1. Mother India (1957) — Nargis's performance as a mother battling poverty and circumstance for her family's survival gave Hindi cinema one of its most enduring emotional templates. It also became one of the first Indian films to earn an Academy Award nomination, putting Bollywood on the global map decades before that was common.

2. Mughal-e-Azam (1960) — A historical romance so lavish it took years to complete, telling the story of Prince Salim and the courtesan Anarkali against the backdrop of Mughal-era politics. Its scale and its music still get referenced as a high-water mark for the genre.

3. Guide (1965) — Adapted from R.K. Narayan's novel, this one took real risks with its story of a tour guide's transformation into an accidental spiritual figure — heavier, stranger territory than most films of its time attempted.

4. Sholay (1975) — Often just called the greatest Indian film ever made. Its blend of western-style action, comedy and friendship — anchored by Jai, Veeru and cinema's most iconic villain, Gabbar Singh — set a template Bollywood is still riffing on fifty years later.

5. Deewaar (1975) — This is the film that turned Amitabh Bachchan into the "angry young man," giving Hindi cinema a new kind of hero — morally conflicted, working-class, furious at a system stacked against him.

6. Anand (1971) — Rajesh Khanna's performance as a terminally ill man who refuses to let his diagnosis define him remains one of the most quietly devastating roles in Bollywood history, built on a philosophy the film never lets you forget: life measured in depth, not length.

7. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) — Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol didn't just headline a hit romance — they reset what on-screen chemistry looked like for a generation, blending tradition and modern longing in a way audiences are still returning to.

8. Lagaan (2001) — A village's cricket match against colonial officers doubles as a story about dignity, class and resistance, and became one of the rare Hindi films to earn a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination.

9. Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) — Anurag Kashyap's sprawling crime saga rewired what a Bollywood gangster film could be — brutal, funny, generational, and completely unconcerned with sanitising its violence for mainstream comfort.

10. Andhadhun (2018) — Proof the template can still be broken. Sriram Raghavan's morally slippery thriller became an instant modern classic for refusing to give audiences a clean, comfortable ending.

From a mother's sacrifice in 1957 to a piano player's moral ambiguity sixty years later, the throughline across all ten is the same: Hindi cinema's biggest legacies were built by films willing to take a real risk with the story they were telling.