Indian cinema has since been looped under the umbrella term of “Bollywood.” The term “Bollywood” was popularized in the 70’s by a journalist named Bevinda Collaco when she wrote it in a column she was writing called “On the Bollywood beat.” It was a portmanteau of Hollywood and the city Bombay, the British given name for Mumbai, and refers to Hindi language cinema produced in Mumbai.

Most importantly, Bollywood does not refer to all Indian language films — it solely refers to the Hindi-language films that are produced in Bombay.

Bedatri Datta Choudhury, an Arts and Entertainment Editor for the Philadelphia Enquirer, spoke about how Bollywood’s impact on India’s image transcended the medium of film.

“Hindi cinema has created somewhat of a cultural stereotype of Indians when it comes to the Western perception. For example, when you ask a Western person, ‘what do Indian weddings look like?’ They’ll pretty much describe what they've seen in films,” Choudhury said. “The mainstream Hindi film industry has created an image of India which is limited in terms of themes, in terms of language, in terms of diversity, and thereby it has created a kind of cultural stereotype of Indians.”

This cultural stereotype of India was developed because of North India’s importance in establishing India’s identity separate from British colonialism. Amrutha Kunapulli, Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University and writer of the book “Worlding Tamil Cinema,” said that Bollywood’s role in developing India’s cultural identity transcended that of any other Indian language film industry for this reason, among others.

“The Hindi film industry was central to the project of nation-building in ways other film industries were not,” Kunapulli said. “Given its considerable relationship with the nascent independent India, the majority of the leaders being primarily Hindi speakers themselves, the centering of the administration in predominantly Hindi speaking city of Delhi, the Hindi language became the only non-English language to be sanctioned for administrative use. The cinema of that language got considered a national cinema, while others were regional.”

As such, a widespread belief is that the cultural stereotypes outlined in Hindi language films is reflective of a homogenous Indian population.

“The majority of Western audiences assume North India to be representative of the rest of India and that has a direct correlation with the fact that Hindi films get to represent the country.” Choudhury said. “There is a larger push from North Indian culture, whether it is food or the clothes that the Western audience thinks that Indians wear. All of those tend to lean heavily into the North Indian aesthetic and Bollywood is just one part of that.”

Despite Indian independence taking place in 1947, British involvement in India’s development persisted and Southern states took particular grievance with regard to Hindi being positioned as the national language. Journalist Mythili Sampathkumar said that the desire to distinguish themselves from North India as a whole resulted in South Indian films being less present in the Western sphere but resulted in the Southern Indian states banding together to support non-Bollywood films, allowing them to flourish even further when South Indians began immigrating internationally.

“Tamil Nadu had its own issues with British control that were often overlooked in history. But decades after partition, the capital city of Chennai was growing and asserted its separate identity from the North and Mumbai, which bled into film,” Sampathkumar said. “For decades, the dominant Indian culture in the West was Punjabi - food, music, weddings, fashion. But the number of South Indian immigrants grew and so did acknowledgement of our languages and culture and art.”

However, there remains a dominant belief from Western culture that Bollywood is the dominant film culture in India, which Choudhury said is by design.

“The narrative that the state of India has often pushed is that Hindi is the national language of India, which leads to an assumption that more people speak Hindi and watch Hindi films.” Choudhury said.

It didn’t take long for other parts of the country to start developing their own film industries, but North Indian culture, including Bollywood, remained the dominant Western facing perspective into India. There are several factors that have contributed to the disparity between Bollywood films and the rest of Indian cinema. One of these factors is funding, a factor that is rapidly changing.

“There are more resources put into Hindi films to be distributed abroad. However, with [non-Bollywood] films like ‘RRR’ and ‘Pushpa’, all this is changing because South Indian films are seeing the influx of more resources,” Choudhury said. “Those films are either being dubbed in Hindi and released internationally or they by themselves are gaining in popularity and seeing distribution in these last few years.”

Because of their comparatively lower budgets, South Indian cinema has had a growing independent film market that audiences have gravitated towards, in addition to the blockbuster scene. Sachetan Bhoopathi, a junior at The Ohio State University and film reviewer, said that this has spurred a new wave of competitive creativity across the different Indian cinematic landscapes, which Bhoopathi says has made it exciting as a fan of Indian film.

“Everyone is trying to explore new genres, and fight for even more mainstream attention,” Bhoopathi said. “I think that it's going to take a lot of time and unity, but I think that can truly be gained over time with more and more unity. We are seeing better films coming out, and I think especially in the coming years, I think we can see this unity leading to some good overall growth for the industry.”

In Kunapulli’s book, “Worlding Tamil Cinema,” she attributed the difference between Bollywood and other film industries to Southern states wanting to separate themselves from what the British imperial ideas of India was by straying from the idealized perception of "Aryan” Indians that is considered Eurocentric in nature.

“They perceived a national imaginary of “India” to be an Aryan conception and built on principles of caste and religious division, placing Sanskrit and Sanskrit-origin languages such as Hindi at the centre.” Kunapulli wrote. “Tamil, on the other hand, was part of a Dravidian identity—different from the Indo-European Aryan racial identities.”

Kunapulli acknowledges in her book that “Dravidian is a not-yet-completely-understood racial/genetic identity that is claimed to have origins in West and South Asia.” Something that is generally agreed upon is that people who speak Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam are descended from Dravidians, whose origins are theorized to be connected to the Indus River Valley civilization. In “Worlding Tamil Cinema,” Kunapulli contextualizes the cinema of South India within this Dravidian identity and considers it the primary catalyst for why South Indian films are removed from Bollywood and, in turn, from Western audiences.

“In the aftermath of Indian independence, Tamil political leaders demanded secession from the Indian nation-state and the right to form a Dravidian nation-state or Dravidistan. This articulation of a non-Indian space in not-Hindi is foundational to the Dravidian movement and Tamil identity in general,” Kunapulli wrote. “It is this set of identity politics that was propagated by and reinforced through cinema, and continually positioned cinema as the site of identity politics, as the vehicle of propaganda of Tamil/Dravidian culture, and as the most prolific medium of representation in and of modern Tamil Nadu.”

Kunapulli further theorizes that “these very identity politics may have kept their reach smaller, more ‘regional’ than the more ‘national,’ globally circulated Hindi film industry.”

As a result, Kunapulli concluded that the various subcultures that exist in India made it inherently difficult for a national identity to be formed, which extended into film.

“The Indian nation-state, in particular, was born fragile, an imagined community not necessarily co-opted into by all the regions it encompassed,” Kunapulli wrote. “Secessionist movements from the South, East, and Northern edges of the country, and constant threats from Pakistan, continue to haunt the everyday existence of the state. When translated to cinema, it becomes difficult then to speak of an “Indian” cinema [or] a national cinema of a nation.”

Kunapulli said in an interview with me that because of these subcultures and to most accurately refer to Indian films, she specifies industries based on the language of production.

“I move away from referring to any of these as variations or modifications of ‘Hollywood.’ To refer to the Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kodava, Marathi, Nigerian, Ghanaian etc film industries are derivations of ‘-wood’ continues to place primacy on Hollywood as a template for both cinema and film scholarship,” Kunapulli said. “Historically, film industries of India have been distinguished by language/state of production, and that continues to be a productive way of referencing them.”

The “Masala” film

Indian films are famous for their extravagant production design and lavish musical numbers, and these are most prominent in the entertainers known as “masala” movies. These refer to films that blend popular genres such as action, comedy and romance, similar to how a masala blends spices in Indian cooking. As a reference point, these are similar to summer blockbuster films in that they are designed to be as accessible as possible, are high budget entertainment, and are produced by studios with the expectation that they perform well at the box office.

The “Pan-India” movement

The most recent trend in masala filmmaking has been the rise in “Pan-India” films. These refer to films starring actors from multiple parts of the country in an attempt to appeal to the greatest audience possible. “RRR” by S.S. Rajamouli is an example of a “Pan-India” movie, and is the third highest grossing Telugu-language movie of all time. Rajamouli is often seen as the pioneer of this movement, as many studios sought to recapture the success of his “Baahubali” duology, a two film fantasy epic whose latter part remains the second highest grossing Indian film of all time.

However, some creatives have pushed back against this movement, deeming it antithetical to artistic integrity. Bollywood director Anurag Kashyap stated in an interview with The Hindu that he saw Pan-India films as “a massive scam” for the added pressure creatives face to turn out a widely profitable and successful product.

Kunapulli said this denotation is more complicated than being either good or bad, but has blurred the lines significantly between all of the film industries and created new divisions in the process.

“The growing porousness of borders between the industries in the age of digital and global distribution, and the growing movement of ‘pan-Indian cinema’—as complex and problematic and ultimately detrimental a concept it might be—is to be considered,” Kunapulli said. “Of course, one notes that the terminology of ‘pan-Indian’ for only a particular set of movies highlights the non-pan-Indianness of other films from India. My own work goes further and attempts to move Tamil cinema out of the framework of ‘cinemas of India’ to ‘world cinema.’”

In the last few years, films like “RRR” and “Baahubali 2: The Conclusion” have seen massive success in international markets. Tamil language films, like the 2017 thriller “Vikram Vedha” were also remade as Bollywood films and the cast and crew of the 2023 action film “Jawan” was primarily composed of actors and crew members that were known for their work in Kollywood films. An increasing number of Indian, non-Hindi language films have topped the box office annually in India and have received broader recognition, such as the Oscar winning Telugu song “Naatu Naatu.”