About India Masala
India Masala answers one question: where can I watch this film, in my language, in my country? Indian cinema is made in more than twenty languages and watched on every continent, and the big streaming guides treat it as a footnote to Hollywood. A Malayalam film might be on a service most people have never heard of. A Tamil film on Netflix might play in a Hindi dub by default. Nobody was keeping track. So we do.
Who makes it
India Masala is an independent site, built and run by Mohan Iyer, a software engineer and lifelong watcher of Indian films who got tired of opening six apps to find one movie. It is not owned by a studio, a streaming service, or a media company, and it takes no money from any of them to list or rank a film. The catalogue lists what is available, not what anyone paid to promote.
Questions, corrections, and press enquiries go to rasa@indiamasala.com or through the contact page.
What is in the catalogue
Right now: 47,924 films across 20 Indian languages, with streaming availability tracked on 74 services. Of those films, 22,489 can be pointed to at least one service somewhere in the world today, and 14,207 carry an audio language confirmed by the platform itself rather than guessed.
The spine of the catalogue — titles, years, languages, cast and crew — comes from Wikidata, which is public-domain data maintained by volunteers. That is why a 1962 Odia film with no Wikipedia article in English still has a page here. It is also why some pages are thin: if the world has not written the film down, neither have we, and we say so on the page rather than padding it.
Where the availability data comes from
Our own crawls
For the services that matter most to Indian cinema — ZEE5, Sun NXT, Eros Now, ManoramaMAX, Simply South, aha, ShemarooMe, and others — we read each service’s own catalogue on a schedule and record what it lists. When you see “confirmed” next to an audio language, it means the platform itself said so.
A licensed aggregator for the global services
Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV, and the other worldwide platforms are covered through a licensed availability feed. These rows are accurate about whether a film is on a service, and often silent about which language it plays in.
Inference, labelled as inference
When a service lists a Tamil film but does not say which audio tracks it carries, we infer the original language is available and mark it “inferred”. An inferred row is a good guess, not a fact, and the label is there so you can tell the difference before you press play.
People who watched it
Visitors can tell us a film has appeared somewhere we missed, or that a language or year is wrong. Nothing a visitor submits changes the catalogue on its own; a person reads every report before it is applied.
How the writing is done
Film synopses are drafted by a language model from sources we cite, then checked for the facts that can be checked: title, year, language, director. Every model-written synopsis records which model wrote it and when. Editorial pieces — what is worth watching, where a filmmaker’s work is streaming, how to find a film in your language — are written and signed by a person. We do not publish reviews, ratings, or comments attributed to people who did not write them, and we never will: that is the one shortcut that would end the site’s reason to exist.
Critic reviews, where shown, are a headline, a score, and a link to the outlet that wrote them. We do not reproduce review text.
Write for us
The catalogue covers more languages than one person can know well. If you know Odia cinema, or Marathi cinema of the seventies, or exactly which Kannada films are worth a stranger’s evening, we would like you to write here. Details on the Write for India Masala page.
What we do not do
We do not host or stream films. Every “Watch” link goes to the service that holds the rights. We do not rank films by a score we invented, and there is no “top rated” list here because there are no ratings to build one from yet. We do not cover gossip, box office, or cricket. And we do not need you to sign up for anything: the whole catalogue works without an account.
Corrections
Availability changes daily and a lot of it is inferred. If a film is listed somewhere it is not, or missing from somewhere it is, the fastest fix is the “Seen it somewhere we’re missing?” pill on the film’s page, or a note through the contact page. We would rather be corrected than confident.