BOLLYWOOD AND BEFORE

India has an extremely prolific film industry turning out anything between 700 and 800 films a year, with peaks sometimes reaching more than 900! (905 in 1985, for example.) Most of these films are produced in regional centres in languages such as Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam... Indeed India is made up of 22 States and has 17 main languages. The Bollywood term covers films produced in Hindi in the Bombay studios. Although such films only account for a quarter of the total Indian production, they are a model and the main source of national box-office hits. Film critic Bikram Singh wrote that Hindi films are for India what Hollywood films are for the rest of the world.

The Bollywood nickname was coined in the Seventies, although what it designates is much older. Right from the early days of cinema in India, Bombay was its main centre where the first Indian feature film was made in 1913, Dadasaheb Phalke's Raja Harishchandra. Yet the actual Bollywood genre was born in 1931 and prospered with the talkies. For Bollywood would not be Bollywood without songs. Like any other commercial film industry, Bollywood has gone through innovative periods (new genres, new ways to direct, new stars and sometimes genuine masterpieces) and periods of exhaustion. The first category includes the mid-Thirties (and P. C. Barua's Devdas) and the Fifties and the super productions (including Kamal Amrohi's Mugal-e-Azam, which took 9 years to be completed), major directors such as Raj Kapoor, Bimal Roy, Guru Dutt, Mehboob Khan, and the first international successes (Mehboob Khan's Mother India was nominated for an Oscar in 1957). The Seventies were also a prosperous decade with die-hard heroes played for example by Amitabh Bachchan in Ramesh Sippy's Sholay (1975), a huge success in the (would you believe it!) Western genre. Despite esthetic ups and downs, Bollywood continuously draws millions of viewers, both for emotional and narrative reasons (today Mother India and Sholay are still being shown to full houses).

The wonders of silent films

Bollywood loves songs, but it has a similar passion for narrative exuberance and melodrama. Bollywood films are crammed with divided then reunited families, revenge, falls from grace, redemption, impossible love affairs, as well as mutilations, tears and whippings. The exuberance is also found in the recycling of stories (Devdas was adapted 7 times for the silver screen!) or shameless plagiarism. This is because a Bollywood film has to be a three-hour affair: a recent hit such as Kuch Kuch Hota Hai is a copy of Grease until the intermission and then turns into Sleepless in Seattle! Bollywood's total lack of shame makes it possible for it to create the same wonders as silent films did, on both the superficial and deeper levels.