The dazzling combination of drama, action, dancing and romance taking place at colourful sceneries and the background of moving music pieces; dominates the Indian movie industry.
Many unfamiliar viewers refer to all Indian movies as products of Bollywood (the same way the cinema of the United States is often generally referred to as Hollywood), while, indeed, the term Bollywood refers to only the movies which are produced by the Mumbai film industry, primarily in the Hindi language and containing song and dance items as an integral part of the movie plot. And surprisingly to many, Bollywood film industry accounts to only around 20% of the total film output of India.
The etymology of the word Bollywood is crystal clear, coming from a play on the centre of the American film industry – Hollywood and the “B” from Bombay (nowadays known as Mumbai).
Going further, the name scheme was copied by the Tollywood – the earliest Hollywood-inspired name dating back to 1932 and referring to the Bengali film industry based in Tollygung, the centre of the Bengali cinema at the time.
The term Bollywood was coined in only the 1970s, yet the Bombay movie industry stretches as far back as the film industries of the rest of the world.
The Lumiere Brothers introduced the art of cinema to colonial India in 1896 and of course it was Bombay the first Indian city to screen short films. So naturally, Bombay became the centre of the India’s Hindi cinematography. The first full-length Indian movie was released in 1913, followed by the production of over 20 films in the next 5 years to 200 by 1930.
India’s struggle for independence lead to the Golden Age of Bollywood, the 1950s and 60s, which were replaced by the quintessential Bollywood entertainer – the Masala film in the 70s and to nowadays when the Bollywood has taken all over the world, yet threatened by the China’s “Bollywood-ization”.
As we have already mentioned the word Bollywood was coined in the 70s, at the time when India overtook America as the world’s largest movie producer, by a magazine columnist. The identity of the writer is not confirmed, but it is mass accepted that it was Bevinda Collaco, a gossip columnist writing under ghost names in Cineblitz magazine (Hollywood-style gossip magazine), who had actually claimed herself to be the one who firstly used the word Bollywood in 1976.
The word firstly appeared in epistolary in 1977, in Keating’s detective series Inspector Ghote, a detective within the Bombay Police Department: “Soon after she had given up the role of Rani Maqbet..she left Ravi Kumar to go to Dhartiraj. My revelation she had done that was the greatest sensation ever to come out of Bollywood.”
Just for comparison, Hollywood was firstly mentioned in 1922, in a June issue of Cosmopolitan: “Beauty is the cheapest coinage in Hollywood.”
And while Hollywood is synonymous to beauty and glory, Bollywood, as a word, sums up the popular mainstream Indian cinema- melodramatic, load and colourful.
