Indian cinema has produced a series of locally developed film genres, most notably the ‘mythological’ and the ‘curry western’. In this paper, I examined films that fall under the sub-genre of the dacoit film, in an effort to fill in a gap in the Indian film history genre development and provide professionals in the field with the necessary information to not only recognize but also make use of recurrent tropes that appear in these films. To do that I selected 11 (eleven) representative dacoit films that cover several decades of Indian film production.  In addition, I conducted a literature review of film genre in Indian film to understand how film genre develops in the Indian film industry and what are the differences in relation to genre theory as developed for the Hollywood film industry. The theoretical framework I used for this study is based upon the work of two film genre analysts, Grant and Altman in addition to various Indian film scholars. In order to understand how genre development takes place for each genre element I applied the thematic analysis methodology to the 11 (eleven) dacoit feature films. My results showed that there are 5 (five) major themes that characterize dacoit films. In addition, overall dacoit films exhibit strong consistency in all the genre elements of the theoretical framework, and they do follow Indian film conventions as well.