Everyone knows Bollywood — the film industry centered in Mumbai (formerly called Bombay, hence the "B" in Bollywood) whose singing and dancing entertainments are shown throughout the country — and now the world.
But films in Hindi — the language of Bollywood — accounted for only 19 percent of the 1,275 films released in India in 2009. Most of the rest were made by India's 10 other major film industries, all working in local languages distinct from Hindi.
When the Indian Ministry of External Affairs invited seven foreign journalists to tour film facilities, they evidently wanted to expand our horizons beyond Bollywood, so the big Mumbai studios were not on our list.
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