Noor Iqbal , Bollywood gets political

The birth of Bollywood
Though the first mass-produced Indian films appeared in the 1930s and the industry reached its "Golden Age" in the decades immediately following Indian independence in 1947, the term "Bollywood" did not appear until the 1970s. Bollywood gets its name from Bombay, renamed Mumbai in 1995, where the films are produced. Today, it is a thriving industry that turns out 150 to 200 films per year. It is not India's only film industry, though. India is the largest producer of feature films in the world, of which Tamil and Telugu language films make up a large part. In fact, Hindi films make up just 20% of the national industry. However, they bring in close to 50% of the revenues.

The Hindi film industry began to grow in Mumbai after the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, which divided the Bengali film industry based in Kolkata and the Punjabi film industry based in Lahore along with their respective audiences. Mumbai enjoyed an influx of prominent actors, producers, directors, lyricists and technicians from these weakening industries in Pakistan. As a result, the Mumbai film industry became religiously integrated at a time when the rest of the region was unraveling along religious lines. Some of the most famous male actors today, including Shahrukh Khan and Aamir Khan, are Muslim, as are the renowned scriptwriter Javed Akhtar and music director A R Rahman. According to anthropologist and film scholar Tejaswini Ganti, Bollywood is "perhaps the least religiously segregated place in India today".

The typical Bollywood movie involves a love affair, a large and meddlesome family, a lavish wedding and a happy ending, all accompanied by song and dance. These films are often infused with religious imagery, usually Hindu, and tend to avoid inter-religious plotlines altogether. It seems odd that an industry with significant Muslim representation would only recently turn to sensitive themes of inter-communal relations.