A Junoon without parallel: Shyam Benegal sowed new cinema in Ankur, rediscovered Bharat | India News

Shyam Benegal came out of nowhere and lit up the Hindi film scene in the 1970s, at a time when the industry was “an absolutely closed shop”, as a close associate recalled. It was the age of melodrama and action – ‘Roti Kapda Aur Makaan’ and ‘Sholay’ were big hits – and each release featured a star cast. “There was absolutely no way for a young filmmaker to get involved in it,” said Girish Karnad, then director of the Film and Television Institute of India.
Benegal’s neorealism resonated with a generation interested in films that reflected the social and political tensions of their time. His debut film Ankur (The Seedling), a story of sexual exploitation in a feudal setting with a cast of unknown but captivating newcomers, ran for 25 weeks at the famous Eros Theater in Bombay. He had started writing the script for Ankur while studying in Hyderabad and spent 20 years looking for a financier before a commercial film distributor agreed to produce the script. Its success opened new territory for the “art/parallel cinema” movement, which over time gave birth to new talents such as Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil, Om Puri, Govind Nihalani, Vijay Tendulkar and Vanraj Bhatia.
Benegal, who was a pioneer Parallel cinema in India and created the 53-episode series Bharat Ek Khoj. His last project was a 2023 biopic on Mujibur Rahman – Mujib: The Making Of A Nation. He died a few days after turning 90 on December 14 in a hospital in Mumbai.

Shyam Benegal grew up in a cantonment town near Hyderabad in the 1930s and 1940s, where his father, a professional still photographer, introduced him to the camera. The passion for films began at an early age, his appetite whetted by films from Hollywood and India that were shown at a local hall to test the morale of the troops. “There used to be two program changes a week,” he once recalled. “…like at Cinema Paradiso, I made friends with the projectionist so I could see both…”
After his training, he changed his location and started working as a copywriter at Lintas in Mumbai. The next decade and a half was spent on an enormous number of commercials and documentaries. Traces of the social concerns underlying his cinema are clearly visible in the short films he made, including the earliest, such as “A Child of the Street,” which took a compassionate look at youthful vagrancy, and “Close to Nature”, a colorful take on tribal life in Madhya Pradesh.
His work as a teacher at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) brought him closer to celluloid. But his dark stories still didn’t resonate with financiers. Lalit Bijlani from Blaze Advertising finally stepped in. Both Ankur and Nishant, which came a year later, were located in the feudal territories of Telangana, a region under the rule of the Nizam. It was a world that Benegal had seen up close in his formative years. The stories and characters that are considered his most striking works are set in a rural milieu with a distinctive dialect and the class-caste equations that come with it. The two films, made at the time of the Emergency, sparked a movement of sorts and cemented his reputation as the high priest of the New Wave.
Benegal’s diverse interests were reflected in the variety of topics. From Gujarat’s dairy cooperatives (Manthan) to the life of a silent-era actress (Bhumika), from 1857 (Junoon) to feuding business families (Kalyug), his projects spanned time periods and themes. A bearded Renaissance figure at the center of the “art film” scene, he was a mentor to actors, musicians, writers and technicians alike. At a felicitation to celebrate Benegal’s 25 years as a filmmaker, actor-playwright Girish Karnad spoke of his innate ability to help artists realize their potential. “He was not only a director but also a doctor, psychiatrist, father figure and banker,” Karnad said.
The latter part of Benegal’s career was marked by biopics, including one about Gandhi’s years in South Africa and a tetralogy about Muslim women (Mammo, Sardari Begum, Hari-Bhari and Zubeidaa). By this point, the “art film” movement had dissipated. He had turned to a new group of collaborators, many from commercial cinema. However, his outstanding work during this period was a part elegiac, part whimsical take on a novel by Dharamvir Bharti, Suraj Ka Saatvan Ghoda. Occasional forays into television also made for interesting viewing: Bharat Ek Khoj, the mega-series based on Jawaharlal Nehru’s discovery of India, and Samvidhaan, about the making of the Indian constitution, were the best examples.
Benegal’s influence on the Indian film industry went far beyond his own work. He led a government committee set up in 2016 to streamline the film certification process and establish a framework that provides more space for artistic expression.