Hindi Cinema: An Editorial History of Bollywood

01What Hindi cinema is, and what it isn't

Hindi cinema is the Hindi-language film industry headquartered in Mumbai. Its working language, more accurately, is Hindustani — the Hindi-Urdu register that draws on Sanskrit-rooted Hindi vocabulary and Persianate Urdu in roughly equal measure, and which is one of the structural reasons the films have travelled across South Asia, the Gulf and the diaspora more easily than any other Indian-language cinema.

What Hindi cinema is not, despite half a century of foreign-press shorthand, is a synonym for Indian cinema. Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi and Punjabi each sustain industries with their own studio histories, star economies and critical traditions. The implicit equation Hindi-cinema-equals-Indian-cinema was always a function of Mumbai's distribution reach and English-language press access rather than artistic dominance, and it has been quietly dismantled across the last decade as Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam productions have repeatedly outperformed Hindi releases at the North Indian box office. The industry's home market remains the Hindi-belt states — Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Delhi, Maharashtra — but its overseas revenue share, often a quarter or more of total grosses for tentpole releases, is the largest of any Indian cinema and continues to define the kind of films Yash Raj and Dharma greenlight.

02The silent and studio era (1913-1947)

Phalke's Raja Harishchandra (1913), shot in a Dadar studio with male actors in female roles because no woman would consent to appear on screen, is conventionally cited as the first Indian feature. Of more historical weight is what came after: the slow industrialisation of mythological-and-historical production through the 1920s, then the seismic 1931 release of Ardeshir Irani's Alam Ara, the first Indian talkie, which embedded the song-and-dance form into Hindi-cinema syntax within a single calendar year. Alam Ara had seven songs. Its successors had a dozen. The convention has held, with minor adjustments, for ninety-five years.

The late 1930s belonged to the studios. Himanshu Rai and Devika Rani's Bombay Talkies, founded in Malad in 1934, ran on a salaried-talent model imported from German and British production practice and produced Achhut Kanya (1936), Kismet (1943) and the early Ashok Kumar features. Prabhat Film Company in Pune, run by V. Shantaram and partners, made Sant Tukaram (1936) — the first Indian film to win at Venice — and the Marathi-Hindi bilinguals that sustained Maharashtra's twin-language tradition. New Theatres in Calcutta, anchored by P.C. Barua's Devdas (1935), gave the industry its first canonical literary adaptation and trained K.L. Saigal as the singing star against whom every subsequent Hindi-cinema male voice would briefly be measured. By 1945 the studios were collapsing under wartime inflation, the freelance star system was rising in their place, and the conditions for the post-Independence golden age were being set.

03The post-Independence golden age (1947-1969)

The two decades after Independence are routinely treated as Hindi cinema's classical period, and the canon does most of the work of justifying the label. Raj Kapoor's Awaara (1951) and Shree 420 (1955), drawing freely on Chaplin, fused tramp-comedy with a Nehruvian socialist sentiment that travelled abnormally well — Awaara was a phenomenon in the Soviet Union, the Middle East and parts of China, and Khrushchev reportedly knew the title song. Mehboob Khan's Mother India (1957) was nominated for the foreign-language Oscar and lost to Fellini's Nights of Cabiria by a single vote; it has remained the canonical Hindi film about agrarian struggle without a serious challenger. Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zamin (1953) brought Italian-neorealist procedure to Bombay via a script by Salil Chowdhury, and his Devdas (1955) and Madhumati (1958) gave the period its prestige melodramas.

The Guru Dutt years are the period's analytic centre. Pyaasa (1957) and Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959) — the latter the first Indian film shot in Cinemascope — constructed a poet-director vocabulary that nothing in Indian cinema had quite anticipated, and Pyaasa now appears with regularity on Sight & Sound and TIME magazine all-time lists. K. Asif's Mughal-e-Azam (1960), thirteen years and several budgets in the making, set production-scale records that stood until the Bhansali baroque of the 2010s. The era's other surviving artefact is its music. Naushad, S.D. Burman, Shankar-Jaikishan, Madan Mohan, Salil Chowdhury and the young R.D. Burman composed for Lata Mangeshkar, Mohammed Rafi, Mukesh, Asha Bhosle and Kishore Kumar — and the resulting catalogue is still the deepest popular-music corpus produced anywhere in South Asia in the twentieth century.

Asif's Mughal-e-Azam (1960), thirteen years and several budgets in the making, set production-scale records that stood until the Bhansali baroque of the 2010s.

04Sholay, the angry young man, and the Salim-Javed years (1973-1985)

Hindi cinema's pivot from melodrama to urban anger is documented as a single calendar year, 1973, and the document is Prakash Mehra's Zanjeer. Written by the Salim Khan-Javed Akhtar partnership, it cast a 30-year-old Amitabh Bachchan — until then a string of commercial failures — as a vigilante police inspector whose rage was articulate enough to read as politics. Zanjeer was followed across thirty months by Deewaar (1975), Sholay (1975) and Trishul (1978), each Salim-Javed scripted, each anchored by Bachchan, and the four films collectively reframed the Hindi leading man for a decade.

Ramesh Sippy's Sholay, in retrospect, was the central event. A Western set in a fictional Ramgarh, conceived after Sippy and the writers had absorbed Sergio Leone, John Sturges and Akira Kurosawa, it ran for over five years uninterrupted at Mumbai's Minerva theatre and accumulated the audience-recognition density that allowed Gabbar Singh's address to his men to become a private national vocabulary. The Salim-Javed-Bachchan run extended through Manmohan Desai's masala-formalist Amar Akbar Anthony (1977) and Prakash Mehra's Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (1978). Running parallel, and operating in a different idiom, was Hrishikesh Mukherjee's middle cinema — Anand (1971), Bawarchi (1972), Chupke Chupke (1975), Gol Maal (1979) — which gave the salaried urban audience a domestic-comedy register and prefigured the kind of mid-budget Hindi film that would become commercially viable again only after 2003.

05The romance reset and the Yash Chopra autumn (1988-1999)

By the late 1980s the Bachchan formula had collapsed into self-parody, the action cycle around Mithun Chakraborty and the small-budget B-circuit was running on diminishing returns, and the Hindi industry was visibly losing audience to the new satellite-television channels that had arrived between 1991 and 1992. The reset, when it came, was a romance reset, and it was engineered by three production houses operating in distinct registers. Sooraj Barjatya's Rajshri made Maine Pyar Kiya (1989) and Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (1994) — the latter, a four-hour wedding film with no antagonist, became the highest-grossing Indian film of the 1990s and proved that the joint family was still a viable theatrical subject. Mansoor Khan's Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988) had earlier reset the teen-romance template with a clean musical idiom and an unknown Aamir Khan in the lead.

The defining film of the decade, however, was Aditya Chopra's Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995). Chopra was 24 when he directed it, the son of Yash Chopra working under his father's banner, and the film he made — Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol meeting first on a European Eurail trip and then in a Punjabi village — fused diaspora longing, post-liberalisation aspiration and a pre-Babri-era Hindu-Muslim composite Punjabiness into a single text. It has run continuously at Mumbai's Maratha Mandir since 20 October 1995, the longest unbroken theatrical run in cinema history, and it remains the film against which subsequent Yash Raj romances measure themselves. Karan Johar's Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) inherited the template with a self-aware urban gloss. Yash Chopra's late films — Lamhe (1991), Darr (1993), Dil To Pagal Hai (1997) — gave the romance reset a mature register and Sanjay Leela Bhansali, debuting with Khamoshi: The Musical (1996), confirmed his voice with Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999). Running underneath all of this was Ram Gopal Varma's insurgency — Rangeela (1995), Satya (1998), the latter co-written by an unknown Anurag Kashyap — that opened the door to the gangster film and to the 2000s indie current.

06The multiplex decade and the Khan triumvirate (2000-2009)

Indian cinema was granted official industry status by the central government in 2001, which sounds ceremonial but mattered: bank financing, completion bonds, structured insurance and listed corporate producers became available for the first time. PVR opened its first multiplex at Saket in 1997, and through the 2000s the chain expansion of PVR, INOX and later Cinepolis remade urban exhibition. Multiplexes supported higher ticket prices and parallel programming of multiple titles in the same complex, which made a genuinely mid-budget commercial film viable in a way single-screen exhibition had never permitted. Khosla Ka Ghosla (2006), Bheja Fry (2007) and A Wednesday! (2008) are direct artefacts of this exhibition shift.

At the upper end, the decade belonged to the three Khans operating across distinct lanes. Shah Rukh Khan held the prestige-romance and diaspora film through Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001), Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003), Veer-Zaara (2004) and Om Shanti Om (2007). Aamir Khan moved decisively toward writer-led prestige work — Lagaan (2001), nominated for the foreign-language Oscar; Rang De Basanti (2006), which collapsed the gap between historical and contemporary student politics; Taare Zameen Par (2007), his directorial debut on dyslexia; and Rajkumar Hirani's 3 Idiots (2009), which became the highest-grossing Hindi film of its era. Salman Khan spent the first half of the decade in commercial decline before resetting his career with the Telugu remake Wanted (2009). Farhan Akhtar's Dil Chahta Hai (2001) had earlier opened a parallel lane — the urban, English-inflected, middle-class friendship film — that Zoya Akhtar, Reema Kagti and Dibakar Banerjee would extend across the next fifteen years.

At the upper end, the decade belonged to the three Khans operating across distinct lanes.

07The indie wave and the Anurag Kashyap school (2009-2019)

If the 2000s were the decade Hindi cinema corporatised, the 2010s were the decade it bifurcated. On one side, the mass-film tier consolidated around Salman Khan's Dabangg (2010) and the small-town-cop genre, the Yash Raj Spy Universe (Ek Tha Tiger, Tiger Zinda Hai, War), Sanjay Leela Bhansali's baroque period films (Bajirao Mastani, Padmaavat) and the Akshay Kumar mid-budget patriotic-comedy slate. On the other, an indie current ran with an institutional coherence the industry had not seen since the parallel-cinema era. Anurag Kashyap's Phantom Films, founded in 2011 with Vikramaditya Motwane, Vikas Bahl and Madhu Mantena, produced or developed Lootera, Queen, Masaan, Udta Punjab and NH10 in its short life, while Kashyap's own Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) — released as two halves of a 5.5-hour epic and shot largely on location in Dhanbad — became the canonical Hindi gangster film of the decade.

Vishal Bhardwaj's Shakespeare trilogy — Maqbool (2003), Omkara (2006), Haider (2014) — adapted Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet into the Indian political landscape with the kind of sustained craft that nothing else in Hindi cinema was attempting. Sriram Raghavan's Andhadhun (2018) became the rare indie thriller to clear ₹100 crore domestically. Neeraj Ghaywan's Masaan (2015) won two prizes in Cannes Un Certain Regard. The decade's most visible commercial trend, however, was the Ayushmann Khurrana mid-budget social-comedy slate — Vicky Donor (2012) through Andhadhun (2018) and Article 15 (2019) — which proved a ₹15-25 crore film built around a social subject could routinely earn ₹70-150 crore. By 2019, Hindi cinema had its richest filmmaker generation since the 1970s and a structural problem the next decade would inherit: streaming had arrived, and the urban-realist mid-budget film was already starting to migrate.

08The pandemic, OTT and the pan-Indian recalibration (2020-present)

Indian cinemas closed in March 2020 and stayed substantially shut through the first half of 2021. While theatrical Hindi content was paralysed, a sequence of dubbed pan-Indian releases — Sukumar's Pushpa: The Rise (2021), Prashanth Neel's KGF Chapter 2 (2022), S.S. Rajamouli's RRR (2022), Rishab Shetty's Kantara (2022) — repeatedly out-grossed contemporaneous original-Hindi releases at North Indian box offices, prompting the industry-introspection moment that ran through mid-2022 around #BoycottBollywood, the underperformance of Laal Singh Chaddha and Shamshera, and the public question of whether the Hindi mass audience had simply moved.

The answer arrived across 2023. Yash Raj's Pathaan (₹1,055 crore worldwide), Atlee's Jawan (₹1,150 crore), Rajkumar Hirani's Dunki and Sandeep Reddy Vanga's Animal (₹915 crore) collectively restored the ₹500-crore-plus Hindi tentpole and reset theatrical confidence. 2024 belonged to genre — Amar Kaushik's Stree 2 (₹875 crore worldwide) confirmed the Maddock horror-comedy universe, and Vidhu Vinod Chopra's 12th Fail (2023) and Kiran Rao's Laapataa Ladies (2024) showed that small-film survival was still possible. Underneath this, however, the structural reordering is permanent. The mid-budget urban Hindi film now lives on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, JioHotstar, SonyLIV and ZEE5; the theatrical economy has consolidated around large-format mass cinema and franchise horror-comedy; and Hindi is no longer the default Indian-cinema language for either domestic theatrical scale or international festival visibility.

09Music as the surviving artefact

Hindi film music is the longest continuous popular-music tradition in South Asia, and it is also the form most consistently underrated by the industry's own historians. The classical playback era from the late 1940s through the 1970s was an editorial-production ecosystem of unusual richness — Naushad, S.D. Burman, Shankar-Jaikishan, Madan Mohan, Roshan, O.P. Nayyar, Salil Chowdhury, R.D. Burman and Laxmikant-Pyarelal composing for Lata Mangeshkar, Mohammed Rafi, Kishore Kumar, Mukesh, Asha Bhosle and Manna Dey, with lyrics from Sahir Ludhianvi, Shailendra, Majrooh Sultanpuri and Anand Bakshi. The catalogue produced in those thirty years is what most South Asian listeners over fifty still hear when they hear the phrase Hindi film song.

The 1990s reset around Nadeem-Shravan's Aashiqui (1990) and Jatin-Lalit's DDLJ (1995), distributed through the cassette economy that T-Series and Tips industrialised. A.R. Rahman crossed over from Tamil cinema with the Hindi dub of Roja and then Rangeela (1995), and the next decade — Dil Se.. (1998), Taal (1999), Lagaan (2001), Rang De Basanti (2006), Slumdog Millionaire (2008) — re-engineered Hindi-cinema rhythm, mix and instrumentation in ways the industry has not fully metabolised. The contemporary slate is led by Pritam (across the Yash Raj and Dharma catalogues), Amit Trivedi (Dev.D, Udaan, Queen, Andhadhun), Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, Vishal-Shekhar, Sneha Khanwalkar's location-recorded Wasseypur, and Arijit Singh's playback hegemony. Lyricists from Gulzar through Javed Akhtar to Irshad Kamil and Varun Grover give the form a literary spine that very few national cinemas can match — and that spine, more than any single film, is what Hindi cinema has actually exported.

The 1990s reset around Nadeem-Shravan's Aashiqui (1990) and Jatin-Lalit's DDLJ (1995), distributed through the cassette economy that T-Series and Tips industrialised.

10Where to start

Eight films are enough scaffolding for everything else. Pyaasa (1957) for Guru Dutt and the period when Hindi cinema was contiguous with the country's literary culture. Mughal-e-Azam (1960) for the studio epic at its scale ceiling. Sholay (1975) for the Bachchan-Salim-Javed axis and the Western-as-Hindi-cinema. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) for the romance reset, the Yash Raj template and the post-1991 diaspora pivot. Lagaan (2001) for Aamir Khan's writer-led prestige and the multiplex decade's outward ambition. Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) for the indie wave and the Kashyap school. Andhadhun (2018) for the contemporary mid-budget thriller at its best. Jawan (2023) for the post-pandemic mass film and the SRK theatrical reset. From those eight, every other strand of Hindi cinema is one or two films away.