The industry is setting out to win the affection of women, not only to profit by selling them tickets, but also to benefit from the fact that the appreciation of women is wildly infectious.

The spate of such films is unusual and is chiefly a result of the desperate quest of the industry to survive the times on the shoulders of artistic talent. The old order has been collapsing and, while no one is clear what the new is, there is a consensus that the new is something that the old was not.

There is much that is going on in the Hindi film industry as it seeks how best to evolve.

Another winning tactic of the industry in transition is the portrayal of provincial life with its dialects, expletives, violence and ruffians of ambiguous morals. As Indians become more westernized, they are rewarding exaggerated reminders of their origins. For many, these are scenes they left behind when they migrated to the big cities or when the cities themselves transformed.

One consequence of the phenomenon is the survival of the authentic Indian storyteller. For decades, storytellers who wrote in Indian languages languished on the fringes as the prestige of regional languages receded. Most of the English-language writers, who have inherited the influential mainstream, are indistinguishable from one another — as though they had been produced in a Western culture factory. But in the major Indian film industries, like Hindi and Tamil, the authentic storyteller is preserved and rewarded.

A critical flaw in the industry is the predominance of a few people whose only claim to influence is that they are the progeny of the industry’s titans. For instance, almost all top male actors are offspring of other actors or filmmakers. The objective of any Indian family is to provide an unfair advantage to its own, and film families are no different.