The History Of Bollywood

Cinema arrived in India on July 7 1896, when the short films of the Lumiére brothers were shown at the Watkins Hotel in downtown Bombay. In 1913 DG Phalke, a successful printer, was inspired by seeing The Life Of Christ on a trip to London. On returning to India, he made the nation's first feature film Raja Harishchandra, based on one of the stories in the religious epic The Mahabharata. The film was a huge success. India's film industry has never looked back.

Silent cinema was seized by artists as an opportunity to create a truly international art, one which had none of the language barriers that emerged with the advent of sound. Whereas for the rest of the world it meant cinema could extend beyond national boundaries, for India, with hundreds of languages, silent cinema created an art that reached beyond the nation's many differences.

The flow of the Indian upper classes back and forth between England and India also contributed to a boom in the medium. Producer Himansu Rai and actress Devika Rani returned to India to run one of the first studios together, Bombay Talkies. Rani starred in his first talkie, Karma (1933) and went on to become India's first major female star.

In 1931 sound came to Indian cinema with the blockbuster Alam Ara (dir Ardeshir Irani), establishing song and dance as part of the storytelling. It also split the film industry along language lines: these broadly being the Hindi belt in the north and the two major language blocks in the south, Tamil and Telegu.

But almost each language has its own cinema for those who only understand Kanada or Gujarati etc. Crucially, it also put a barrier up to the exhibition of Western films. With sound came isolation, and India was able to build up a thriving, distinct indigenous industry to serve its cinema-crazy, predominantly illiterate audience.

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