by Sucharita Ray

Created on: August 26, 2009

The Hindi language film industry based in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India is popularly called Bollywood. Though the term is often incorrectly used to refer to the entire Indian film industry, in reality it is only a part of the latter. Bollywood primarily makes Hindi movies but in recent times, with the increasing popularity of multiplexes in the India, the industry has started making films in English too.

Though Bollywood is the single largest movie making industry in the world, it is yet to gain wide spread popularity across the globe, particularly in Western Europe and North America. This is quite evident from the small number of Bollywood movies that have ever been nominated for the Academy Awards.

MOTHER INDIA (1957)

The film was India's first submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1958. After making it to the final five nominations in the category, it lost the award to the Italian film "Nights of Cabiria" in the third round of voting.

The movie was directed by Mehboob Khan and its star studded cast included Nargis, Raj Kumar, Sunil Dutt and Rajendra Kumar. The film was in fact a remake of Khan's earlier film Aurat. It was an Indo-Russian co-production.

Here Khan used the struggle against poverty and exploitation of Radha, a peasant Indian woman as a metaphor of India rising on its own after the gaining independence. This epic saga is considered a classic of Indian cinema and is often referred to as the Indian equivalent of Gone with the Wind.

The film tried to deviate from Bollywood's over the top mannerisms and the unnecessary song-and-dance routines. However, my favorite scene in the film has Radha and her two small children singing "Duniya Mein Hum Aaye", with tears in their eyes as they plow the fields.

SALAAM BOMBAY! (1987)

It took exactly thirty years for another Bollywood film to be chosen as one of the five nominations for the Best Foreign Language Film. It lost the award to the Dutch film Pelle the Conqueror. However, Salaam Bombay! won the Golden Camera and Audience Awards at the Cannes Film Festival and three awards at the Montral World Film Festival.

The film was directed by Mira Nair and screen written by Sooni Taraporevala. It depicted the day-to-day life of children living off the streets of Bombay. In fact, most of the young actors who appeared in the movie were actual street children. In 1989, director Mira Nair established the organization, Salaam Baalak Trust to rehabilitate the children who appeared in

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