Definition: A play on ‘Bombay’ (now Mumbai) and ‘Hollywood’, ‘Bollywood’ is shorthand for popular Hindi cinema, chiefly song-and-dance spectaculars.

Forget the US – India is easily the most prolific movie-making country on Earth, producing over 800 films a year. And Bollywood, Indian cinema’s most visible cultural export, accounts for more than 200 of these.

Though the term ‘Bollywood’ only gained currency in the ’90s, the industry has been around for almost a century, starting with DG Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra (1913), a silent flick charting the mythical travails of an honest king.

Filmmakers inherited the folk-theatre tradition of imparting the great Indian epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata to the largely illiterate masses. The process was galvanised by Alam Ara (1931), India’s first talkie.

Cinema took up theatre’s use of song too, giving rise to the musical numbers Bollywood is renowned for today (1932’s Indrasabha had an ear-numbing 71 songs).

The industry moved on to socially relevant and nationalist themes ahead of India’s independence from Britain in 1947.

The ’50s are considered the golden age of Bollywood, with movie-makers such as Bimal Roy and Guru Datt tackling the problems of new-found independence in films like Do Bigha Zamin, Awaara and Kaagaz Ke Phool.