Hindi cinema
Hindi-language film industry based in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Hindi cinema, popularly known as Bollywood and Bombay cinema, refers to India's Hindi-language film industry, based in Mumbai. The popular term Bollywood is a portmanteau of "Bombay" (another name for Mumbai) and "Hollywood". The industry, producing films in the Hindi language, is a part of the larger Indian cinema industry, which also includes South Indian cinema and other smaller film industries. The term 'Bollywood', often mistakenly used to refer to Indian cinema as a whole, only refers to Hindi-language films, with Indian cinema being an umbrella term that includes all the film industries in the country, each offering films in diverse languages and styles.
In 2017, Indian cinema produced 1,986 feature films, of which the largest number, 364, have been in Hindi. In 2022, Hindi cinema represented 33% of box office revenue, followed by Telugu and Tamil representing 20% and 16% respectively. Mumbai is one of the largest centres for film production in the world. Hindi films sold an estimated 341 million tickets in India in 2019. Earlier Hindi films tended to use vernacular Hindustani, mutually intelligible by speakers of either Hindi or Urdu, while modern Hindi productions increasingly incorporate elements of Hinglish.
The most popular commercial genre in Hindi cinema since the 1970s has been the masala film, which freely mixes different genres including action, comedy, romance, drama and melodrama along with musical numbers.
“Hindi cinema” enters the record as hindi-language film industry based in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Hindi, cinema and Hindi-language can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Hindi cinema” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Hindi, cinema and Hindi-language provides the most credible route into that argument.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q93196. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2017, 2022 and 2019.
Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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This entry incorporates text from “Hindi cinema” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.