Bollywood is the informal name for the vast Hindi-language film industry, one of the world's largest. It's a portmanteau of "Bombay" (the former name of Mumbai, where the industry is based) and "Hollywood", first coined by a Variety journalist but wholeheartedly embraced by the local film industry and the Indian public.
Bollywood cinema, especially outside India, is seen as stylistically unique. The big thing that sets it apart is the music — almost every Bollywood film is a musical, chock-full of singing and dancing. Indeed, while in the West the music and film industries are separate things, in India they're practically the same; most popular Indian music is first made for a film. The composer, singers, and choreographers are as important to a Bollywood film as the producer and director, sometimes more so. Interestingly, unlike a Western musical film where a trained Broadway singer or dancer has to show their acting chops, Bollywood films usually feature a professional actor who's dubbed over by a professional "playback singer", kind of like what Lina Lamont insisted on in Singin' in the Rain — except the industry and public are well aware of the arrangement, and playback singers are as respected and coveted as the actors they're dubbing. Bollywood films' love for singing and dancing, even if it would be kind of incongruous with the scene, has given it a reputation in the West as a style where characters will break into song and dance at the slightest provocation, even though this wouldn't describe every Bollywood film.
One distinctive feature of Bollywood is the relative lack of variance in style and narrative. In general, the average Indian film of the 1950s would differ from one made in the 2000s only minimally, with some improvements in props, costumes, and technique but little by way of narrative. The standard Bollywood narrative still involves the "masala film" — family dramas, unrequited love, rich-girl-poor-boy romances. The main distinction in Bollywood is between urban and rural films — films for the rural market tend to be more traditional family dramas set in the Indian "heartland", whereas films for the urban market tend to focus more on younger, richer college students or urban professionals. In more recent years the number of "urban" films has grown, but deviations from the traditional narrative remain far from mainstream.
Bollywood is influenced significantly by India's censorship system. The Censor Board of Film Certification (CBFC) is more than a rating agency; it will dictate changes and order cuts to meet censorship standards, much like in Hollywood under The Hays Code. It takes a particularly hands-on approach to films with subversive political or sexual content. But unlike the Hays Code, which was formed by Hollywood itself as a self-policing venture to forestall government interference, the CBFC is an Indian government office. Because of this, Bollywood films are generally very clean, with no nudity or graphic violence. This may also be one reason the films don't change so much; the writers know what works and don't want to risk anything further. Interestingly, the government oversight and censorship is mostly unchallenged by both the industry and the public, leading to the idea that it's really a protectionist scheme. The censorship applies equally to Hollywood imports, whether on television or released theatrically; in India, the only way to see most Western filmsnote is to see the equivalent of a U.S. "TV edit", or else to pirate it. Western film producers therefore see little market in India, and many Western films just aren't released there, allowing Bollywood to dominate the local box office. But there's a big pirate market for Western imports in India, whose influence can be keenly felt in the many local remakes (often plagiarised) of popular American films into Bollywood films.
Bollywood is often used as a shorthand for "Indian cinema" in the rest of the world, but it really only applies to Hindi-language films. There are films in all of the many Indian Languages, each with their own "otherwoods" like "Tollywood" for Telugu cinema and "Kollywood" for Tamil cinema. Although some of these "otherwoods" can be really big in their own right, none have picked up the international notoriety of the Hindi-language Bollywood.note
We've got a list of Bollywood Actors and Bollywood Movies, but here's a short list of particularly notable Bollywood films:
- Neecha Nagar (1946) - Roughly based on The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky, it is considered India's first social-realist film. Neecha Nagar is also the only Indian film to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes (then known as the "Grand Prix du Festival").
- Mother India (1957) - Shows the poverty and precariousness of India's farmers through the tragedy of one young family.
- Mughal-e-Azam (1960) - Grand historical epic retelling of the story of Anarkali and prince Salim.
- Sholay (1975) - Probably the most famous film from Bollywood, featuring the infamous Gabbar Singh, a feared bandit. A retired policeman hires a couple of thieves to take him out.
- Salaam Bombay! (1988) - A fairly dark story set in the slums of Mumbai (Bombay).
- 3 Idiots (2008) - College slice-of-life about three friends. While mostly comedic in tone, it also criticises India's extremely competitive education system.
- Dangal (2016) - (Loosely) based on the life of wrestlers Geeta Phogat
and Babita Kumari, becoming a watershed moment for sports movies in India.
Not to be confused with Bollywood Nerd, although both come from India.
Tropes common across Bollywood films in general:
- Adaptation Amalgamation: Often what is to expect when you have action or horror movies from Bollywood: they have a shortage of ideas in this so they produce tons of unofficial remakes (and they've started to have a shortage there, as well: The Godfather was remade at least 7 times, for example). A particular example is a movie named Commando (no, not that one) by Bubbar Subhash starring Mithun Chakraborti which combines Romancing the Stone with American Ninja.
- Almost Kiss: Often happens in place for the Kiss. (It's only lately that kissing on screen has become "okay" in Indian movies.)
- Anvilicious: To fairly unbelievable levels. Tradition is good, listen to parents, and parents should be nice to the kids, etc.
- Arranged Marriage: One curious irony is the fact that most marriages in India, especially among middle-class families, tend to be arranged marriages but almost every Bollywood movie is about couples who Marry for Love and have a Happy Ending. Most films about arranged marriage tend to never portray it positively, so much so, that the film Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam was shocking in its time for showing the heroine settle for her arranged spouse, simply because it didn't do the cliche Happy Ending thing again.
- Bash Brothers
- Be Yourself
- Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Almost every Hindi film has a big musical number (many times more than one), and often includes random people not even part of the story. For an exhaustive list, see on the other wiki.
- Can't Live with Them, Can't Live Without Them
- Child Marriage Veto
- Chorus Girls: Songs from these movies often have many female backup singers.
- Cloudcuckoolander
- Crowd Song
- Dance Sensation
- Dancing on a Bus: Not the most unusual location for a dance. Extreme ones involve moving trains, i.e. actual moving trains through a mountain pass as in "Chaiya Chaiya".
- Dramatic Thunder
- Drunken Song
- Epic Movie: This is actually the rule in Bollywood film making rather than the exception. Three hours is about the average movie length, and India's many religious traditions and great narrative epics, along with inspiration from American epic movies, provide fertile ground for movie-makers who want to go big.
- Fanservice
- Filmi Music: : Indian music created for Bollywood productions.
- Foreign Remake: Many Bollywood films have been inspired by Western films, although with their own twist.
- Forgiveness
- Friend to All Children: Children are often seen as either a light or mischievous but trying to seem innocent.
- The Generation Gap
- Getting Crap Past the Radar
- Gorgeous Period Dress
- Gratuitous English: Often used to signify a certain character is pretentious/snobbish/rich or that a certain character is trying to be cool and fit in. NRI heroes who want to show they have "street cred" will often do the reverse, speak Gratuitous Hindi and other local languages. The ones who want to prove to the heroines they have Hidden Depths will do the real thing.
- Gratuitous Foreign Language: One problem with Indian movies is that they generally are done entirely in one base language with loan-words thrown in. This is especially odd for movies set in Punjab and Gujarat where you don't hear full dialogues entirely in Gujarati or Punjabi when those are the languages spoken there. In the case of movies set in Mumbai, a city that is polyglot it's weird to see whole scenes done in Hindi without smattering of Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Bengali and several other languages spoken there.
- Guns Do Not Work That Way: Most of the time.
- How We Got Here
- Identical Stranger
- I Have No Son!
- Impractically Fancy Outfit
- Incendiary Exponent
- The Item Number
- I Want My Beloved to Be Happy
- "I Want" Song
- Kick the Dog
- Kissing Discretion Shot
- Long Lost Sibling
- Lost in Translation
- Love Triangle
- Meet Cute
- Melodrama: Especially in the fighting.
- Mistaken Identity
- The Musical
- My Girl Is Not a Slut: There has been a progression (or regression) in morality in Bollywood movies that reflects Indian culture. Older movies (pre-80s) usually showed both male and female leads as virgins until marriage. 80s-00s movies usually had male-playboy-female-virgin leads. This has carried over into the 21st century, although it is more common that movies that are targeted towards the middle-to-upper-class/younger/NRI crowd show the female lead character is not a virgin.
- Non-Singing Voice
- Parental Marriage Veto: All love marriages, especially the inter-class, inter-community and inter-religious ones, will face opposition. Though the parent eventually gives in and goes along with it anyway.
- Perfectly Arranged Marriage: This is actually rarely shown, at least among the hero and heroine of the story (on the other hand, this does tend to be true for the parents of the characters).
- Pimped-Out Dress: Many movies have at least one scene where the female lead is wearing a ridiculously awesome sari.
- The Power of Friendship
- The Power of Love
- Reincarnation: This is actually a Dead Horse Trope these days and only used in movies in an "ironic" fashion as in "Om Shanti Om", but it used to be quite common in the older titles.
- Reincarnation Romance: In some of the older Bollywood movies, a variation is "Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai" where the heroine meets a Doppelgänger Replacement Love Interest instead and has her Happy Ending.
- Relationship Upgrade
- Rule of Cool: How else would the hero's ability to OHKO any Mook in his way be explained?
- Sad Bollywood Wedding: Naturally. A staple of melodrama and romance.
- Separated at Birth
- Sibling Team
- Soaperizing
- Spontaneous Choreography: Random people not even part of the story end up knowing how to dance on cue.
- Story Within a Story
- Suspiciously Idle Officers: This is a very common trope in films from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Most crime bosses had a few cops on their payroll who could be seen hanging around the villain's lair in most scenes without actually doing anything cop-like.
- Thicker Than Water: Many a Bollywood villain reforms, pulls a Death Equals Redemption maneuver, or turns himself into the police after discovering he is related to the good guys.
- Values Dissonance: For Western and international audiences, Bollywood movies, on the rare instance they are watched (most usually are there for the song-and-dance number), will strike them oddly for its class biases, religious stereotypes, pre-First Wave Feminist sexism, questionable look at minorities and foreign stereotypes, of the kind that no film and TV producer would get away with for its Transatlantic Equivalent in America and Europe.
- "Well Done, Son" Guy
- Wet Sari Scene: A common form of fanservice in Bollywood movies is to show an attractive woman getting soaked while wearing a sari.
- Why Waste a Wedding?
- Word Salad Lyrics: Most Bollywood songs today.
- World of Ham
- You Always Hear the Bullet: The ricochet sound effect is heard frequently when a shot is fired, even if the bullet doesn't bounce off anything.
