Bollywood without its distinctive trademark of song and dance is inconceivable. Music, songs and dance are the very life line of the Indian film industry. It is this which adds chaaracter to the industry in recognising its unique selling point.

Genre conventions

Most Bollywood films would be classified as musicals. Few movies are made without at least one song-and-dance number. However, they do not fit easily in the "musical" category as defined by Hollywood movies; they usually contain a great deal more in the way of plot and action than is found in the typical Hollywood musical.

Indian audiences expect full value for their money, with a good entertainer generally referred to as paisa vasool, (literally, "money`s worth"). Songs and dances, love triangles, comedy and dare-devil thrills-all are mixed up in a three-hour-long extravaganza with an intermission. Such movies are called masala movies, after the Hindi word for a spice mixture, masala. Like masalas, these movies are a mixture of many things.

Bollywood plots have tended to be melodramatic. They frequently employ formulaic ingredients such as star-crossed lovers and angry parents, love triangles, corrupt politicians, kidnappers, conniving villains, courtesans with hearts of gold, long-lost relatives and siblings separated by fate, dramatic reversals of fortune, and convenient coincidences.

There have always been Indian films with more "artistic" aims and more sophisticated stories, both inside and outside the Bollywood tradition (see Indian art cinema). They often lost out at the box office to movies with more mass appeal.

Bollywood conventions are changing, however. A large Indian diaspora in English speaking countries, and increased Western influence at home, have nudged Bollywood films closer to Hollywood models. Film kisses are no longer banned; the once-ubiquitous "wet" scenes, with damp saris molded to an actress`s curvaceous form, have been replaced by skin, pure and simple. Plots now tend to feature Westernized urbanites dating and dancing in discos rather than arranged marriages. Plots can be less melodramatic, more sophisticated. Some Indians think that this is "progress"; others miss the masala films of yore.

Bollywood song and dance

Songs in Bollywood are sung by professional playback singers, rather than actors, who lip-sync the lyrics. Pictured here is Mukesh Chand Mathur (commonly known as Mukesh), a famed playback singer.

Bollywood film music is called filmi music (from Hindi, meaning "of films").

Songs from Bollywood movies are generally pre-recorded by professional playback singers, with the actors then lip synching the words to the song on-screen, often while dancing. While most actors, especially today, are excellent dancers, few are also singers. One notable exception was Kishore Kumar, who starred in several major films in the 1950s while also having a stellar career as a playback singer. K. L. Saigal, Suraiyya and Noor Jehan were also known as both singers and actors.

Of late, a few actors have again tried singing for themselves: