Bollywood success story sets British actors on passage to India

British actors and Indian directors are making the most of the west's fascination with Bollywood.

Hindi movies used to be sneered at in the west, even though they attract an annual audience of nearly four billion people - particularly throughout Asia, Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. Elsewhere, the common perception has been that the films are all about men and women prancing around to overwrought music in mustard fields or the middle of waterfalls, with dance sequences full of pelvic thrusts and violently heaving bosoms.

Things in the west started to change with the likes of Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding and Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham. Then, last year, Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas - the most expensive Indian movie ever made - screened at Cannes, and Aamir Khan's Lagaan was nominated for an Oscar in the foreign film category.

That film, starring British actress Rachel Shelly, is set in 1893 and revolves around a group of upstart British soldiers settling their differences with the poor residents of a remote village through a game of cricket.

Following Shelly's lead, Antonia Bernath is now playing the heroine in Kisna, a film set during the British Raj of the 1930s. Bernath stars as the daughter of a ruthless English aristocrat who falls in love with a simple Indian mountain boy, Kisna, after he saves her from a mob.

The fantasy of a young white woman falling for a dark man has always excited Indian audiences and continues to appeal because of an abiding fascination with foreigners, or firangis as they're called. Fair skin is, in fact, a prerequisite even for Indian film stars, given the Indian fixation with light skin. Lighting and cosmetics are routinely used to make Bollywood actors appear paler.