Hindi cinema

This article is about the Hindi film industry based in Mumbai, Maharashtra. For the entire film industry of India, see Cinema of India.
"Bollywood" redirects here. For other uses, see Bollywood (disambiguation).

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Indian cinema

Hindi cinema, popularly known as Bollywood and formerly as Bombay cinema,[1] refers to the film industry based in Mumbai, engaged in production of motion pictures in Hindi language. The popular term Bollywood is a portmanteau of "Bombay" (former name of Mumbai) and "Hollywood". The industry is a part of the larger Indian cinema, which also includes South Indian cinema and other smaller film industries.[2][3][4] The term 'Bollywood', often mistakenly used to refer to Indian cinema as a whole, only refers to Hindi-language films, with Indian cinema being an umbrella term that includes all the film industries in the country, each offering films in diverse languages and styles.

In 2017, Indian cinema produced 1,986 feature films, of which the largest number, 364 have been in Hindi.[2] In 2022, Hindi cinema represented 33% of box office revenue, followed by Telugu and Tamil representing representing 20% and 16% respectively.[5] Hindi cinema is one of the largest centres for film production in the world.[6][7][8] Hindi films sold an estimated 341 million tickets in India in 2019.[9][10] Earlier Hindi films tended to use vernacular Hindustani, mutually intelligible by speakers of either Hindi or Urdu, while modern Hindi productions increasingly incorporate elements of Hinglish.[11]

The most popular commercial genre in Hindi cinema since the 1970s has been the masala film, which freely mixes different genres including action, comedy, romance, drama and melodrama along with musical numbers.[12][13] Masala films generally fall under the musical film genre, of which Indian cinema has been the largest producer since the 1960s when it exceeded the American film industry's total musical output after musical films declined in the West. The first Indian talkie, Alam Ara (1931), was produced in the Hindustani language, four years after Hollywood's first sound film, The Jazz Singer (1927).

Alongside commercial masala films, a distinctive genre of art films known as parallel cinema has also existed, presenting realistic content and avoidance of musical numbers. In more recent years, the distinction between commercial masala and parallel cinema has been gradually blurring, with an increasing number of mainstream films adopting the conventions which were once strictly associated with parallel cinema.

  1. ^ Gulzar, Nihalani & Chatterjee 2003.
  2. ^ a b "Indian Feature Films Certified During The Year 2017". Film Federation of India. 31 March 2017. Archived from the original on 24 November 2018. Retrieved 25 November 2017.
  3. ^ "'The word B'wood is derogatory'". The Indian Express. Archived from the original on 11 November 2016. Retrieved 11 November 2016.
  4. ^ Richard Corliss (16 September 1996). "Hooray for Bollywood!". Time. Archived from the original on 19 January 2007.
  5. ^ "Distribution of the Indian box office in 2022, by language". Statista. Retrieved 4 October 2023.
  6. ^ Pippa de Bruyn; Niloufer Venkatraman; Keith Bain (2006). Frommer's India. Frommer's. p. 579. ISBN 978-0-471-79434-9.
  7. ^ Wasko, Janet (2003). How Hollywood works. Sage. p. 185. ISBN 978-0-7619-6814-6.
  8. ^ K. Jha; Subhash (2005). The Essential Guide to Bollywood. Roli Books. p. 1970. ISBN 978-81-7436-378-7.
  9. ^ Jha, Lata (31 January 2023). "Footfalls for Hindi films slump up to 50%". Mint. Retrieved 14 February 2023. Footfalls for Hindi cinema fell to 189 million in 2022 from 341 million in 2019, 316 million in 2018 and 301 million in 2017, according to media consulting firm Ormax.
  10. ^ "Despite slowdown, theatres see 8.9% jump in footfalls in 2019". Moneycontrol. 17 February 2020. Retrieved 14 February 2023.
  11. ^
    • Saxena, Akshya (March 2022). Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India. Princeton University Press. pp. 170–171. ISBN 978-0-691-22313-1. Scholars of Hindi-Urdu film noted a gradual replacement of Urdu with English in these films... the "ideological work" of Urdu— its evocation of a pre- Partition composite culture and business practices— "has now been challenged by English, which provides the ideological coordinates of the new world of the Hindi film.
    • Varia, Kush (31 January 2013). Bollywood: Gods, Glamour, and Gossip. Columbia University Press. p. 33. ISBN 978-0-231-50260-3. The specific use of Hindi/Urdu has shifted through time with the films produced in the pre-independence era having a leaning towards Urdu and those of the post independence era leaning towards Hindi... The use of Urdu has gradually declined since independence...
    • M Madhava, Prasad (1 August 2008). "Surviving Bollywood". In Kavoori, Anandam P.; Punathambekar, Aswin (eds.). Global Bollywood. NYU Press. p. 45. ISBN 978-0-8147-2944-1.
    • Ganti, Tejaswini (2004). Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema. Psychology Press. p. 69. ISBN 978-0-415-28854-5.
    • Virdi, Jyotika (2003). The Cinematic ImagiNation [sic]: Indian Popular Films as Social History. Rutgers University Press. pp. 20–21. ISBN 978-0-8135-3191-5. ...the extent of Urdu used in commercial Hindi cinema has not been stable... Although the shift was gradual and two generations communicated with each other through a blend of Urdu and Hindi, known as Hindustani, the ultimate victory of Hindi in the official sphere has been more or less complete... The decline of Urdu is mirrored in Hindi films... It is true that many Urdu words have survived and have become part of Hindi cinema's popular vocabulary. But that is as far as it goes.
  12. ^ Cite error: The named reference Ganti2004 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  13. ^ Nelmes, Jill. An introduction to film studies. p. 367.