THE MISUNDERSTANDING
'Indian cinema' is used in Western discourse as a synonym for Bollywood - the Hindi-language commercial film industry based in Mumbai. Bollywood is real and significant and worth engaging with on its own terms. It is also approximately one-third of Indian film production by volume and the dominant commercial cinema of one of twenty-eight Indian states. The other two-thirds, and the cinema of the other twenty-seven states, are almost entirely invisible in Western film culture.
India has multiple distinct cinema traditions operating in different languages - Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, among others - with different industrial structures, different formal modes, and different relationships to the Bollywood model that dominates Indian cinema's international image. The guide below maps the most significant.
SATYAJIT RAY - THE INTERNATIONAL GATEWAY
Satyajit Ray (1921–1992) is the filmmaker through whom Indian cinema became internationally visible. The Apu Trilogy - Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), The World of Apu (1959) - is the formal foundation: a Bengali village boy's journey from rural poverty to urban Calcutta, shot with a formally precise attention to the texture of ordinary life that owes as much to Italian neorealism as to the Indian literary tradition Ray was working in.
Pather Panchali is the correct entry point. Shot over three years with interrupted funding, in real locations, with non-professional and professional actors mixed, it established the formal vocabulary that would define the Parallel Cinema tradition: the authentic face, the real place, the rejection of the Bollywood musical register in favour of something more formally austere and emotionally direct.
The broader Ray catalogue - Charulata (1964), The Music Room (1958), Devi (1960) - demonstrates the range of a filmmaker who operated at the formal level of the great European directors while working in a specifically Bengali cultural context that gives the films their particular weight. Available substantially on MUBI UK.
THE PARALLEL CINEMA TRADITION
The Parallel Cinema (or New Indian Cinema) tradition emerged in the 1970s and 80s as a formal alternative to the Bollywood commercial model, supported by the Film Finance Corporation of India and the National Film Development Corporation of India. Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Girish Kasaravalli - a generation making formally serious, regionally specific films in multiple languages.
Shyam Benegal's films - Ankur (1974), Manthan (1976), Bhumika (1977) - are the most accessible entry points to the tradition. Political, formally direct, concerned with caste, gender, and the specific texture of Indian rural and urban life in the 1970s. Benegal at his best is comparable to the Italian social realists in his formal commitment to showing the actual conditions of people's lives.
Adoor Gopalakrishnan (Kerala): The Rat Trap (1981) and Mathilukal (1990) are the most formally accomplished films in the Malayalam tradition - slow, precise, formally patient in ways that the Bollywood commercial model makes no space for.
CONTEMPORARY SOUTH INDIAN CINEMA
The Tamil and Telugu film industries - sometimes called Kollywood and Tollywood respectively - have produced commercially massive films in recent years that are reaching international streaming platforms in ways that the Parallel Cinema never achieved. RRR (S.S. Rajamouli, 2022) is the most globally visible example: a period action film of extraordinary scale and formal ambition that earned international attention completely independently of the Bollywood infrastructure.
The Malayalam film industry has produced a run of formally serious films in the last decade that have won National Awards and international festival recognition. C U Soon (Mahesh Narayanan, 2020, shot entirely on smartphones during COVID lockdown), The Great Indian Kitchen (Jeo Baby, 2021, a formally precise feminist argument about domestic labour), Malik (Mahesh Narayanan, 2021).
WHERE TO ACCESS
MUBI carries the most complete South Asian cinema archive of any mainstream UK streaming platform. The Ray catalogue, the Parallel Cinema tradition, and the contemporary Indian art house thread are all there. Netflix carries some contemporary Telugu and Tamil commercial cinema and original Indian productions. For the full range of regional Indian cinema, specialist streaming platforms (Manorama Max for Malayalam, Sun NXT for Tamil content) require separate subscriptions but are accessible in the UK.
The other two-thirds, and the cinema of the other twenty-seven states, are almost entirely invisible in Western film culture.