Hindi cinema is now 'Bollywood' cinema, although many in the Bombay film industry find the term derogatory. After all, Bombay cinema is the only film culture in the world that has been able to withstand, and even thwart, the global juggernaut called Hollywood. Working in a manner that hardly befits its so-called industry status (never mind the recent efforts at corporatisation), Bombay cinema has achieved what even the proud French have failed at — prevent Hollywood from bringing the national film industry to its knees.
But the same Bombay cinema — often described as the opiate of the masses in the Hindi-speaking world, and increasingly an addiction even in the non-Hindi regions of the globe — is doing to India itself exactly what Hollywood has so effectively done to so many countries. Aided by an ever-willing and ever-expanding media, Bollywood has emerged as a threat to the entirety of India's venerable 'regional' film industries.
In a country as diverse as India, cinema has long been a tool to tell the stories of different peoples across the vastly diverse regions. Hindi cinema has been the fulcrum of this phenomenon. However, the regional cinema has also had a powerful role as an entertainment medium that chronicles the concerns, cultural richness and contradictions of India's many societies. In fact, it was regional cinema that initially catapulted Indian film to the global stage.
As Bollywood now becomes a familiar term across the world — associated with colourful songs and dances even while telling the most conscientious stories in parallel — the space for regional film, including even the non-Bollywood Hindi cinema, is rapidly shrinking. But it is cinema in the various parts and languages that have been hit the hardest in the widely applauded rise of Hindi Bollywood. This could sound like a paradox when regional-language films, such as Amol Palekar's Marathi Anahat, Rituparno Ghose's Bengali Chokher Bali and Rajeev Menon's Tamil Kandukondain Kandukondai, are being released in multiplexes even in a hardcore Bollywood film market such as Delhi. But these are exceptions, which do not reflect the broader trend.