How South Indian cinema conquered India

For most of the twentieth century, “Indian cinema” to many outsiders meant Hindi films made in Bombay. Yet South India has always had powerful film industries of its own, with superstars who command devotion unmatched anywhere. In the last decade, these industries have broken out of their regional markets to dominate the national box office. Here are the people who made that happen.

The superstars

Rajinikanth, a former bus conductor from Bengaluru, became the biggest star of Tamil cinema through stylish mass entertainers such as Baashha and Enthiran. His contemporary Kamal Haasan took the opposite path, experimenting with roles and techniques in films such as Nayakan and Dasavathaaram. In Malayalam cinema, Mohanlal and Mammootty built careers spanning more than forty years and hundreds of films, admired for naturalistic acting.

The filmmakers

Director Mani Ratnam made Tamil films that the whole country watched, through dubbed versions of Roja and Bombay in the 1990s. Composer Ilaiyaraaja scored more than a thousand films and transformed South Indian film music, and A. R. Rahman, who began with Roja, took that music to the world.

Baahubali and the pan-Indian film

The turning point came with S. S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali films in 2015 and 2017. Made in Telugu and Tamil and dubbed into Hindi and other languages, the second film became one of the highest-grossing Indian films ever and made its star Prabhas a national name. Rajamouli’s RRR (2022) went further, becoming a global hit; its song “Naatu Naatu” won the Academy Award.

The new wave of stars

The success of Baahubali encouraged producers to release big films in several languages at once. Allu Arjun’s Pushpa films became a pan-India craze — he became the first Telugu actor to win the National Film Award for Best Actor — and Kannada films such as KGF also found huge audiences in the north.

Why it happened

Several factors came together: cheap smartphones and dubbed films on television and streaming services exposed northern audiences to southern stars; southern studios invested in spectacle and visual effects; and their films often offered heroic, emotionally direct stories at a time when many Hindi films were aimed at city audiences. The result is a more genuinely national Indian cinema, in which a hit can come from Hyderabad, Chennai, Kochi or Bengaluru as easily as Mumbai.