|
Bollywood
is the informal name given to the popular Mumbai-based Hindi language film industry in India. The term is sometimes used incorrectly to refer to the whole of Indian
cinema. The name is a portmanteau of Bombay, the old name of
Mumbai, and Hollywood, the center of the United States film industry.
Though some purists deplore the name, arguing that it makes the
industry look like a poor cousin to Hollywood, it seems likely to
persist and now has its own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Bollywood and the other major cinematic hubs (Tamil, Bengali, Telugu,
and Malayalam) constitute the broader Indian film industry, whose
output is the largest in the world in terms of number of films
produced and in number of tickets sold. Bollywood
is a strong part of popular culture of not only India and the rest of
the Indian subcontinent, but also of the Middle East, parts of Africa,
parts of Southeast Asia, and among the South Asian diaspora worldwide. |
|
Bollywood has its largest diasporic audiences in the UK, Canada,
Australia and the U.S., all of which have large Indian immigrant
populations. Bollywood is also commonly referred to as "Hindi
cinema", even though use of poetic Urdu words is fairly common.
There has been a growing presence of English in dialogues and songs as
well. It is not uncommon to see movies which feature dialogues with
English words and phrases, even whole sentences. A few movies are also
made in two or even three languages (either using subtitles, or
several soundtracks).
Westerners would tend to classify most Bollywood films as musicals,
because few movies are made without at least one song-and-dance
number. However, such labelling fails to recognise the unique nature
of the genre. In the Western tradition, a "standard" movie
has no songs, at least none that are sung by the protagonists. A movie
with such songs is therefore a "musical". To understand the
Bollywood genre, it is necessary to unlearn this straightforward
concept. The standard Bollywood movie is expected to contain a number
of elements, and one of the essentials is catchy music in the form of
song-and-dance numbers woven into the script. Indeed, a movie's music
often sells the film through advance release — a populace that is
already humming the songs from a movie is far more likely to troop
into theatres to see the movie when it is finally released. A
Bollywood movie without songs and dances would need to be particularly
strong in other departments to avoid being considered a rip-off.
Indian audiences expect full value for their money, with a good
entertainer generally referred to as paisa vasool, (literally,
"money's worth"). Songs and dances, love triangles, comedy
and dare-devil thrills — all are mixed up in a three-hour-long
extravaganza with an intermission. Such movies are called masala
movies, after the Hindi word for a spice mixture, masala. Like masalas,
these movies are a mixture of many things. If a movie lacks an
ingredient (such as songs), the audience has not received its full
money's worth. Bollywood plots have tended to be melodramatic. They
frequently employ formulaic ingredients such as star-crossed lovers
and angry parents, love triangles, family ties, sacrifice, corrupt
politicians, kidnappers, conniving villains, courtesans with hearts of
gold, long-lost relatives and siblings separated by fate, dramatic
reversals of fortune, and convenient coincidences.
|
