Call it the Slumdog effect, globalisation or a consequence of Bollywood’s new technical sophistication, but after a long on-off courtship the British film industry has finally fallen head over heels in love with India.

The country is suddenly crawling with British film-makers looking for a slice of exhilarating, cost-effective exoticism. According to Tim Bevan, the co-chairman of Working Title, the British film company, India is a film destination whose time has come. “It is the zeitgeist,” he said.

With its historical links to the UK and its irresistible locations, India has long been an alluring prospect for British film-makers. In the early Eighties Britons made two epics (Gandhi and A Passage to India), a Bond film (Octopussy) and two big-budget TV mini-series (The Far Pavilions and Jewel in the Crown) there, but the relationship cooled.

There were sporadic British shoots (The Warrior, A Mighty Heart) but just as Hollywood only ever dropped in occasionally for the temples, the poverty and the elephants (City of Joy and The Bourne Supremacy) the UK industry never put down roots.

Until now. Last year the UK and Indian governments signed a co-production treaty to encourage film-makers from the two countries to work in each other’s backyards (though it currently offers significantly juicier incentives to Indian film-makers hoping to film in the UK than vice versa).

This year the UK Film Council took a delegation of British film-makers to India to develop closer ties to the industry. Then came Slumdog Millionaire. Danny Boyle’s £11 million film about a Mumbai street kid on the verge of winning a fortune on a TV game show scooped eight Oscars and has taken £150 million at the global box office to date.

“It broke the mould,” said David Thompson, who runs his own production house, Origin Pictures. “Its massive international success has indicated that people are more open to stories from other worlds than we might have been led to believe.”

He hopes the Slumdog effect will help him to raise money for projects in South Asia that include a detective series and a film about a crazed elephant. Its greater legacy, though, may be in Boyle’s approach: unlike previous visiting film-makers he used a substantially Indian cast and crew to tell a story from an Indian point of view.

The most ambitious Anglo-Indian project on the horizon is Indian Summer, set against the backdrop of the vast migrations and bloody Hindu-Muslim violence of 1947. It homes in on the love affair that flared between Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first Prime Minister, and Edwina Mountbatten, the glamorous wife of the last British Viceroy, as the soon to be independent country burnt around them.

Bevan expects to make the whole film on location in India. “We will be working with some of the excellent people there that worked with Danny Boyle on Slumdog and we’ve got the resources of Bollywood, the second-largest film industry in the world,” he said.

A passion for India

— Joe Wright, the director of Atonement, is in India now on a month-long trip before he starts filming the Partition drama Indian Summer for Working Title

— Leslee Udwin, the producer of East is East, the hit 1999 comedy about an Anglo-Asian family in Seventies Salford, will be shooting a sequel, West is West, in the Punjab later this year

— Graham Broadbent, the producer of Becoming Jane and In Bruges, is putting together an all-star cast to film Deborah Moggach’s novel These Foolish Things, about a nursing home in Bangalore for retired Britons

— Gurinder Chadha, the director of Bend it Like Beckham, is developing two new projects set in India, while David Thompson, the former head of BBC Films, also has two Indian films in the pipeline

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