Cinema and the Regional Language Industries

Reference library · 966 words

Outsiders often use the word Bollywood as if it meant Indian cinema. It does not. Bollywood is the Hindi language film industry centred on Mumbai, and while it is the most internationally visible of India's film industries, it is one among many. India certifies more feature films each year than any other country, and those films are made in a long list of languages: Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Bhojpuri, Odia, Assamese and others, alongside Hindi. Each of these has its own studios, its own star system, its own trade press, its own distribution territories and, crucially, its own audience whose expectations have been shaped over decades. To describe them as regional, as the industry itself often does, understates how large several of them are.

The geography is worth learning. Hindi cinema works out of Mumbai, in studios and post production houses spread across the suburbs of Andheri, Goregaon and Film City. Telugu cinema, historically associated with the term Tollywood, is based in Hyderabad, where Ramoji Film City is one of the largest studio complexes in the world. Tamil cinema operates from Chennai, in the neighbourhood long known as Kodambakkam, which gave rise to the nickname Kollywood. Kannada cinema works from Bengaluru, Malayalam cinema from Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram, and Bengali cinema from Kolkata, in the studio district around Tollygunge, from which the whole family of "wood" nicknames originally derives.

How language created separate industries

The split into language industries was not a policy decision. It followed directly from the arrival of sound. India's first feature film, Dadasaheb Phalke's Raja Harishchandra, was released in 1913 and was silent, which meant it could in principle travel anywhere, with intertitles swapped as needed. The first Indian sound feature, Alam Ara, arrived in 1931, and from that moment a film's language determined its market. Within a very short period, production centres emerged wherever there was a large enough audience for a given language to support a self sustaining industry. Tamil and Telugu talkies both began in the early 1930s, and the pattern of separate industries has held ever since.

These industries developed distinct aesthetics rather than simply making the same films in different tongues. Bengali cinema produced an internationally celebrated art tradition, above all in the work of Satyajit Ray, whose Pather Panchali of 1955 and the two films that complete the Apu trilogy remain fixtures of world cinema lists, and in the films of Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen. Malayalam cinema built a reputation for restrained, socially observant storytelling, associated with directors such as Adoor Gopalakrishnan and, in the contemporary period, with a wave of naturalistic films that have found audiences well beyond Kerala. Tamil and Telugu cinema developed a strong tradition of large scale spectacle with elaborate action choreography, alongside serious social filmmaking. Marathi cinema, which is one of the oldest strands since Phalke worked in the Marathi speaking region, has had periods of decline and revival.

Politics and cinema have been unusually intertwined in the south. In Tamil Nadu, the Dravidian movement used film scripts and screen personas as instruments of mass political communication from the middle of the twentieth century, and several chief ministers of the state came directly from the film industry, including M. G. Ramachandran and M. Karunanidhi, the latter as a screenwriter. In Andhra Pradesh, N. T. Rama Rao, famous for playing gods and heroes in mythological films, founded the Telugu Desam Party and became chief minister in the 1980s. This is not a curiosity. It reflects a genuine relationship in which the cinema hall functioned as one of the few spaces where a mass audience could be addressed directly in its own language about questions of dignity, caste and regional pride.

The pan Indian film and what it changed

For most of the twentieth century, a Telugu film was made for Telugu speakers, and a Hindi film that wanted a southern audience was remade locally rather than dubbed. That began to change in the 2010s. Improved dubbing, satellite television, and then streaming platforms with subtitle infrastructure made simultaneous multilingual release commercially viable. The Telugu film Baahubali: The Beginning in 2015 and its 2017 sequel, directed by S. S. Rajamouli, were released in multiple languages at once and took enormous sums nationwide, demonstrating that a film made in Hyderabad could top the box office in Hindi speaking markets. Rajamouli's RRR, released in 2022, went further still, winning the Academy Award for Best Original Song for "Naatu Naatu" in 2023, the first time an Indian film production had won in that category.

The consequences are contested within the industry. Some argue the pan Indian model is a democratising force that has ended Mumbai's assumption of primacy and rewarded southern craft. Others warn that it pushes production towards a homogenised spectacle designed to offend no regional sensibility, which risks squeezing out the smaller, locally specific films that gave each industry its character. There is also a straightforward economic worry: budgets have risen sharply to meet pan Indian expectations, which raises the stakes of failure and makes financiers more conservative.

Streaming has cut both ways. Platforms have created a market for Malayalam and Marathi films that would once have struggled to be seen outside their home states, and have given subtitled Indian cinema a genuine international audience, including among diaspora communities in Australia, Britain, Canada, the Gulf and the United States who previously depended on limited theatrical releases. At the same time, platforms have concentrated commissioning power in a small number of companies, and theatrical exhibition in smaller towns has been under pressure. What has not changed is the underlying fact that made these industries separate in the first place. Indians watch films in the language they think in, and no amount of dubbing technology has yet dislodged that preference.

Back to the library