Bollywood Superstars – A Short Story of Indian Cinema

The power of an iconography or of a holy person is usually conveyed through "'beholding" ("darshan" in Sanskrit, literally "viewing"). The particular import of sight has undoubtedly contributed to placing the visual arts at the heart of Indian society and popular culture to date. The release of a film and the hero worship of actors in India arouses a fervour like nowhere else in the world. During the colonial era of the British Raj, India appropriated the new image technologies as they were invented. In the late 19th century, polychrome series printing and photography looked to the subjects and conventions of painting prior to the advent of animated images. From the 1920s, early films drew their inspiration from mythological subjects and the dramatic style of the popular images produced by the studios of the artist Ravi Varma. A decade later, with talking films, full length musicals with an intermission made their appearance, becoming the dominant genre.
Today, India is the world's leading film producer, with more than 1,500 films a year in around twenty languages exported throughout Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The international success of Bollywood must not conceal the diversity of Indian cinematography. The term "Bollywood" was created in 1970 from the contraction of Bombay and Hollywood, and refers to the predominant production of musicals in Hindi, but Indian cinema is vast and multicultural. Every region has its own production in its regional language: Kollywood in Kodambakkam, for Tamil cinema a mix of comedy, action and emotion—, or Bengali cinema which is more intellectual and social, as reflected in Satyajit Ray's culturally significant oeuvre the opposite of commercial productions.