India Travel Guide

Bollywood
For anyone brought up on TV, it's hard to imagine the power that movies continue to wield in India. Every village has a cinema within walking distance and, with a potential audience in the hundreds of millions, the Indian film industry is the largest in the world, producing around 900 full-length features each year. Regional cinema, catering for different language groups (in particular the Tamil cinema of Chennai), though popular locally, has little national impact. Only Hindi film - which accounts for one-fifth of all the films made in India - has crossed regional boundaries to great effect, most particularly in the north. The home of the Hindi blockbuster, the "all-India film", is Mumbai, famously known as Bollywood.

To overcome differences of language and religion, the Bollywood movie follows rigid conventions and genres; as in myth, its characters have predetermined actions and destinies. Knowing a plot need not detract from the drama, and indeed, it is not uncommon for Indian audiences to watch films numerous times. Unlike the Hollywood formula, which tends to classify each film under one genre, the Hindi film follows what is known as a "masala format", and includes during its luxurious three hours a little bit of everything, especially romance, violence and comedy. Frequently the stories feature dispossessed male heroes fighting evil against all odds with a love interest thrown in. The sexual element has tended to be repressed, with numerous wet sari scenes and dance routines featuring the tensest pelvic thrusts, but strictly no kissing. Other typical themes include male bonding and betrayal, family melodrama, separation and reunion and religious piety. Dream sequences are almost obligatory, too, along with a festival or celebration scene - typically Holi, when people shower each other with paint - a comic character passing through, and a depraved, alcoholic and mostly Western "cabaret", filled with strutting villains and lewd dancing.

Recent blockbusters have also seen the introduction of a new stock character, the returning emigrant or "NRI" (Non-Resident Indian). This is one element in a more general trend sweeping Bollywood at the moment, as the big studios seek to pull in Hindi-speaking audiences in the UK, US and Canada. Overseas tickets typically cost ten times what they do in the flashiest of Mumbai's cinemas, and together with videos and DVD sales now account for forty percent of the industry's revenues. Budgets, production standards and on-screen sauciness have all been on the rise as a result, with more and more films using foreign locations, smaller spangly miniskirts and MTV-style choreography. A memorable recent example was the big first dance sequence in the smash hit Kal Ho Haa Ho, starring Shahrukh Khan and Preity Zinta, which takes place on the streets of Manhattan, featuring a multicultural cast of dancers in outlandish outfits waving little American flags.

Audiences may be growing in New York and London, but there has been a thirty percent drop in cinema receipts at home with the new pro-Western trends. Many pundits now warn that in its scramble for crossover hits, Bollywood is becoming perilously detached from the tastes of its less sophisticated audiences in India.

Visitors to the city should have ample opportunity to sample the delights of a Hindi movie, traditional or otherwise. To make an educated choice, buy Bombay magazine, which contains extensive listings and reviews. Alternatively, look for the biggest, brightest hoarding, and join the queue. Seats in a comfortable air-conditioned cinema cost Rs50-75, or less if you sit in the stalls (not advisable for women). Of the two hundred or so cinemas, only eight regularly screen English-language films. The most central and convenient are the Regal in Colaba, the gloriously Art-Deco Eros opposite Churchgate station, the Sterling, the New Excelsior and the New Empire, which are all a short walk west of CST (VT) station.