Hindi Cinema and Bollywood

The Industry the World Underestimated

Bombay. The name still matters. Before Mumbai replaced it on official maps, before streaming dissolved the distinction between a film and a series, before the phrase "Bollywood" became a shorthand that flattened everything into dancing and sequins, there was a city that invented a film grammar entirely its own.

The industry crystallised in the 1930s and 1940s around the studios of Dadar and Parel. It absorbed the conventions of the Hollywood musical, the social-realist currents of Urdu literature, the devotional traditions of the mythological film, and the melodramatic architecture of Parsi theatre, and produced something that belonged to none of those sources. By 1957, Mother India was competing at Cannes. By the 1970s, the "angry young man" films of Amitabh Bachchan were the dominant cultural fact of the republic.

Two traditions ran in parallel almost from the beginning. The mainstream commercial cinema ("Bollywood" in the narrow sense: song-and-dance, family drama, romantic triangles) sat alongside a parallel-cinema movement that drew on Italian neorealism and Bengali art-film practice. The parallel filmmakers, working mostly outside the studio system on thin budgets, produced Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Mani Kaul, and Kumar Shahani, directors whose films circulated at festivals while Amitabh Bachchan was selling out halls across the subcontinent.

These traditions were never as separate as critics made them sound. Gulzar wrote lyrics for masala entertainers and directed psychologically intricate dramas in the same decade. The composer R.D. Burman scored both pop blockbusters and arthouse films. The borders were porous, which is why the cinema stayed alive.

The 1990s liberalisation cracked the industry open. Satellite television brought competition; the multiplex expansion of the 2000s split the audience; and the arrival of Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+ Hotstar since 2016 produced a third tier of prestige Hindi-language storytelling that has no easy precedent. A film like Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) or a series like Sacred Games (2018) would not have existed without this structural change. The industry is now genuinely plural: tentpole spectacles that compete globally, intimate streaming dramas, and a steady stream of mid-budget character films that are arguably the healthiest part of the ecosystem.

Where to Go Deeper

The parallel cinema directors are the most systematically understreamed. Shyam Benegal's early trilogy (Ankur, Nishant, Manthan) is available in fragments across platforms. Govind Nihalani's Ardh Satya (1983) is the only Indian film that treats police corruption as a structural problem rather than a villain's personal failing.

For the golden-era classicist, the place to start after Guru Dutt is Bimal Roy: Do Bigha Zamin (1953), Devdas (1955), Bandini (1963). Roy was a formalist who understood the grammar of Soviet montage and used it entirely in service of emotion rather than ideology.

The 1990s romantics wear less well than their reputation in some cases, but Dil Se (1998) holds: Mani Ratnam made a film about obsession and political violence that the mainstream marketing machine tried to sell as a love story, and the resulting collision is more interesting than either version on its own.

On streaming, Scam 1992 (SonyLIV, 2020) is the best Indian television drama since Sacred Games, and it belongs to a completely different tradition: the long-form business investigative drama that India had never really attempted before. It runs to thirty episodes and sustains them.