Southern Contributions to Bollywood

The South has contributed substantially to Bollywood over the years. More heroines than others. Two or three of the most successful have been from the South of India- Waheeda Rehman, Hema Malini and Rekha.

Lots of Southern directors like T. Rama Rao made a series of hit films which resurrected Jeetendra's career along with heroines like Sridevi and Jayaprada- Mawali, Judaai, et al. K. Vishwanath was a talented Telugu director who made Sargam and Kaamchor in Hindi. Bapu directed an offbeat movie called Hum Paanch based on the Mahabharata, made contemporary. LV Prasad made a lot of Hindi films, and so did Nagi Reddy.

S.P. Balasubramaniam has sung a lot of Hindi film songs in the early films of Salman Khan, and also for Kamal Haasan in Ek Duuje Ke Liye. Many recent films of Salman Khan and one of Aamir (Ghajini) were originally Telugu films.

In olden times, many tunes were copied from Telugu or Tamil films into Hindi and vice-versa. The hit song from Kalakar, "Neele neele ambar par chand jab chhaye," is a copy of a Tamil film song "Ilaya nila,.." that I happened to watch during my stay at IIM Bangalore in 1983.

1 comment:

Diamond Head said...

unrelated Q - how come we have a Zareena Wahab but no Czar Wahab? Maybe Obama can appoint one?

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