As Hollywood suffers the worst box office slump it has seen in two decades, India’s prolific Bollywood industry continues to rise and rise. Once derided by Western audiences who occasionally caught a glimpse of them (usually on late night television), the primacy of Bollywood films is now impossible to ignore, with the genre transcending diasporic audiences and enjoying an influential ascent in the international big picture.
In many ways, the development timeline of Indian cinema mirrored that of Hollywood. Early pioneers began exploring the form in the late 1800s, with the nation’s first indigenous feature Raja Harishchandra (derived from religious epic, The Mahabharata), emerging to critical and popular acclaim in 1912. India’s multitudinous languages were suddenly united through images; a studio system was born, and over the century to come, several key cinematic hubs sprung up and thrived.
