Colophon
About The Bollywood 100
A ranked, annotated canon of Hindi cinema, built for people who want to actually watch the films.
What this is
A working canon of 232 Hindi-language films — 100 of them ranked — with a full page for every title, external sources on every page, and no attempt to pretend the ranking is objective. The scoring is stated openly so you can argue with the machinery rather than just the result.
What it is not
It is not a list of Indian cinema. Hindi cinema is one industry among many, and some of the greatest films made in India — Pather Panchali, Nayakan, Elippathayam, Sairat — are in languages this list has no business ranking. Borrowing their prestige would be dishonest.
Who made it
An independent editorial project, written and built in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. The ranking is the work of one editor rather than a panel, which is a limitation and is why the scoring is published — a single point of view is only defensible if you can see it working.
Editorial contact and corrections: Amit Sharma.
Artwork
Every poster and portrait on this site is drawn in code — generated as SVG from the film's own title and year, so the same film always produces the same picture. Nothing here is a scan of a real poster or a photograph of a real person. That is partly a design decision, giving 232 films one visual language instead of 232 clashing ones, and partly a legal one: film posters and press photographs are copyrighted works with living rights-holders, and a reference site that reprints two hundred of them is a takedown waiting to happen.
Palette follows the decade, motif follows the leading genre — beams for crime, arcs for romance, a Mughal arch for the historical, a single sun for the social drama. Once you know the code you can read a film's era and register off the artwork before you read the title.
Corrections
Dates, spellings and credits are checked against Wikipedia and IMDb, both linked from every film page. If something is wrong, it is wrong and we want to know — reach us via amit.marketing.
Design
The visual system is called Midnight Matinée — a restored 70mm print screened at midnight in a single-screen cinema, catalogued like a Criterion booklet. Gold foil, marigold, sprocket rails and halftone poster dots, all drawn in CSS with no image assets. Fonts are Bricolage Grotesque, Fraunces, Source Serif 4, Inter and Tiro Devanagari Hindi.