The title of this chapter is important. India has many film industries making films in more than a dozen different languages. Unfortunately, outside India there is little sense of this diversity and it is often assumed that Indian cinema = Hindi cinema, aka ‘Bollywood’. My aim therefore is to present some background on the other forms of cinema, namely the ‘regional industries’ and the concept of ‘parallel cinema’. The term ‘regional cinema’ is quite disparaging since the the largest of these, the Telugu and Tamil industries are roughly equivalent in terms of production and admissions to the cinemas of European countries – and Chennai (Madras) is at least the equal of Bombay in terms of film production.
Browse all the blog posts in the Indian cinema category.
The case studies include the following films discussed on this blog:
The latter part of this chapter
