How India Turned Cinema into an Anti-Colonial Tool Before Independence

India is today the world’s largest annual film producer. Domestic output accounts for roughly 90% of the domestic market—a phenomenon exceedingly rare in today’s global landscape, where the overwhelming majority of national markets are dominated by American productions.

Within the streaming ecosystem, India ranks third among the world’s largest suppliers of digital content, trailing only the United States and Japan. Its films circulate across more than 90 countries, and international revenues continue to expand steadily.

This is not merely about volume. It is about strategic positioning in the global contest over narratives.

The crucial question is different: How did a Global South country—despite enduring deep inequalities and significant structural challenges—become a power capable of competing for symbolic value in an era defined by narrative warfare, global platforms, and algorithmic colonization?

How did India build this strength? The answer begins before independence.

Hacking the System Before Sovereignty

In the 1920s, India remained a British colony. Yet even then, cinema was already taking shape as a coherent system.

This was not a state-led initiative. Nor was it the result of a planned cultural policy. It was industrial intelligence.

Exhibitors—those in direct contact with audiences—studied Hollywood’s vertically integrated model of production, distribution, and exhibition. They grasped that power lay not only in screening films, but in controlling the entire process.

They already dominated exhibition. They began investing in production. They structured distribution networks. And they understood something even bolder for the time: the content produced there need not be confined within India’s borders.

As early as the 1920s—still under colonial rule—Indian producers and exhibitors began exporting their films to regions across Asia and Africa, leveraging existing cultural circuits and diasporic communities. India did not simply imitate Hollywood; it decoded the logic of the American system and adapted it to its own reality. It hacked the process—transforming a foreign industrial model into its own instrument.

What could have remained mere colonial consumption began instead to crystallize as productive self-assertion.

The Power of Showing Up

Yet there is an even deeper dimension to this story.

The strength of Indian cinema lies precisely in its refusal to shy away from being unmistakably Indian.

In much of the Global South’s cinematic output, filmmakers have oscillated between copying external models or diluting local references to render them “exportable.” India pursued the opposite path. It forged a cinema in which audiences recognize themselves.

The Indian public sees its own country on screen: its faces, its bodies, its gestures, its landscapes, its colors, its local conflicts, its distinct cultural codes. There is no dilution.

When sound arrived in the early 1930s, this dimension intensified further. Despite British colonial rule, most of the population did not speak English—and had no reason to. The colonizer’s language was not the language of daily life.

Foreign-language cinema therefore lost traction in India once talkies emerged. At that moment, the Indian industry consolidated its own linguistic and aesthetic grammar.

Music and dance became central—not only due to aesthetic tradition, but because they functioned as unifying elements across a multilingual nation. Rather than adapting to the dominant language, Indian cinema drew on its own cultural matrices to forge a common idiom for the entire country.

Speech ceased to be a barrier; performance became a bridge.

Late Independence and Mastery of Twentieth-Century Tools

India achieved independence in 1947—already well into the postwar twentieth century, the age of image, sound, and mass circulation.

Unlike the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century independence movements—organized around print and the press—Indian revolutionaries developed techniques of sovereignty struggle also in the audiovisual domain. Political independence coincided with a functioning cultural industry already oriented beyond national borders.

This helps explain why cinema, innovation, and technology have advanced hand-in-hand throughout Indian history. The appropriation of modern tools unfolded simultaneously with the very struggles that founded the republic.

Breaking Into China: The Case of Dangal

The strength of Indian cinema extends far beyond the domestic market.

The case of Dangal is emblematic. The film grossed approximately USD 303 million worldwide—including nearly USD 193 million in China alone, surpassing its earnings in India itself.

China is one of the world’s most tightly controlled markets, with strict state oversight and severe limits on foreign film imports. Gaining access there is anything but trivial.

Dangal’s success was no accident. Actor Aamir Khan had already built symbolic capital with Chinese audiences through 3 Idiots. But that resonance only works because the Indian cultural matrix remains intact.

India exports identity—and that identity crosses political frontiers.

Popular and Auteur: A Productive Tension

The domestic market’s economic strength rests primarily with popular cinema—Bollywood and the major regional industries. These films sustain the system financially.

At the same time, India produces a sophisticated, politically engaged auteur cinema, consistently present at leading international festivals—Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno. This strand projects India symbolically onto the world stage—even if it lacks comparable domestic reach.

The challenge lies in reconciling these two poles. Yet this tension is structural across many national cinemas.

Structural Overview of Indian Cinema

India is the world’s largest annual film producer, with domestic films capturing around 90% of the internal market and circulating in over 90 countries. International revenues continue to grow steadily. In supplying streaming-platform content, India ranks third globally. Among the world’s top audiovisual exporters are, besides the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, and India itself—with France appearing fifth as the first non-Anglophone European country.

Why This Matters for Brazil

Indian cinema is not strong by chance. It is strong because it was conceived, from the outset, as a tool of cultural sovereignty. Even before formal independence, India had grasped that contesting the imaginary is contesting power.

It may not be irrelevant, then, that Brazil is now turning its diplomatic and strategic attention toward India. The presidential visit scheduled for February takes place in a year when India assumes the BRICS presidency—and when both nations seek to deepen commercial and cultural exchanges as part of a broader effort to assert autonomy amid mounting pressure and coercion from the United States.

The rapprochement between two major Global South countries should not be viewed solely through commercial or industrial lenses—but also through cultural ones. If the twenty-first century is defined by fierce competition over narratives, platforms, and imaginaries, India demonstrates that cultural identity, technological mastery, and industrial infrastructure can be successfully combined. For Brazil—which continues to grapple with consolidating domestic audiovisual hegemony—the dialogue with India’s experience is not merely symbolic: it is strategic.

Sovereignty is not built only through trade agreements—but through command of the narrative tools of one’s time.

By Priscila Miranda, director of Fênix Filmes.