Indian cinema heritage

Story hook

On 3 May 1913 at the Coronation Cinema, Girgaum, Bombay, a silent film flickered to life on a tattered screen. It ran 40 minutes and 14 seconds. The story was of King Harishchandra, the truth-bound monarch of legend. The audience, mostly Marathi- speaking middle class, had never seen Indians acting on a screen before. Up to that day, every "moving picture" in India had been imported — Lumiere brothers' arrivals (1896), Hollywood imports, British newsreels. Raja Harishchandra was different. Made by Dadasaheb Phalke in a Bombay suburb, on a budget of roughly ₹15,000 over six months, with his wife Saraswatibai doing the cooking, costume-design, and processing of the film negatives, it was India's first full-length indigenous feature film.

A century later, India produces ~2,000 feature films per year in over 30 languages — the largest film industry by volume in the world. Hindi cinema (Bollywood, named in the 1970s) is the most visible internationally, but Indian cinema is properly polyphonic — Tamil (Kollywood), Telugu (Tollywood), Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, Bhojpuri, and dozens of smaller regional cinemas all flourish in parallel.

The story from Phalke's Raja Harishchandra (1913) to RRR's Oscar (2023, Best Original Song Naatu Naatu) is the story of how a colonial-era curiosity became one of independent India's most powerful cultural exports.

Why this matters for UPSC

Indian cinema appears in Prelims roughly once every two years (award identification, director-film matching, Dadasaheb Phalke Award questions). Mains and essay papers occasionally explore cinema as soft-power vehicle or as identity-formation tool. Interview boards probe it as a window into the candidate's cultural literacy. The recent rise of regional cinema (Pan-Indian releases) has made it a higher-yield topic.