Bollywood for Beginners: Part 1

Note: This series was originally posted to my Bollywood blogspot blog and represents the cumulation of the wisdom of a decade or so spent in the Bollywood trenches. It would have last been edited in about 2014.

Bollywood for Beginners 1: 

What is Bollywood?

Bollywood is often used as a generic term for all Indian films, which is equivalent to using the term “Hollywood” to describe every American, English, Australian, Irish, and West European and etc. film ever made. Most Western film fans would balk at rolling up Woody Allen, Michael Bay, and Jean Luc Goddard into the same generic category of “Hollywood” and Indian cinema fans feel the same way about the Western press rolling up all of Indian cinema under the general term Bollywood. The reality is that India not only has numerous popular film industries--one for every regional language--but it also produces art films, middlebrow films, schlocky Z-grade horror films and everything in between. 

The term “Bollywood” emerged in the tabloid press sometime in the 1970s as a catchy portmanteau of Hollywood and Bombay, as Mumbai was then called. Although many in the Hindi film industry find the term insulting, for better or worse, the term has worked its way into the language and seems unlikely to disappear soon. Used properly it can refer to both mainstream Hindi-language films themselves and to the global pop culture industry that has been built up around them. Bollywood is the biggest of the many Indian film industries and has the widest distribution, which leads some to treat it as the national film industry but the truth is that it is only one part of the tapestry of Indian film.

Despite the derivative name, Bollywood has been around at least as long as Hollywood has. Short films were produced in India from the late 1800s and the first full-length Indian feature film was made in Mumbai in 1913 (Raja Harishchandra) and the first Hindi film to use sound was made in 1931 (Alam Ara). The historical and cultural circumstance that was the British occupation of South Asia, among other factors, meant that Indian film grew parallel to the American film industry and almost completely isolated from it. New filmmakers didn’t take their cues from Los Angeles or London, they created their own style of film, rooted in artistic traditions that made sense to them.

That Bombay, a port city halfway down the West coast of the Indian subcontinent, would become the film capital of the country was far from inevitable. In the early days of film, a handful of other cities, including Lahore, now located in Pakistan, also had thriving film industries. But the bustling commercial nature of Bombay had long attracted ambitious migrants from across the region and, slowly, talented writers, directors, and actors joined in the flow of people who wanted to try their luck. Migration only grew in the upheaval of the British Partition of South Asia in 1947, as refugees from all sides of the Pakistan/India border joined the flow of people. Helen, who only needs one name, famously trekked across the entire subcontinent with her mother in the early 1940s, on the run from the Japanese soldiers occupying Burma.

Besides acting as a collector for talent from all over the globe, there is one other major factor that separates Bollywood from the rest of the popular regional film industries: the Hindi language. (And that’s “Hindi,” not “Hindu,” which is a religion.) Hindi was not originally the language of Bombay, which is located in the state of Maharashtra where people speak Marathi. But all those migrants, especially those from regions that would become Pakistan, brought their languages with them and it was Hindi, not Marathi, that emerged victorious. And this is why there are more Bollywood films that take place in the Punjab or Delhi or some village in Uttar Pradesh than in the immediate area around Bombay. The situation is similar to what happened in Los Angeles, where the language of the English-speaking migrants eventually won out over the Spanish speakers already living there. And much like the Spanish language market in Los Angeles, even today there is a Marathi film industry operating parallel to Bollywood in Mumbai. 

After Indian independence, there was a push from New Delhi to make Hindi (not coincidentally the language spoken in New Delhi) the national language. If Hindi was the national language, then the Hindi-language film industry would therefore become the national film industry by default, even though there were--and are--significant numbers of people all over India who can’t speak a word of Hindi. The role of Hindi in India is still a controversial topic and there are still large portions of India where Bollywood films aren’t really watched. Despite this somewhat controversial role, Bollywood today is still considered the public face of Indian cinema and Bollywood films are the films that get distributed to the Indian Diaspora and the other major markets for popular Indian films: Africa, Southeast and Central Asia, the Middle East, and the former Soviet republics.

In short, the Oscar-nominated Lagaan (2001) is a Bollywood film because it was made for mainstream Hindi-language audiences but Slumdog Millionaire (2008) is not a Bollywood film because it was made by Westerners for a Western audiences. By the same token, the actor Anil Kapoor who starred in Slumdog Millionaire is a Bollywood actor because he has starred in numerous Bollywood films but actors like Kal Penn or Mindy Kaling are not Bollywood actors, just Indian-American. An Indian setting doesn’t turn a film into a Bollywood one and Indian heritage alone doesn’t make an actor a Bollywood star. In fact, there are a handful of white Bollywood actors currently working in Indian films, most prominently the actress Kalki Koechlin, whose parents came to India from France.

The word Bollywood can be hurtful when tossed around indiscriminately, such as in Natalie Portman’s “Bollywood Princess” video for singer Devandra Barnhart’s “Carmensita,” in which “Bollywood” was taken to mean a highly exoticized and exploitive take on traditional Indian culture. Because of the association of the word “Bollywood” with images like white actress Natalie Portman dancing with snake charmers, there was even a movement within Bollywood to rename it HiFi  (as in Hindi Film) which would separate Hindi films completely from those negative connotations. 

Now that the idea of Indian film is becoming more known on an international scale, it would be a real shame if Bollywood was forever branded with those exploitative images of an exotic India but the amazing treasures Bollywood has to offer continue to be dismissed by Western gatekeepers as “silly” and “derivative.”