‘FACE OF INDIAN CINEMA’ STILL LIMITED TO ONE LANGUAGE !!
No wonder India produces a large number of Movies in a year when there is a contribution from many languages across the country. The movie audience in India doesn’t use the term ‘Indian Cinema’, because cinema is being produced in different languages, and each language has its own set of audience, but the Outsider uses the term ‘Bollywood’ when they refer to Indian Cinema.
Well, Bollywood used to be the face of Indian cinema in the past maybe because of the vastly spoken language or maybe because of its movie release from ‘Kashmir to Kanyakumari’, but now the time has changed to that point where a regionally made Hindi dubbed movie can become a Biggest Hit of Hindi cinema.
From the past few years there is a huge rise in Regional cinema, be it content-wise or scale-wise and on the other hand, it’s been a struggling time for Bollywood in terms of the content or proper Hits. The rest of the world watches Cinema but India celebrates Cinema, audience celebrating Hindi cinema has become very rare in the present days whereas regional cinema, mainly south languages are still celebrating their cinema and continuously raising their standards.
When there is a talk about the supreme content in India then everyone points to a regional ‘Malayalam Cinema’, talk about generating revenue then especially Tamil and Telugu markets are doing well and sometimes on par with Hindi market.
There were many instances where an Indian regional film getting selected for Film Festivals outside India and also Regional cinema or actors bagging National awards can be seen regularly. The domination of regional cinema over the Hindi cinema, especially from the past few years, can be seen.
Then started the “Pan-India’ India boom where a regional actor getting huge recognition with dubbed movies, the audience watching other language cinema increased, actors acting in other languages increased, Movies getting released as a ‘Pan-Indian Film’ increased. These above changes have created an environment called “Indian Cinema”.
Things significantly started to change inside India regarding the matter of ‘Face of Indian Cinema’ ….Still, the whole of Indian cinema is ‘Bollywood’ for the majority of the outside world. This can’t be changed in a little period, this will be changed slowly when regional language movies become more Global, where the best example is Bahubali which got a huge reception in other countries.
Movies like these create a mark for regional cinema outside India. It will be very interesting to see how the dynamics in this matter would change in the coming years considering the mammoth and Event cinema content being produced in the south Indian languages.
