It is rush hour on Monday morning in Hyderabad, but the city’s usual deafening soundtrack of revving engines and blaring horns is absent. The only noise comes from a woman gently sweeping the veranda of one of the large, pastel-coloured mansions nearby. The silence is even more disconcerting when you see the airport near the end of the street, and, just beyond that, a railway station. New York’s Statue of Liberty is a short walk away, as is the splendour of the ancient city of Mahishmati. In fact, Mahishmati is the first place here where I encounter any real noise – the blue special effects screens around the fibreglass throne area are rather flimsy, and a buzz from power tools carries from the adjoining parking lot, where workers are building a pirate ship.

We are in Ramoji Film City, the largest film studio in the world and the beating heart of Tollywood, India’s Telugu-language film industry. And although Ramoji is technically part of Hyderabad, in reality – with its (real) hotels, workshops, soundstages, gardens, post office, banks and restaurants – it is a metropolis in and of itself.

It is not Hyderabad’s only “city within a city”. To many outside India, the southern Indian metropolis is best known for Hitech City – the country’s own purpose-built Silicon Valley. Nearby is Genome Valley, which boasts manufacturing and R&D arms of some of the biotech sector’s biggest names.

Hyderabad owes much of its rapid growth to the jobs created for these companies, both directly and from the construction boom resulting from the need for offices, homes and infrastructure to accommodate the influx of labour. Its expansion has seen it swallow up its twin city of Secunderabad to become one sprawling metropolis.

• Sets at Ramoji Film City including a pirate ship being constructed for a forthcoming feature. Photographs: Ravi Giragani/the Guardian

The latest UN projections forecast that Hyderabad will reach megacity status – having a population over 10 million – by 2020, with 14.1 million residents by 2035. But when you are caught in the inevitable snarl of the city’s legendarily bad traffic and surrounded on all sides by construction projects, it is hard not to agree with locals who say that, thanks to unofficial migrant workers, the 10 million population point has long since been passed.

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India has the largest film industry in the world, producing 1,903 films in 2016 compared with 200 made in Britain and 798 made in the US. The Hindi-language output of Bollywood, with its bright colours, catchy soundtracks and spectacular dance sequences, is the first – and sometimes only – thing that springs to the outsider’s mind when Indian film is mentioned, but Bollywood only accounts for a small proportion of the country’s films. Tollywood’s output is almost as large and the return for investors on each of its pictures tends to be better.

• The Hindi-language output of Bollywood, with its dance routines and catchy soundtracks, is what many outsiders associate with Indian film. Photograph: DreamPictures/Getty Images

Every film studio is a little like a small town, with multiple catering locations, shops, backlots, transport, workshops and security. Studios need space, which is why many UK studios are built on former manor estates or Ministry of Defence airfields, while some of Hollywood’s biggest studios were based around ranches or large colonial mansions.

But Hyderabad’s Ramoji Film City dwarfs them all. As well as the standard studio facilities, Ramoji also offers permanent sets including a prison, an elaborate hilltop temple, and a village with a town square. In the west, permanent sets are rare nowadays, partly because of the rise in land prices and taxation in cities like Los Angeles, but also because of their poorly disguised overuse in Hollywood films until the 1970s. (Although Ramoji’s one-stop shop model emulates golden age-era Hollywood, Ramoji was only built in 1996, the same year as Hitech City.)

• A view over part of Ramoji Film City – which even has a mock-up of the Hollywood sign atop one of the surrounding hills. Photograph: Ravi Giragani/the Guardian

But size isn’t everything – in today’s fast-moving film industry, the ability to keep up with technical advances is also key. In central Hyderabad, Annapurna Studios, built in 1975 in the Film Nagar neighbourhood (named for its long association with Tollywood), set up a film school nearly eight years ago in order to address a perceived skills shortfall: “The [studio owners] felt that the major lack that the Telugu film industry had in comparison to Hollywood or Bollywood was technical expertise,” says Zaid Ali Khan of the school’s faculty of direction.

This increasing technical competence is part of what has begun to set Tollywood apart in Indian film, exemplified by the two-part blockbuster Baahubali, filmed at Ramoji, where some of the sets remain as a tourist attraction. Baahubali: The Conclusion is the second highest-grossing Indian film in history, and both parts used visual effects (VFX) to an extent and with a complexity not previously seen in Indian film. Although a number of studios were involved, the main players were based in Hyderabad.

• A still from the Tollywood blockbuster Baahubali

Hyderabad, as a magnet for software developers and programmers, has a swiftly growing VFX industry, but on the whole its labs currently deal with less creative and more labour-intensive work outsourced by large western and Chinese companies. Khan says this will change: “We are inculcating VFX artists and VFX supervisors to be on a par with international levels and slowly we’ll see more of work being completely outsourced here. We’re in the transformation stage from being that BT outsource call centre to being the actual customer service.”

The other main reason for Tollywood’s success is linguistic flexibility. In a feat unimaginable in western cinema: Baahubali was filmed in both Telugu and Tamil, then dubbed into both Hindi and Malayalam. The film academic Prof CSHN Murthy says: “The most impressive feature of Telugu cinema is its cross-cultural approach … there is no [other] film industry in India which produces films in other languages.”

• Tourists pose on part of the Baahubali set at Ramoji Film City. Photograph: Ravi Giragani/the Guardian

And this is key, because the domestic market is only one player. Telugu is the third-most spoken language in India, but in the US, the number of US residents speaking Telugu rose by 86% between 2010 and 2017, according to the World Economic Forum. Although the rise is from a relatively low base, last year there were more than 400,000 Telugu speakers in the US. This increase has much to do with Hyderabad and its links to the tech industry, Prasad Kunisetty, founder of the US-based nonprofit Telugu People Foundation, told the BBC in an interview last year.

And as Hyderabad’s IT dominance increases, so too does the number of Telugu, Malayalam and Tamil-speaking workers heading overseas to work for major companies – and their enthusiasm for cinema does not alter with distance. “Today, every filmmaker’s target is diaspora in the US, UK and Europe besides Africa and the Gulf,” explains Murthy. With modern digital distribution methods, this means that more cinemas worldwide are now showing Tollywood’s output, while platforms such as Netflix have massively increased the potential audience.

• Hyderabad old and new: the Charminar, top left, is one of the oldest and most famous monuments in the city, and below a modern replica built as part of Hitech City. Photographs: Tash Reith-Banks

The response to this growth in diaspora audience is increasingly to make films targeted at them. As Murthy points out, Tollywood films are “aimed at satisfying and impressing the diaspora about what they are missing in their native lands. Most of the Telugu films shoot their songs and some sequences in the US or UK or Europe background.”

With wider distribution comes a demand for increasingly sophisticated offerings, acknowledges Khan: “Now when our content is going up on, say, Netflix or Amazon, if quality-wise we’re not at par with international content, an Indian viewer also will not watch what we are putting out. You know he has the option of watching Narcos if our crime series is not popular enough.”

If Ramoji Film City’s studio-based vision seems old-fashioned to the Netflix generation, this does not appear to trouble owner Ramoji Rao. He is also looking to the digital future with a very real news media empire, centred on three working office blocks that sit amid the studio fakery.

There, alongside his newspaper and news TV operations, is a news video app currently in the testing stages. Each Indian state is represented, with its own studio and team of editors and presenters based at Ramoji, while reporters throughout the country send back a stream of national and hyper-local news bulletins. The aim is for any app subscriber to have access to 24-hour news from their home state, in their own language – an ambitious undertaking in a country made up of 29 states with 22 different languages. If the project pays off, it could make Hyderabad not just the film capital of the south, but the media capital of India – and as it takes its place as a megacity, it seems certain to become a serious player on the global stage.

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