Bollywood

Bollywood is the informal name given to the popular Mumbai-based Hindustani language film industry in India. The term is often incorrectly used to refer to the whole of Indian cinema.
The name is a portmanteau of Bombay (the former name for Mumbai) and Hollywood, the center of the American film industry. Though some purists deplore the name, arguing that it makes the industry look like a poor cousin to Hollywood, it seems likely to persist and now has its own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The term Bollywood is so popular that most articles talking about the cultural, social and economical impact of Hindi movies, use the term Bollywood instead of Hindi film industry based in Mumbai. The word is used in almost all entertainment magazines in India and abroad, television, newspapers and even scholarly articles written about Hindi entertainment industry. Do we have some person, individual, publication who owns the credit to introduce this term to Indian popular culture?

Tanya Palta tells us about the origin of the term Bollywood. According to Tanya, Amit Khanna was the person who first used the term Bollywood in mid seventies. Which is not entirely true. In an e-mail to the literary review’s wordspeak Bevinda Collaco claimed that she is the person who first used the term for his gossip column ‘On the Bollywood Beat. In her email she wrote:
Bollywood was not by accident. It was very much by design… I got into film journalism by pure accident and knew nothing about Hindi films… I was given a studio beat to do. I was not happy with the name of the column Studio Roundup and thought of `Flipping around Follywood’, but it sounded too harsh. I settled for `On the Bollywood Beat’ instead. From a studio roundup column I began commenting on what was happening off the sets too and it turned into a gossip column. In no time at all the stars were calling up to find out why they were mentioned in Bollywood and others to find out why they were not mentioned in Bollywood. I guess they were responsible for giving my word longevity.

So far there seems an agreement that the term first appeared in a magazine column. We don’t know for sure who first used it Amit or Bevinda but we do know that Bevinda’s column gave the word popularity among the film stars who then started referring the industry as Bollywood. So I think that more credit goes to Bevinda who popularized the term that she claims that she designed to sound different.