This, apparently, is to be the Summer of Bollywood. The spectacular and wonderful products of the vast Bombay film industry, which had always enjoyed considerable audiences among Asian English audiences, show signs of breaking out and enjoying more general appeal. Andrew Lloyd Webber is promoting a new musical by AR Rahman and Meera Syal, Bombay Dreams, and the V&A is mounting a very promising-sounding exhibition of Bollywood promotional art.

Personally, I'm greatly looking forward to all this in rather a guilty way. Indian friends get extremely cross when Europeans go on about how marvellous Bollywood movies are, and probably rightly so. You can bet that when the colour magazines praise Indian cinema now, they aren't thinking for one moment about the Calcutta cinema which takes Satyajit Ray as its master. We see little of that moral seriousness here, since it's much easier to patronise. Earlier this year, we were even subjected to the undignified spectacle of Mira Nair's excellent Monsoon Wedding being marketed as a "Bollywood" movie, which I suspect is a label its thoughtful director would prefer to refuse.

All the same, I have to admit being completely mad about the Bombay cinema, and dash to anything at all, so long as it has seven song-and-dance numbers, lasts the whole afternoon and stars the wonderful Hrithik Roshan taking his shirt off. Bollywood is one of the great pleasures of India. Here is a country which has proved almost completely resistant to American movies, and it has a film-going culture which is wonderfully self-absorbed. Added to the huge, peanut-throwing enjoyment of an afternoon at the flicks in Calcutta, there are the hand-painted posters everywhere, the souvenir shopping bags of the latest hit, and, best of all, the fan magazines. To open Stardust is to be transported back to the early days of Hollywood; endless interviews with one impossibly glamorous star after another, coyly revealing intimate "secrets" and viciously slagging each other off. They are a constant joy.

At this point, serious-minded Indian readers will be getting rather annoyed, and certainly, I don't think I've ever quite brought myself to admit to any Indian friends quite how much I like even very routine Bollywood films. To most educated Indians, it is mildly offensive to hear an Englishman saying how much he enjoys the Indian cinema, meaning not Pather Panchali or Mother India or any of the great classics, but a piece of froth like Chore Chore Chupke Chupke. It would be rather like being told by a foreigner that his great love for English film-making rested on that great classic, Carry On Camping.

But there is definitely a place for the Bollywood spectacular, and I think one's taste for them is not entirely a camp taste, or a patronising one. Quite simply, they are often extremely good films. The reason that they appear rather naive and conventional to a Western viewer is that they are interested in quite different things from Western films. A European or an American film will expend a great deal of effort in inventing a surprising and an intricate plot; they will try to explore the psychology of the characters and expose ambiguity of motive; everything else is secondary.

The characteristic Bollywood movie, reduced to Western terms of plot and character, does seem rather naive. There is a good guy, who has the virtue, and a bad guy, who has the money; the bad guy tempts the girl, and misunderstandings arise, but it all gets sorted out in the end. But the films absolutely aren't naive or unsubtle; if the plots and characters are completely conventional, that is because the film-makers are concerned to be original and inventive in other directions.

Take a film like Lagaan. On the surface, it sounds absurd; in 1893 a villager, played by Aamir Khan, challenges the British governor to a game of cricket. If the British win, the villagers' taxes will be tripled; if they win, they pay no taxes for three years. Of course, the governor's sister falls in love with our hero, but he wins the match, goes off with the nice girl next door and all is well.

The heart of the film is not in the story, but in the dazzling inventiveness of the music, the dance, and the extraordinary clashes of acting styles. Some of the acting is near to naturalism; other players, like the village guru or, very brilliantly, the British governor, adopt a very formal style of eye-waggling and eyebrow-movement not far from the art of kathakali. The dances are stupendously resourceful, beyond anything Hollywood has ever achieved, and give the film a depth of psychology and feeling you wouldn't be able to predict from a summary of the plot. It is all in the incidentals; the dance, the song, the imagery, and the heart-soaring score by AR Rahman. Except that, of course, from an Indian viewpoint, they are not incidentals at all; they are the fundamentals.

One day, Bollywood may take the world by storm; it certainly does things which Hollywood has never attempted. There are many other things in Indian cinema, and perhaps better things; but there is one thing no viewer of a film like Lagaan should doubt. This is not a film, or an industry, we are in any position to patronise.

p.hensher@independent.co.uk