"Film producers and directors are adept at making things look simple on the surface, but there are layers of cultural and religious codes which lie beneath, informing the way characters behave with each other, the way they dress, or even what they are called. If a character is called 'Vijay' then the audience will know he is a Hindu. If he is called 'Akbar', then they will know he is a Muslim.
Aishwariya Rai and Vivek Oberoi in a scene from Kyun Ho Gaya Na
The Hindu-Muslim divide has been the most explosive political issue in the sub-continent since India gained her independence from Britain in 1947 - resulting in riots and bloodshed. Thousands died following the destruction of a mosque in Ayodhya in 1992 and from communal riots in Gujarat just 2 years ago. For Bollywood, Hindu-Muslim relations have dominated plot lines for decades.
The central plot theme was a Hindu boy falling in love with a Muslim girl. For many in small town or village India, this is still a very big issue. However, with the emergence of India's new middle classes and the more western orientated cities of Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta and Madras, these plots are beginning to lose their appeal, although it is still rare for the hero to be anything other than a Hindu.
Despite this, Bollywood prides itself on its claim to transcend barriers of religion, culture and caste. In this industry people of all faiths and backgrounds work together in communal harmony - from the big-screen stars to the lighting director to the make-up artists."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/bollywood/bollywood_religion.shtml"Hindi Film Industry and Dance
Here's a brief history of the phenomenon known as “Bollywood,” that unfortunately can't do justice to the complexities of this film industry. The Setting is British ruled India, in a region not yet called India. Two French brothers, the Lumieres, are said to have brought cinema to India when they first brought their vide recording to a hotel in Bombay in 1896 to do a screening of six silent movies. These initial images were just of everyday events until a better understanding of the video instrument sparked artistic interests as well. Indian cinema had a unique flavor from the beginning, because it took its leads from older Indian musical theater, particularly from the Urdu poetic dramas of the late nineteenth century. The influence of these traditions ensured that Indian movies would favor mythological or legendary-historical stories, that their dialogue would carry an Urdu flavor even in languages other than Urdu, and that every film would be a musical. At first many mythological and ancient historical themes were depicted because the stories were familiar to a lot of people and required minimum commentary. Though singing, dancing, sculpture, painting, and literature were not new to India, this new mechanical medium of narrating visually came after a century of British rule. What lots of people forget to realize is that under British rule, visual and narrative arts were suppressed a lot. Some Indian filmmakers did touch upon Gandhian ideas in their films, however the British government soon realized that the force of cinema was being used for political incitement. So, in order to prevent the depiction of these anti establishment ideas in films, the British censor board tightened film censorship around 1918. The censorship was especially sensitive to issues such as the Indian princes, labor, communist ideas, the Gandhian program and Hindu-Muslim relations. As a consequence, the Indian filmmaker confined himself to predominantly non-controversial entertainment. This was the origin of the tradition of escapist cinema in India. But some gifted directors, like the noted director Shyam Benegal, were able to find the balance between issue and mass appeal and grappled with issues of class contradictions, the displacement caused by industrialization, the impotency of democracy, etc in Hindi as well. Film Music too has been a big aspect of films now. Because of the playback singer system, a few good singers have sung many of the songs for various movies. Hindi film music has borrowed unabashedly from all known styles and genres of music, and much like Indian culture as a whole, refuses to acknowledge the concept of "copyright". India produces more movies than any other country in the world-over 900 feature-length films in at least 16 languages. It’s important to know that Indian movies are also big in places like: British Caribbean, Fiji, East and South Africa, the U.K., United States, Canada, or the Middle East."
http://satrang.berkeley.edu/modern.php"In a trend reminiscent of how post-Cold War Hollywood stopped depicting of Russian communists as the baddies du jour, Bollywood has apparently decided to stop depicting Pakistanis as "extremists and terrorist sponsors," thanks to the warming of Indo-Pakistani relations.
Furthermore, last year's massive box office failure of the jingoistic Indian war epic LoC Kargil could have warned Bollywood that the popularity of anti-Pakistani movies is no longer guaranteed. At any rate, cross-border cooperation between Bollywood and Lollywood is now the in-thing. The just-released Veer-Zaara is a good example, as it "follows a couple who bridge the India-Pakistan divide." According to its director, the legendary Yash Chopra,
"In my film, Pakistanis are positive characters. Relations between the people have never been bad, but those between politicians, governments and bureaucrats have been."
Another example of Bollywood-Lollywood cooperation is the upcoming Bollywood thriller Nazar, which features the Lollywood goddess Meera. As she explained, she joined the cast "in the name of friendship between Hindustan and Pakistan. New roads are opening and as the friendship deepens, I thought I should contribute my bit too.""
http://tinyurl.com/3rrk9 (don't be put off by the site; it's a Reuters article)
Indian movie stirs passions of intolerance
By Raju Bist
MUMBAI - The timing could not have been worse. Even as preparations continue in New Delhi for the historic meeting in mid-July between Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf, a big-budget Hindi movie threatens to further strain relations between the two hostile neighbors.
Gadar - Ek Prem Katha (Revolution - A Love Story) was released on June 15 across India. There was a lot of pre-release hype surrounding the movie as the future of a number of film personalities was riding on its success.
Leading man Sunny Deol, the Bruce Willis of Indian cinema, was looking for a big hit to revive his flagging career. So was director Anil Sharma, who hitherto had dabbled only with B-grade productions. Heroine Amisha Patel, scion of a leading business family, had to prove that her first film - last year's biggest hit, Kaho Na Pyar Hai (Say You Love Me) - was no flash in the pan.
Gadar went on to make news, but for the wrong reasons. On June 20, 400 activists led by a local Muslim leader, Arif Masood, stormed the Lily theatre, which was screeningGadar in the central city of Bhopal. They ransacked the cinema hall - located in the old part of the city, which is predominantly populated by Muslims - and burned two motorscooters. The mob was protesting the manner in which the film's Hindu-Muslim love story is portrayed. Gadar is the fourth film in recent times where a Muslim girl is shown marrying a non-Muslim. (Zubeida, Dahek and Fiza were the others.)
http://www.atimes.com/ind-pak/CG03Df02.htmlBollywood's Wars
By David Jacobson
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For all its garrulous profusion-an estimated 800 films a year and daily domestic ticket sales of twelve million-mainstream Indian cinema has always been remarkably reticent about the 1947 Partition, a topic basically left to art-films, foreigners, and expatriates (Indo-Canadian Deepa Mehta's powerful Earth, 1998). But now "Bollywood" too, India's Bombay-based film industry, is finally confronting India's historical relationship with Pakistan-while also releasing an unprecedented new strain of jingoistic war and police films reflecting the past decade's Hindu-Muslim tensions, particularly in Kashmir.
Such jingoism was inconceivable a generation ago, when Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai (brotherhood) filled scripts often written, produced, and directed both by leftist secularists and by Indian and Pakistani Muslim refugees who, like their stars, often kept their Muslim origins hidden with Hinduized names. Today, the still-multicultural industry—several of whose biggest stars are openly Muslim—churns out an increasing number of socially divisive, ultranationalistic "civil war" stories since the December '92 destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya.
The new big-budget war dramas help Bollywood compete with satellite TV. War films were perhaps the one genre India never copied, since its public had little direct experience of armed combat, and earlier patriotic films made after the India-Pakistan conflicts of the mid-60s were resounding flops. But now even self-styled mavericks are making virtual nationalistic propaganda: for instance, Gulzar's Maachis
or John Mathew Mathan's Sarfarosh . Maachis recounts a young man's conversion-amid songs, picturesque mountains, and love intrigues-to terrorism in Indian Punjab. Sarfarosh portrays a Pakistani ghazal singer smuggling arms into India for the Pakistani secret service. And the recent Gadar: ek prem katha (Revoluation: a love story) narrates a Sikh boy's heroic efforts to save his beloved from her disapproving Muslim family and from throngs of Pakistani soldiers and thugs who thwart the pair's return to India.
In making simplistic backdrops of complex political backgrounds, these films serve the Hindu religious right's negation of the long, vast Muslim contribution to India culture and its rejection of Muslims as unassimilable aliens. Sarfarosh's caricatures are especially incendiary given the ultranationalist Hindu party Shiv Sena's refusal of all cultural exchange with Pakistan (its head, Bal Thackery, forbade two eminent Pakistani ghazal singers to perform in "holy Bombay").
http://www.cfr.org/pdf/correspondence/xJacobson2.php
At least I feel like I've spent part of my lunch hour educating myself and helping out when someone's in a jam :7 
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