While many of his acting-school classmates dream of Hollywood stardom, Purav Gunderia has set his sights on Bollywood, Mumbai’s multibillion-dollar, Hindi-language movie industry, which is famous for its campy, song-and-dance-filled releases.

“There’s an element of fantasy meets reality in it,” Mr. Gunderia, a student at the New York Film Academy, said of the genre, which has been described as Broadway on film. “It’s very colorful, very vibrant.”

It is also fastidiously choreographed, which is why the Buffalo native thought it best to learn some basic Bollywood moves before heading overseas this fall. Last week, he was among my classmates in choreographer Pooja Narang’s “Beginners Bollywood” dance class. Mr. Gunderia, 23, is an anomaly among Ms. Narang’s students, most of whom come seeking an unconventional workout, not career skills.

Bollywood movies have long inspired dance-fitness courses in India and Britain, but the concept is relatively new in America. In recent years, a bevy of Bollywood-style dance studios have opened up across the country, and exercise DVDs with such names as “The Bollywood Dance Workout,” “Bollywood Burn,” and “Bollyrobics” have hit the market.

In the nearly five years since she founded Bollywood Axion, Ms. Narang, 31, said demand has grown steadily. These days, she and an associate teach between 10 and 15 classes to about 150 students each week. Offerings include three levels of Bollywood dance, as well courses in the classic Indian dances bhangra and garba.

Ms. Narang attributes the heightened interest, in part, to the box-office success of such films as “Monsoon Wedding” (2001) and “Bend It Like Beckham” (2002) — which, while not Bollywood productions, did feature music typical of the genre — and “Bride & Prejudice” (2004), in which a classic Jane Austen story gets the Bollywood treatment.

Bollywood’s chime-heavy music and fanciful moves fuse classical Indian dance with jazz and hop-hop styles, said Ms. Narang, who was born in Canada to Punjabi parents. “It’s all about telling a story through song and dance,” she said. “For the most part, they’re very, very happy stories.”

Once a year, Ms. Narang hosts a recital, at which her students of all levels, from amateur to professional, don colorful costumes and perform in front of friends, family, and invited guests.

During the course of the hour-long “Beginners Bollywood” class, Ms. Narang taught a sequence that included skipping — forward, backward, and to the side — and stomping one foot, while pivoting on the other. Each movement was accompanied by sweeping arm movements, which were the coups de grace for the coordination-challenged, like me.

“I had no problem with the upper-body movements or the lower-body movements, but it’s the combining of them that was challenging,” a Brooklyn-based photographer who took his first Bollywood dance class last week, Jon Anzalone, 25, said. “The instructor made it easier by having us focus on one, and then the other.”

Mr. Anzalone eventually got it down — and so did I.

Synchronized movement to loud Hindi-language music comprises only about half of the class time. For the rest of the hour, students are asked to practice the steps on their own, as Ms. Narang walks around the studio, adjusting students’ form and fielding their questions.

Several days after taking a Bollywood Axion class, I was looking to practice and perfect some of the moves I had learned, so I decided to try “The Bollywood Dance Workout,” an exercise DVD by Hemalayaa Behl.

The exercise video’s soundtrack recalled the dreamlike music Ms. Narang had played, but the fun 45-minute workout featured movements (spins, shimmies, spine stretches) of a more flowing variety — both less precise and less aerobic — than those in my class.

An undergraduate at New York University who took her first class with Ms. Narang about a year ago, Iris Wang, said the dance classes provide a workout that’s much more enjoyable than a gym-based regimen. “Plus, there’s a context for it,” Ms. Wang, 21, a Bollywood film aficionado, said. “You can see the movies; you can rent the videos; you can access another culture.”

gbirkner@nysun.com

Bollywood Axion at Champion Studios, 257 W. 39th St., between Seventh and Eighth avenues, 646-373-2555, 10 hours, $160 and 20 hours, $260. For more information, visit bollywoodaxion.com.