India: Mumbai – Bollywood, S J Studio Tour

🎬 A Day at a Bollywood Studio

We had saved one final treat for our stay in Mumbai — a visit to one of the city’s legendary Bollywood studios. Now, we ought to be straight with you: we came into this as enthusiastic amateurs rather than dyed-in-the-wool Bollywood devotees. Our knowledge of Indian cinema was, to put it charitably, modest. What had sparked our curiosity was a handful of western productions that had drawn heavily on the style, the swagger, and the sheer glorious excess of Bollywood — films like the lively and wonderfully colourful Bride and Prejudice, the 2004 Gurinder Chadha musical that brilliantly transplanted Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice into a fusion of Punjabi, American and British settings, complete with song-and-dance numbers that were unmistakably Bollywood in spirit. That was just enough to give us a foothold, enough to appreciate the massive influence Indian cinema has had on world culture, and to make us genuinely curious about what actually goes on behind those tall studio gates. We were not going in blind, but we certainly were not going in as experts either — which, as it turned out, made the experience all the more eye-opening.

The word “Bollywood” is a portmanteau — a blend of “Bombay,” the city’s name before it was officially renamed Mumbai in 1995, and “Hollywood,” the American film capital in Los Angeles that has dominated global cinema since the early twentieth century. The term came into common usage during the 1970s, a decade when the Indian film industry dramatically accelerated its output and, in terms of sheer volume, overtook Hollywood in the number of films produced each year. The roots of Indian cinema, though, go back much further. The first Indian feature film, Raja Harishchandra, was directed by Dadasaheb Phalke and released in 1913 — making Indian cinema well over a century old. The industry grew steadily through the silent era, survived the transition to sound in 1931, and by the 1940s and 1950s — often called the Golden Age of Bollywood — was producing classics that remain beloved to this day. Legends like Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt, and Dilip Kumar became household names not just across India but throughout much of Asia, the Middle East, and the Soviet Union. Today, Bollywood refers specifically to the Hindi-language film industry based in Mumbai, though India as a whole produces films in dozens of regional languages. In terms of output, Indian cinema produces somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 films annually — more than any other country on earth. Bollywood is far more than mere entertainment. It is a cultural engine that shapes fashion trends, drives the music industry through its film soundtracks, sets the vocabulary of romance and aspiration for hundreds of millions of people, and generates enormous economic activity. Its reach extends well beyond India’s borders: Bollywood films are watched across South Asia, in the Indian diaspora communities of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and the Gulf states, and increasingly by mainstream global audiences who have discovered the genre through streaming platforms. To step inside a working Bollywood studio, then, was to enter a world of genuine cultural weight — even if our personal knowledge of it was limited to a couple of loosely affiliated western films and a vague but enthusiastic goodwill.

The drive from South Mumbai up to the studio took us the better part of an hour, heading steadily northwards and away from the grandiose colonial-era architecture that dominates the city’s historic waterfront. South Mumbai — the area around Colaba, Fort, and the Churchgate district — has the feel of a Victorian city that never quite let go of its past: wide boulevards lined with Gothic revival buildings, the imposing Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus), the graceful arc of Marine Drive curving around the Arabian Sea. The further north you travel, the more the city sheds that imperial formality and becomes something else entirely — denser, more chaotic, more alive in a raw and immediate way. The traffic in Mumbai is, to put it diplomatically, an adventure. The city of roughly 20 million people is served by a road network that was largely designed for a population a fraction of that size, and the result is a perpetual negotiation between cars, taxis, auto-rickshaws, motorbikes, buses, and pedestrians that would give a London traffic planner a nervous breakdown. We pressed on northwards, watching the city reveal its extraordinary contrasts through the car windows — glass-fronted apartment towers rising directly behind clusters of modest tenements, street food sellers doing brisk business in the shadows of corporate office blocks, enormous hand-painted film posters slapped onto every available wall. SJ Studios is located in Sakinaka, in the Andheri East area of the city — a part of Mumbai that feels thoroughly workaday and residential rather than glamorous. There was nothing about the surrounding neighbourhood to suggest we were anywhere close to one of the world’s great film industries. If our driver had not known exactly where he was going, we would never have found it. The studio announced itself, eventually, only through a pair of tall black gates bearing the golden initials “SJ” — understated, almost secretive, which we thought was rather fitting for a place in the business of illusion.

🏭 First Impressions of the Studio

Stepping through those gates, we were genuinely taken aback by what greeted us. In our minds — shaped, no doubt, by too many documentaries about Hollywood and by the general mythology that surrounds filmmaking — we had expected something glamorous: grand soundstages, perhaps, gleaming corridors plastered with film posters, maybe a hint of red carpet. What we found instead was rather more honest than that. The area inside the gates looked, bluntly, like a working industrial yard. There were open-sided sheds with corrugated roofs, vehicles parked at odd angles, scattered props and bits of timber and metal that looked more like a builder’s merchants than the birthplace of cinematic dreams. It was a useful corrective. Bollywood filmmaking, we quickly came to understand, is not about polished exteriors and manicured studio lots. It is about what happens on the sets themselves — the craft of creating believable worlds out of plywood, paint, and ingenuity. SJ Studios has been a significant presence in the Mumbai production landscape since the 1990s and has hosted the shooting of numerous major television serials and feature films over the decades. The Indian television drama industry in particular — producing the long-running soap operas and family dramas that attract tens of millions of viewers each night — is an enormous operation that runs essentially around the clock. Despite our arriving on a Sunday, the place was buzzing with purposeful activity. Crew members in worn jeans and T-shirts were hauling equipment, adjusting lights, and consulting clipboards. Camera operators were testing rigs. There was not a moment’s sense that this was a day of rest. In Bollywood and in Indian television production, the working week simply does not observe the same boundaries that we are used to at home. The machinery of Indian entertainment never really stops.

☕ Cafeteria Turned Film Set

Our first genuine glimpse of actual filming came almost immediately, and in the most unexpected of places — the studio’s modest staff cafeteria. On any ordinary working day this room served as the canteen for the hundreds of crew members, technicians, caterers, and support staff who keep the whole operation running. But today it had been pressed into service as a location. Two young actresses, dressed and made-up to within an inch of their lives, were positioned across a table from one another, mid-scene in what appeared to be a deeply emotional exchange. The make-up was heavy and precise — the kind of professional finish that photographs beautifully under film lighting — and the costumes were elegant contemporary Indian dress. A small crew hovered around them, adjusting the framing, checking levels, consulting monitors. It was a reminder of something that characterises Bollywood and Indian television production more broadly: the sheer pragmatism and ingenuity of it all. There is no room too mundane, no corner too ordinary, to be transformed into a set if the script demands it. A canteen becomes a living room, a corridor becomes a palace hall, an industrial yard becomes a romantic courtyard. It is filmmaking as a form of permanent creative improvisation — and watching it happen in a place designed for serving chai and dhal was unexpectedly charming.

🎭 The Mini Theatre Experience

The formal portion of our tour began in a small screening theatre tucked inside the complex. It was a compact space — perhaps twenty seats arranged in a shallow arc — and it doubled, we were told, as a room for viewing rushes and internal screenings during production. For the first half hour or so, we were shown a series of short films walking us through the history of Bollywood: from those earliest silent productions of the 1910s, through the golden age of the 1950s, into the masala films of the 1970s and 1980s (when the term Bollywood itself became widespread), and on to the globalised, technically sophisticated productions of today. We learned that Bollywood’s music — those irresistible songs that seem to burst out of the narrative at regular intervals — evolved from a tradition rooted in Indian classical music, particularly Hindustani classical forms, but has absorbed an enormous range of influences over the decades, from qawwali devotional music to western pop and hip-hop. The playback singing tradition, in which professional singers record the vocals that actors then lip-sync to on screen, has been an institution of Indian cinema since the 1940s, producing legendary voices like Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammed Rafi whose recordings remain embedded in the cultural memory of generations of Indians. After the films, a group of dancers performed live routines in the narrow space at the front of the theatre. The stage was tiny, but the energy was extraordinary — you could feel the floor vibrate. We were introduced to the complexity of Bollywood dance as a form: it is not one thing, but many things simultaneously. It draws on Bharatanatyam, the ancient classical dance tradition of South India that dates back at least 2,000 years; on Kathak, the storytelling dance form of North India with its intricate footwork and spinning movements; on Bhangra, the vigorous folk dance of Punjab traditionally performed at harvest festivals; and on Garba, the circular devotional dance of Gujarat associated with the festival of Navratri. Layered on top of all of this are more recent borrowings from jazz, hip-hop, and contemporary western styles. The result is a form that is visually spectacular, athletically demanding, and instantly recognisable to audiences around the world — even people who have never consciously sought out a Bollywood film will recognise the aesthetic the moment they see it.