The most profitable films in Indian cinema history are not the explosive action blockbusters but modestly budgeted devotional films like the 1975 movie about the goddess Santoshi Maa. That surprising fact opens a deep dive into a widely misunderstood industry. Bollywood is not a synonym for Indian film; it is specifically the Hindi-language industry based in Mumbai, one giant spoke in a multilingual landscape that produced 1,986 feature films in 2017 alone.

The episode traces the history from an 1899 wrestling match filmed in Bombay and Dadasaheb Phalke's 1913 silent epic, through the 1931 arrival of sound and the choice of Hindustani, the 1943 anti-hero blockbuster Kismet, the golden age trinity of Dev Anand, Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor, and the parallel cinema of Neecha Nagar and Guru Dutt. It then explains the angry young man of the 1970s ...