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Indian Cinema: The World’s Biggest And Most Diverse Film Industry

We can best understand the importance of these classifications by making two simple distinctions. The first is between ‘popular’ and ‘art’ cinema. The massive popular audience in India is hungry for cheap entertainment and this is what cinema has provided. This audience, which includes a significant proportion of people with limited access to education, enjoys universal genres such as action, comedy and melodrama and more specifically ‘Indian’ stories with spiritual/mythological themes. The typical Indian film as viewed from outside the country may well be a three hour spectacular ‘multi-genre’ film with six or seven extended elaborately choreographed and costumed musical. | CORNERHOUSE ARTFILMBOOKSFOODDRINK CORNERHOUSE ARTFILMBOOKSFOODDRINK Indian Cinema What is Indian Cinema It ought to be straightforward to present a description of the world s biggest film industry but even Indian film scholars find it difficult to come to terms with its diversity and seeming contradictions. The biggest single mistake that non-Indian commentators and some Indians make is to assume that Bollywood is the same thing as Indian Cinema. It isn t. Consider the sheer size of India. Roughly as big as Western Europe but with four times the population it includes two major ethnic groups two large and several smaller religious communities including the world s third largest Muslim population and an enormous range of languages several hundred . CORNERHOUSE ARTFILMBOOKSFOODDRINK Indian Cinema The size of the country is matched by a longstanding love affair with cinema which creates the world s biggest film audience. Even though India was controlled by the British until 1947 this did not prevent the development of industrial film production in several Indian cities so that by the late 1930s an Indian studio system was in place. By the late 1990s India had overtaken Japan and America as the producer of the largest number of feature films per year 800-1 000 and with an annual audience of over 3 billion at home and millions more overseas it can also claim to be the most popular. All of this is not disputed but when we come to look at the films themselves and who watches them it gets more complicated. India is now famous for its computer software engineers and it has always been known for its bureaucracies needed to organise the world s largest democracy but the film industry in India is only slowly beginning to deliver the detailed box office information on a regular basis that business commentators and film scholars in the UK and North America have come to expect from their own industries. There are rapid changes taking place in the Indian entertainment business .