with Ardeshir Irani's Alam Ara in 1931, four years after The Jazz Singer, and audiences demanded talkies and songs so strongly that the industry converted quickly. In 1937 Irani went further with Kisan Kanya, the earliest Hindi picture shot in colour, though colour did not catch on until the late 1950s.
The 1940s turned Bombay into a national force. Kismet, released in 1943, cost about two lakh rupees and earned more than one crore, holding the title of India's longest-running hit into the 1970s. Figures such as Bimal Roy and Prithviraj Kapoor wove the independence struggle into their work. Before Partition, Bombay was tightly linked with the Lahore industry, and when Calcutta talent migrated west, Bombay became the centre of Hindustani filmmaking.
Since the 1970s the dominant commercial form has been the masala film, a blend of action, comedy, romance and melodrama punctuated by songs. India has made more musicals than anywhere else since the 1960s, when it overtook American output. Alongside ran parallel cinema, realist and songless, though the line between the two has been blurring as mainstream films borrow its habits.
Source: Hindi cinema
