Punjabi cinema
Punjabi-language film industry of India
Punjabi cinema, also known as Pollywood or Punjwood, is cinema dedicated to the production of motion pictures in the Punjabi-language widely spoken in the Indian state of Punjab. It is based in Amritsar, Ludhiana, and Mohali.
Punjabi cinema began with the 1928 silent film of Daughters of Today, produced in the region in Lahore. In 1932, the first sound film, Heer Ranjha, using sound-on-disc technology, was released. 2,377 short-films and 117 feature-films were produced in Punjabi by 1989.
History
Silent Era (1920's)
In 1924, the first Punjabi film, Daughters of Today, was released in Lahore; the city had nine operational cinema houses. Movies shown at these cinemas were mostly produced in Bombay and Calcutta, and seldom from Hollywood and London. Daughters of Today was a brainchild of G.K. Mehta, a former officer with the North-Western Railways who, much like H. S. Bhatavdekar, had imported a camera into the country. Mehta continued to produce newsreel coverage for companies abroad and delved into further film projects but his dedication gave way when he promptly left the film industry for more profitable ventures.
In 1928, alongside Muhammad Ismail, Abdur Rashid Kardar who previously worked with Mehta, started a studio and production company under the name United Players Corporation after having sold all his belongings.
“Punjabi cinema” enters the record as punjabi-language film industry of India. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Punjabi, cinema and Punjabi-language can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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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 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5120791. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1928, 1932, 1989 and 1920.
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This entry incorporates text from “Punjabi 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.