Bollywood’s encounters with the third kind: A critical catalogue of Hindi science fiction films

Abstract

India not only happens to be a country of 1.21 billion people (as per 2001 census; Ministry of Home Affairs, 2001) but also home to one of the most prolific film industries in the world. Despite prolific film production, not many Science Fiction (SF) films have been produced by Bollywood. The fact that the voice of the Indian nation increasingly endorses science as the panacea to all issues merely deepens this paradox. This is an essay about the general absence of SF in Hindi popular cinema, seen from the perspective of a film-lover who is also a shamelessly zealous SF fan in a culture that, for various reasons, has not shown much interest in it.