The Hindi-language film industry of Mumbai, rooted in a silent feature of 1913 and grown into a storytelling machine for a subcontinent of many faiths and languages. Far from a Hollywood imitation, Bollywood grew from India's own theatrical and musical traditions; its films are long, star-driven, and built on songs that actors mime to separately recorded playback singers. At its heart lies a tradition of Hindu-Muslim cultural collaboration carried in an Urdu-inflected Hindustani idiom — a tradition now under pressure from rising religious nationalism and a shifting diaspora audience.
In a Hindi film, the lovers do not just say they are falling in love. The scene dissolves, and suddenly they are dancing in a Swiss meadow, the music swelling, the whole world arranged around their feeling. Neither actor is singing. The voice belongs to a 'playback singer' recording in a Mumbai studio, and that voice may be the most famous in the country. This is the dream-factory that gave a divided subcontinent a shared imagination. For a hundred years, the Hindi-language cinema of Bombay has sold the same few stories, again and again, to more people than almost any storytelling machine on earth: love across barriers of caste and creed, family duty, exile and return. People who share no language sing the same film songs. The nickname 'Bollywood' folds Bombay into Hollywood, as if it were an imitation. It is not. It grew from India's own traditions of theatre, music, and story, and the name does it a quiet injustice.