August 18, 2007 - An Indian woman in a flow-ing beaded gown glides through a pond. A mosquito net brushes over her lover. And to insistent drumbeats of the Indian heartland, a dancing phalanx of tunic-clad women twirls. These images appear in the trailer of a forthcoming movie, Saawariya.

The melodrama, whose Hindi title means "beloved", has an Indian director and cast. Its characters speak Hindi and burst into eight song-and-dance numbers. It is, in other words, vintage Bollywood - but for one thing. It comes to you courtesy of Hollywood.

The studio behind Saawariya, Sony Pictures Entertainment, is the first in a wave of American studios to produce their own kaleidoscopic Bollywood musicals. The US studios are keen to make money in India, but in a nation where nine out of ten box-office rupees go to indigenous films, the studios are deciding to join Bollywood, not conquer it with their American-made fare.

"The importing of American films into India is not filling a gap," says Gareth Wigan, a vice chairman of Columbia TriStar, the Sony division that produced the film. "You're not bringing a dish to a bare table. You're bringing a dish to a crowded table where you have to move a lot of other dishes to fit it in, and that's not true in a lot of other countries."

And so begins a strange competition to make the best Bollywood film, pitting Hollywood against India's own studios, which make more movies and sell more tickets than any film industry in the world. With international revenues increasingly important to the conglomerates that own the major studios, Hollywood wants to tap into India's market. But indigenous films captured 95 per cent of Indian box office sales in 2006, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. The figure is identical for domestic pictures in the United States, but just 35 per cent in France, 33 per cent in Japan and 12 per cent in Britain, according to 2005 data published by two scholars, David Waterman and Sang-Woo Lee.

"There is no country on the planet, other than India and the United States, that approaches that level of domestic business," says Andrew Cripps, the president of Paramount Pictures International. And so Paramount, too, is contemplating Bollywood productions.

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