• Regional showbiz emerging out of Bollywood's shadow
  By Priyanka Khanna
  
  New Delhi, July 15 (IANS) Regional cinema seems poised to emerge out of the shadows of Bollywood. And the global success of "Sivaji - The Boss", the Rajnikant-starrer released in Tamil and Telugu, is not the only indicator. Films made in Bhojpuri have been routinely eclipsing Bollywood fare at the box-office.
  
  Hindi movies, which dominated the Indian box-office for years and have come to be indicative of cinema in India, are being edged out by regional films as they make their presence felt in foreign film fests.
  
  Yash Raj Films' latest venture "Jhoom Barabar Jhoom" starring Amitabh Bachchan found itself lagging far behind simultaneously released "Sivaji" and even trailing Bhojpuri film "Nirhua Rikshawala" at the turnstiles.
  
  Marathi filmmaker Sandeep Sawant's "Shwaas" remains one of the most critically acclaimed Indian films in recent times. Director Rajnesh Domalpalli's Telugu film "Vanaja" was the winner of the Best Feature Debut award at the Berlin film festival this year.
  
  And Kolkata-based filmmaker Aparna Sen has upstaged all her contemporaries by making "A Japanese Wife" - the first Indian film in Japanese, Bengali and English.
  
  "Bollywood is a mere percentage of the Indian cinema as a complete entity. But the Indian psyche is such that it has personified Bollywood as mainstream cinema, and sidelined regional cinema. We have to end such compartmentalisation to be able to produce world-class movies," Marathi filmmaker Amol Palekar said in an interview to a national daily.
  
  The Marathi film industry boasts of legends like Dadasaheb Phalke and V. Shantaram.
  
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  A country of more than a dozen official languages, India has several different hubs of cinema scattered across the subcontinent, churning out movies that cater mostly to regional audiences.
  
  Bollywood's colourful song-and-dance spectacles generally boast the biggest budgets, the biggest stars and the biggest domestic and international penetration. But the Hindi film industry in Mumbai accounts for only about a quarter of the 1,000 or so movies produced in India annually.
  
  The Tamil film industry and its Telugu-language counterpart in Andhra Pradesh - two entertainment powerhouses - together released nearly twice as many feature films last year as Bollywood.
  
  "Everyone thinks Bollywood is the biggest in India, but it's actually the south Indian movie market that is bigger than the Hindi market," trade observer Hetal Adesara is quoted as saying in The Los Angeles Times.
  
  The growth in regional filmmaking is taking the same route that the newspaper or the television industry has taken following influx of funds.
  
  Niche is the way to go in a fast globalising world. It is projected that regional cinema will play a key role in fulfilling optimistic forecasts of the potential of the country's movie industry.
  
  According to PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), India's film business was $2.1 billion in 2006 and is expected to more than double by 2011.
  
  This year, Bollywood has struggled to match 2006's record at the box office.
  
  Several high-profile films with big-name stars have bombed.