First Indian silent film"RAJA HARISH CHANDRA"

Dhundiraj Govind Phalke's black-and-white silent film Raja Harischandra was screened in Mumbai on 3 May, 1913. It is a tale of a righteous Indian king who never told a lie. Many say this was the filmic seed that spawned a billion-dollar industry. One of the most famous scenes is the bathtub sequence where the king comes to call on his wife Taramati. She is in the tub with attendants and they are all drenched, their saris and blouses clinging to their bodies - but they are all in fact male actors dressed as women. Phalke went on to make 95 full-length films, but he died in penury. As Nasreen Rehman, a historian of South Asian cinema, points out, the Hindi language film industry of Mumbai was not known as Bollywood for many years. "The term Bollywood is an invention of the late 20th Century, after Bombay cinema caught the imagination of the West."