NEW YORK - It's still not as ubiquitous as curry and dal, but the Bollywood movie - the staple of Indian pulp entertainment - has been tickling more Western palates than ever before.

        Critical praise for Monsoon Wedding; an Oscar nomination and mild box-office success for the musical Lagaan; and a remake of the classic Devdas - all within a year - have given Hindi-language cinema a new visibility in the West.

        Sniffing an emerging market, even 20th Century Fox is making a Bollywood movie, the first Hindi-language film by a foreign production house. Fox has teamed with director Ram Gopal Varma for Ek Hasina Thi (There Was a Beautiful Girl), a $1.2 million thriller, according to Aditya Shastri, head of Fox's India unit.

        The modest success of some Bollywood movies in the West has “opened up a market for Indian cinema,” says Suri Gopalan, who runs a film distribution company, Cinebella, in Edison, N.J.

        “The audience is still primarily expatriates,” he said, but in Britain, such movies “have a slightly broader following, and in the United States they are beginning to get noticed.”

        Bollywood, which churns out mostly long musicals with thin and often repetitive plots, also has hit the London stage, and its influence can be seen in some recent Hollywood movies.

        “More Americans today have heard the term Bollywood,” said Gitesh Pandya, editor of the New Jersey-based Web site, boxofficeguru.com, who partly credits a growing and more vocal Indian diaspora.

        “It's a combination of various things - the South Asian population is expanding and the newly arrived have a strong attachment” to Indian movies, Mr. Pandya said.

        Compared to the economic migrants in the 1960s and '70s, today's Indian diaspora is better off and more inclined to assert its cultural heritage. Now, an Indian in the United States is as likely to be a doctor or computer engineer as the more traditional immigrant occupations of cabbie or newsstand vendor.

        According to the latest census, Indians are the third largest Asian group in the United States, at 1.9 million, behind the 2.7 million Chinese and 2.4 million Filipinos.

        Bollywood, a term that combines Bombay and Hollywood, is the world's most prolific film industry, making nearly 800 movies a year. They have long been popular across Asia and the Middle East.

        For Western audiences, the recent wave may have begun with Lagaan, a nearly four-hour extravaganza about villagers who seek justice under colonialism by challenging their British masters to a game of cricket. The movie employed the usual “masala” formula - lots of hip-gyrating, a powerful protagonist and a love story. It became the third Indian movie ever nominated for a foreign-film Oscar.

        Soon came a flood of other movies - dramas about Indian families set in London and at home starring Indian heartthrob Shah Rukh Khan; Monsoon Wedding by New York-based Indian director Mira Nair; and Kabhie Khushie Kabhie Gham (Sometimes Happiness, Sometimes Sadness), with screen idol Amitabh Bachchan.

        Devdas, an expensive and tacky rendition of a classic love story, became the first Bollywood film presented in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, in May.

        June saw the London opening of the play Bombay Dreams, which embraces such Bollywood kitsch as dancers in wet saris. Produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber, it features film music of the kind that spills out onto dusty Indian streets from radios hanging from rickshaw handlebars and cigarette kiosks.

        “It's very exciting. This will be an exposure of the big industry that exists in India, of the films we make, of life in India,” said the show's Bombay composer, A.R. Rahman, who has written soundtracks for more than 50 Bollywood movies.

        The movie Agni Varsha, another mega-production, opened in New Jersey, Boston and California last month - about the same time Indian viewers began seeing it.

        Bollywood's mix of melodrama and song-and-dance could be seen in Australian director Baz Luhrmann's big-budget Moulin Rouge last year. In one number, the dancers even wear bindis, the dots on many Indian women's foreheads.

        The smaller indie film Ghost World had Thora Birch's teenage protagonist infatuated with old Indian musicals.

        No Bollywood movie has come close to being a blockbuster on Hollywood's scale. Monsoon Wedding, for instance, among the most successful, has pulled in an estimated $13.7 million over several months.

        But foreign box-office performance carries weight, since audiences in America pay up to $10 for a ticket, compared to an average of one or two dollars in India.

        Komal Nata, editor of the Bombay-based magazine Film Information, estimates that a movie like Kabhie Khushie Kabhie Gham, set in India and London and aimed at overseas screens, grossed as much overseas as at home. Others say Indian movies often chalk up 40 percent of their profits overseas.

        Cheap digital technology has made it easier to produce DVDs and videocassettes to be sold in Indian grocery stores across the United States.

        Mr. Gopalan of Cinebella sees other benefits to the streak of Bollywood success in the West.

        “It gives me hope that Indian producers will pay more attention to stronger narratives and making better movies,” he said.

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