Bollywood – this term needs no introduction. It encompasses the colour, music, melodrama, fun, joie de vivre, murkiness, power, fame, money and sweep of the Hindi film industry.
In use since the 1970s, Bollywood was a portmanteau word coined by juxtaposing Bombay (now Mumbai, where the Hindi film industry is based) over Hollywood (home of the American film industry).
Bollywood has a mindboggling annual turnover of thousands of crores and reaches into all continents.
In India, the two largest common factors and denominators cutting through the swathe of the nation are Bollywood and cricket.
Some Interesting Tidbits
·
Till
the early 1990s top stars (including Amitabh Bachchan) intensely disliked and
deplored the use of this term to describe the Hindi film industry because they
felt it made this immense Indian industry sound like a poor cousin or wannbe
Hollywood
·
Many
Hollywood stars (whether they were visiting or were doing a long-distance
interview) expressed interest in visiting “Bollywood” -- clearly believing that
Bollywood was an actual place like Hollywood. This makes our Bollywood probably
the first virtual city ever conceived and populated
·
The
term Bollywood made an entry into the Oxford dictionary in 2001 because they
found this word increasingly being used not just in India but also by British
and American sources
·
Till
the early 1990s overseas markets were not fully tapped as a money-generating
market though the popularity of Hindi films, songs and stars was widely known, acknowledged
and recognised
·
Frequent star-studdded performances and shows,
and recognising the potential and selling “Overseas” as a territory became a
norm in the industry in mid- to late 1990s
Coinage
·
From
Bevinda Collaco: I am a journalist based in Goa visiting London very soon. I write
a gossip column for Cine Blitz (by the way, I coined the word 'Bollywood' way
back in December 1978), [Source: http://www.goanvoice.org.uk/newsletter/2004/Mar/issue1/]
·
Oxford
English Dictionary credits the first known use (note, the use not the coinage) of the term to H R F Keating
·
Popular
perception credits the coinage of this word to Stardust (in their column Neeta’s
Natter). This could possibly mean that Shobhaa De coined it (she was the
editor of Stardust when it started)
Other “Hollywood”-inspired Names (none of them are gaining much currency, though)
·
Tollywood: Bengali Film Industry . This was probably
the first
Hollywood-inspired portmanteau term (
1932). Most movers and shakers of the Bengali film industry lived in and around
Tollygunge in Calcutta/Kolkata.
·
Mollywood: Tamil Film Industry. Like Hindi film
industry in Bombay, the Tamil film industry was most based in the ten Madras
9now Chennai)
·
Kollywood: Kerala Film Industry
·
Interestingly, the Telugu Film Industry, supposedly
one of the three largest the country (Hindi and Tamil being the other two), has
been unable to get “ollywood-ed”. Their problems:
o
If the “H” of
Hollywood is replaced by “A” for Andhra it is an unpronunce-able “Aollywood”
o
The industry is largely Hyderabad based and using
‘H” is out