A Bollywood Primer: From Demigods to Disco

With so many choices, which Indian films are worth watching for beginners?

Despite the fact that Hindi-language Bollywood is often used as an umbrella term, Indian cinema is multitudinous — which is why Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan called the popular moniker into question at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this month.

Indeed, "Big B" has raised a good point. The palate is larger-than-life: gods and goddesses, issues of caste and religious diversity, melodramatic tales of star-crossed lovers, and of course, song and dance.

"There are as many flavors of Indian movies as there are languages to drive the stories told in the Subcontinent's films."

"Bollywood has often been portrayed as a musical-producing industry in the West, which is untrue," Parichay Patra, a graduate student at Monash University, told The Diplomat. "Indian film scholars are quite certain about the fact that genre-determination is impossible in this part of the world. What the Western audience should keep in mind is that generic divisions do not exist in Indian cinema."

Without the life raft of genre categories to cling to, where does one begin? "It is possible, to my mind at least, to divide 'Indian cinema' into a few phases," Rochona Majumdar, associate professor of Indian cinema history at the University of Chicago, told The Diplomat. Until after independence from the British Raj, the industry was organized — much like Hollywood — into studios that made films in multiple languages, producing classics from Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy to Mehboob Khan's Mother India.

Boiled into decade-long blocks, the story runs roughly thus: the first Indian feature, Raja Harishchandra, in 1913; the advent of "talkies" in the 1930s; breakthrough films through the 1940s and '50s; Rajesh Khanna's romance in the '60s; the "angry young man" era of the '70s with a young Amitabh Bachchan at the helm; the disco-era blockbusters of the '80s; the emergence of names like Shah Rukh Khan in the '90s; and, in the 2000s, a new crop of directors making films with a more global sensibility.