Mukesh Ambani, India’s wealthiest man, watches Hindi films in his private cinema theatre at home in Mumbai. Rekha Rana watches them on her third-hand television set in a Gurgaon slum near the capital New Delhi.
Across India, men and women, rich and poor, speaking a babel of languages, adore their Bollywood films. They laugh, weep, identify, loathe, aspire and sing along. And that’s the way it has been for a 100 years.
“If you are an Indian, Bollywood films are a part of growing up.
It’s a common language. It is a common passion, perhaps only matched by cricket,” Kolkata-based film buff Sudeshna Ghosh said.
Dadasaheb Phalke is credited with producing India’s first feature-length movie, Raja Harishchandra, about a mythological king who gave up his empire and family to keep a promise to a saint.
With the quintessential Bollywood theme of good triumphing over evil, the silent film hit Mumbai theatres in May 1913.
There has been no looking back since. India’s Hindi film industry based in Mumbai, the erstwhile Bombay, and informally known as Bollywood now churns out 800 to 1,000 films a year.
The industry was estimated to be worth 122.4 billion rupees (about $ 2.2 billion) in 2012, according to the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry. It is growing between 7 and 10 per cent every year, even in times of economic slowdown.
But more than the numbers, Bollywood is about emotions and dreams and passionate followers. In a country of immense diversity — of languages, culture, attire, food, religions or castes — Bollywood is a great unifying factor.
Bollywood films generally have north Indian characters and the region’s traditions, culture, attire and lifestyle form the routine backdrop, yet the films transcend those parochial boundaries to cheer millions of people every week.
Film historian Amrit Gangar picks a 1957 classic, Mother India, as an prime example of how a range of emotions are blended together in a typical Bollywood movie.
The film is about a poor peasant woman’s struggle to raise her sons through a multitude of troubles without losing sight of her high moral values.
“The film is about heroism, eroticism, rage, grief, wonder, fear, laughter, serenity and more,” Gangar said.
In the early years, Bollywood films were largely based on mythology and stories from the Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata.
Soon they embraced a wider scope of historical narratives, romances, comedies and action films.
For Indians, cinema is an escape, from rising prices, corruption, power cuts and general chaos. Bollywood often takes the nation’s mood and jazzes it up with a full bucket of emotions, New Delhi-based film critic Suparna Sharma said.
In a 100-year-long cinematic journey, Bollywood has lost many things and acquired new companions.
“The raped/dishonoured sister, the coughing, ailing mother, the separated brothers/family — all characters drawn from the trauma of the country’s partition in 1947 — have gone,” Sharma said.
Mumbai-based film critic Anupama Chopra said the role of women, especially, has changed over the last 20 years. “Earlier, there was a heroine and a vamp, who did all the things the heroine couldn’t. Over the last 20 years, these lines really blurred. Hindi cinema today, with some exceptions, is mostly about a world Bollywood has created — a beautiful, perfect world, brushing out all warts and moles. It’s a sort of la-la land, a middle-class aspiration,” Sharma said.
A world of branded clothes, designer homes, exotic locations and streamlined bodies, all aimed at a growing, consumerist middle-class.
There are two ingredients which are marks of Bollywood’s abiding success — male stars who fetch $ 6-16 million per film — well ahead of women who get $ 1-2 million — and songs which spin out into a separate industry.
Bollywood stars Like Amitabh Bacchan and Shahrukh Khan are household names across India and revered almost like deities. When Bachchan was gravely injured on film sets in 1982, millions of fans prayed and fasted for his health.
“No matter where you are in this country, you can always strike up a conversation with anyone, often with just two words, or even one — Amitabh Bachchan, Rajinikath,” Sharma said.
Box office revenue is only a small portion of the cinema-based entertainment industry. Celebrity endorsements and the spin-off music industry are huge.
There is Indian cinema outside Bollywood as well. Films are produced in the Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and many other languages.
But Bollywood is the all-encompassing giant. Fashion and haircuts are influenced by Bollywood, director Kunal Kohli noted. “We do not even have a music culture outside of the cinema,” he said.
Director Vishal Bharadwaj spoke for most Indians when he told a recent opening of centenary celebrations in New Delhi, “Cinema is an incredible 100-year-old disease, and we are all fellow sufferers.”