| Bollywood (Hindi: बॉलीवुड, Urdu: بالیوڈ) is the informal name given to the popular Mumbai-based Hindi language film industry in India. The term is sometimes used incorrectly to refer to the whole of Indian cinema.
The name is a portmanteau of Bombay, the old name of Mumbai, and Hollywood, the center of the United States film industry. Though some purists deplore the name, arguing that it makes the industry look like a poor cousin to Hollywood, it seems likely to persist and now has its own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Bollywood and the other major cinematic hubs (Tamil, Bengali, Telugu, and Malayalam) constitute the broader Indian film industry, whose output is the largest in the world in terms of number of films produced and in number of tickets sold. Bollywood is a strong part of popular culture of not only India and the rest of the Indian subcontinent, but also of the Middle East, parts of Africa, parts of Southeast Asia, and among the South Asian diaspora worldwide. Bollywood has its largest diasporic audiences in the UK, Canada, Australia and the U.S., all of which have large Indian immigrant populations.
Bollywood is also commonly referred to as "Hindi cinema", even though use of poetic Urdu words is fairly common. There has been a growing presence of English in dialogues and songs as well. It is not uncommon to see movies which feature dialogues with English words and phrases, even whole sentences. A few movies are also made in two or even three languages (either using subtitles, or several soundtracks).
Genre conventions:-
Westerners would tend to classify most Bollywood films as musicals, because few movies are made without at least one song-and-dance number. However, such labelling fails to recognise the unique nature of the genre. In the Western tradition, a "standard" movie has no songs, at least none that are sung by the protagonists. A movie with such songs is therefore a "musical". To understand the Bollywood genre, it is necessary to unlearn this straightforward concept. The standard Bollywood movie is expected to contain a number of elements, and one of the essentials is catchy music in the form of song-and-dance numbers woven into the script. Indeed, a movie's music often sells the film through advance release — a populace that is already humming the songs from a movie is far more likely to troop into theatres to see the movie when it is finally released. A Bollywood movie without songs and dances would need to be particularly strong in other departments to avoid being considered a rip-off.
Indian audiences expect full value for their money, with a good entertainer generally referred to as paisa vasool, (literally, "money's worth"). Songs and dances, love triangles, comedy and dare-devil thrills — all are mixed up in a three-hour-long extravaganza with an intermission. Such movies are called masala movies, after the Hindi word for a spice mixture, masala. Like masalas, these movies are a mixture of many things. If a movie lacks an ingredient (such as songs), the audience has not received its full money's worth.
Bollywood plots have tended to be melodramatic. They frequently employ formulaic ingredients such as star-crossed lovers and angry parents, love triangles, family ties, sacrifice, corrupt politicians, kidnappers, conniving villains, courtesans with hearts of gold, long-lost relatives and siblings separated by fate, dramatic reversals of fortune, and convenient coincidences.
There have always been Indian films with more "artistic" aims and more sophisticated stories, both inside and outside the Bollywood tradition (see Indian art cinema). They often lost out at the box office to movies with more mass appeal.
Bollywood conventions are changing, however. A large Indian diaspora in English speaking countries, and increased Western influence at home, have nudged Bollywood films closer to Hollywood models. Film kisses are no longer banned; the once-ubiquitous "wet" scenes, with damp saris molded to an actress's curvaceous form, have been replaced by skin, pure and simple. Plots now tend to feature Westernized urbanites dating and dancing in discos rather than arranged marriages. Plots can be less melodramatic, more sophisticated.
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