Bollywood
Bollywood, is the Mumbai-based Hindi language film industry in India, which is considered to be the largest filming industry in the world, pumping out 2-3 times more films than Hollywood.
We’ve all heard about Bollywood movies, sure every country has its own local movie industry but when it comes to the box office, Hollywood blockbusters dominate the highest-grossing films where India is an exception to this by placing a huge number of films in a year over Hollywood films.
India has more than 26 regional languages and in fact, when Indians talk about Bollywood they’re referring to the Hindi language film industry which produces only about 20% of the total number of movies produced by the Indian film industry. The other 80% are made in the other regional languages – Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and so on. Each language has its own industry with its own stars and studios.
Growth Of Bollywood
Bollywood movies are so popular in India that they surpass the big Hollywood blockbusters. And all of this comes despite the fact that the history of this industry was far from easy. An Indian man named Dadasaheb Phalke traveled to London and learned film-making, and then came back to India, secured funds, and produced a movie called Raja Harishchandra, which was India’s first home run feature film. It was a 40 minutes silent film about a king from Hindu mythology and was screened for the public at coronation cinema in Mumbai in 1913. See the beautiful growth of Bollywood in sand art here.
Golden Age Of Bollywood
Over the next decade or so, several silent films were produced in India. Initially, they were based on Indian mythology but soon the plots made way for adaptations of novels. And then, in 1931, India’s first movie with audio or talkie was produced. It was Ardeshir Irani’s movie called “Alam Ara” and the concept of this film is so fascinating for the people that it’s reported that police had to control the crowds that went berserk at Mumbai’s cinema theater and further this film won the best film award too. This paved way for many minds to think on different concepts to produce by filming. Due to which, one could call this as the golden age period of Indian cinema.
Later in the ’70s and ’80s, filmmakers explored the genre of action films and from then jumped to the ’90s when films revolved around traditional family values. And with the new concepts, the film industry started to flourish. In 2009, there were 1279 films produced in India. According to the 2019 report, India produced more than 2200 movies which is a very good remark for the growth of the Indian film industry.
Fans Of Bollywood
Despite Bollywood being the world’s largest filming industry, it’s also known for its influential power in attracting people. It’s even a political tool.
“ Wherever I go in the Middle-East, Africa, the people talk about Indian films. So that is a new way of influencing the world about the growing importance of India. Soft power is equally important in the new world of diplomacy “
former Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh.
Indian movies are so influential that one single movie made Indian tourism to Spain grow 9.5% in one year, the movie was called Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (life doesn’t come again), it was about three Indian guys taking a road trip to Spain. In fact, you know what is the world’s largest Youtube channel, it’s not PewDiePie or in fact visual politics, it’s T-series, a channel that broadcasts Bollywood visual clubs.
Impact Across Countries
China is a huge consumer of Bollywood movies and according to the report, the Chinese prefer watching Indian films over the largest Star Wars movie. Unlike Hollywood studios which are mainly located in a town called Hollywood on the outskirts of Los Angeles, there is no actual place called Bollywood. Nevertheless, you could say the most of the Hindi language films are produced in one city Mumbai or as it is used to be called Bombay. Just like Los Angeles and the US, Mumbai is a thriving and cosmopolitan city with good weather all year round and the perfect place for making movies.
The Bollywood industry has set a very high level to reach and paved the way for new interesting concepts to evolve. Today Indian movies are becoming increasingly popular not just in India, but worldwide in countries like Russia, China, and the Arab world. And also the number of movies releasing per year is increasing.
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