The past decade has been a rich one for Indian science fiction, both economically and in terms of production. Big budget Indian productions, such as Koi … mil Gaya (I … Found Someone, dir. Rakesh Roshan, 2003), its sequel Krissh (dir. Rakesh Roshan, 2006), Love Story 2050 (dir. Harry Baweja, 2008), and Krissh 3 (dir. Rakesh Roshan, 2013), demonstrate that science fiction has become a major box-office draw in India and its diaspora as it has been among international audiences elsewhere. Both domestic and overseas gross box office takings from these films have subsequently been in the tens of millions of US dollars.

However, science fiction, let alone science fiction cinema, is not new in India. The earliest science fiction story to have been published in the subcontinent appears to have been the Bengali author Hemlal Dutta's 1882 tale of an automated house entitled Rahashya (The Mystery). The history of Indian science fiction cinema itself goes as far back as 1952, with the release of the Tamil-American coproduction Kaadu (The Jungle, dir. William Berke), in which researchers find that woolly mammoths are not in fact extinct. Although Swalaripi Nandi claims that Koi … Mil Gaya ‘introduce[d] images of spaceship and alien for the first time on a Bollywood screen’ (81), the first Indian film to involve an alien's visit to Earth was in fact Kalai Arasi (Queen of Arts, dir. A. Kasilingam, 1960), a comedy in which aliens arrive in search of inspiration for their performing arts, which they find in the form of Vani, a village girl with a talent for classical Indian-cinematic song and dance. The aliens in Kalai Arasi view several different culturally specific examples of singing and dancing, rejecting them all before they finally settle on the Indian tradition. This prefigures an interesting development in Indian science fiction whereby nationalist and religious sentiment dominates much of the filmic discourse.

The first Tamil film of any genre to cost more than Rs. 1 crore (10 million rupees) was the techno-thriller/Indiana Jonesesque Vikram (dir. Rajasekhar, 1986). It is interesting to note that Tamil cinema—known as ‘Kollywood,’ as distinct from the Hindi-language ‘Bollywood’ cinema— was also an early pioneer of science fiction, and continues to be a major power in Indian science fiction film.