For more features on the history of Bollywood, check out the channel4.com/film website.

Jessica Hines gives us a brief history of Bollywood. Enjoy!

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.

Throughout the 1930s the industry operated through a studio system similar to that of Hollywood, with each studio employing its own directors, stars and music directors. The economic boom which followed the coming of sound eventually led to the downfall of this system, as the lucrative business attracted a host of independent producers who quickly set about coaxing the most popular actors and actresses away from the studios that they were contracted to. They did this in the time honoured fashion of offering them vast sums of cash, the origin of which wasn't always legitimate.

The 1950s were the golden age of Indian cinema. The stars ruled supreme with Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand and Raj Kapoor and their beautiful leading ladies, Nargis, Madhubala, Vyjanthimala and Meena Kumari becoming gods and goddesses. The great directors who emerged from the studio system, including Raj Kapoor, Mehbood Khan, Guru Dutt and Bimal Roy produced some stunningly beautiful and powerful films, for example Devdas (1955, dir. Bimil Roy), Pyassa ('The Thirsty One', 1957, dir. Guru Dutt), Sri 420 ('Mr 420', 1955, dir. Raj Kapoor), Kaagaz Ke Phoo ('Paper Flowers', 1959, dir. Guru Dutt) Awaara ('The Rogue', 1951, dir. Raj Kapoor), CID (1956, dir. Raj Khosla), all of which only get better with time.

The 1940s and 1950s also saw the emergence of the 'playback singer', the off-camera voice that performs the songs that the actors and actresses subsequently mime to. The woman who would dominate the music industry for the next half a century, Lata Mangeshkar, soon to be known as 'the nightingale of India', shot to fame at this time. She was the first playback singer to demand that she should be billed as the singer. She and her younger sister Asha Bhosle sang pretty much every female part for many years. During the 1950s, Mangeshkar recorded four songs a day, and has recorded over 25,000 songs in her long career.

Shammi Kapoor exploded onto the screen in the 1961 hit Junglee ('The Wild One', dir. Subodh Mukherjee) and the brightly coloured romances really got going. The industry was ruled in the 1960s by 'big banner' production houses which all made highly romantic films. The logical conclusion to this devotion to love love love came when Indian girls went nuts over the ultimate chocolate box hero, the great Rajesh Khanna.

Khanna was subsequently eclipsed by the man who would rule the screen for the next 20 years: Amitabh Bachchan. Although the beginning of his career did not promise superstardom, by 1975 he had become 'the angry young man' and nothing could stop his rise. His fame grew exponentially. When he was seriously injured in 1982, the country came to a standstill. Upon his recovery banners lined the roads declaring,'God is Great! Amit Lives!'

The 1980s are generally agreed to be the lowest point in the industry's history. Sub-disco music polluted the airwaves and pale imitations of Amitabh Bachchan's angry young man strutted their steroid-enhanced stuff across the screen. The roles for women, which had taken a backseat during the 1970s, became almost non-existent.

A new breed of fresh faced, happy young men - Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan (all unrelated) - arrived in the early 1990s. Once again, heroes cared only for getting the girl. These romantic types were the spiritual heirs to their 1960s counterparts. It took just one look and the hero and heroine were transported, usually to Switzerland, to profess their love amongst the mountains. The women made a comeback, with strong actresses such as Manisha Koirala, Madhuri Dixit and now Aishwarya Rai taking bigger roles. Spectacle and 'glamorous realism' continue to be the order of the day.

These new stars compete in a radically changed entertainment landscape. The mid-1990s saw cable and satellite arrive in India, opening up more channels for film. The music channels MTV and Channel V quickly dropped their Western music and programmed predominantly 'filmi' music videos. As a result a film's music, always important as an advertising hook, took on an even greater importance.

The last decade has seen the markets and the expectations of Bollywood's traditional audiences change irrevocably; what once worked no longer does. Bollywood's future success depends on whether it can change and adapt to the demands of this new market without loosing its core identity; and whether the rest of the world will accept it when it has.

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