Gone are the days when mainstream commercial Hindi cinema affixing a superstar Bollywood name to a project would lure the audience. With cutting-edge global cinema at everyone’s fingertips, movie-watching habits have rapidly reorganized in the past few years. Language and genre are no longer restrictions. That’s why when Prashanth Neel directed ‘K.G.F: Chapter 2’ appeared on top of Google’s ‘Year in Search 2022’ list as the most searched film of the year after Bramhastra, some were surprised, but many were still curious. Not just this, other vernacular movies like RRR, Directed by S.S. Rajamouli, Kantara Directed by Rishab Shetty, Pushpa: The Rise, Directed by Sukumar, Vikram, Directed by Lokesh Kanagaraj, dominate all other mainstream Hindi movies released in the year 2022. These films overtook prominent Bollywood outings, including Laal Singh Chaddha and Drishyam-2 featuring bigshots like Aamir Khan and Ajay Devgn, respectively. Traditional understanding would have proposed a much different title crowning the list, but as unconventional as the past year has been, the result doesn’t appear to startle. We often come across writings by well-known journalists or even academics who confuse the term “Indian cinema” with “Hindi cinema,”more specifically with “the Hindi cinema of Bombay, currently dubbed as Bollywood cinema.” The fact that films have been made in 14 distinct languages throughout the history of Indian cinema is sometimes glossed over for convenience. The study and academics that concentrated on Hindi films generally eclipsed those that focused on other languages, including “Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Ahomiya, Bangla, Bhojpuri, Odiya, Marathi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Konkani, and Khasi.” In vernacular parlance, these films are classified as examples of “regional cinema,” also known as “Kshetriya Cinema” in the Hindi language. This study presents a comparative examination of the rising popularity of vernacular films in comparison to mainstream Hindi films.

National Cinema, Vernacular Films, Regional Cinema, Hindi Literature, Bollywood.