The Indian filmmaker Shyam Benegal, who has died aged 90, was a pillar of the Parallel Cinema, the informal grouping of independently minded and funded creatives whose work stood in stark, socially committed contrast to the song-and-dance escapism of Bollywood. Responding to real events and centred on marginalised protagonists (often women), Benegal’s breakthrough films of the 1970s rejected the cosmetic, crowdpleasing approach of the Hindi mainstream. Yet they found an appreciative audience both at home and abroad, helping to make household names of such performers as Shabana Azmi, Om Puri and Naseeruddin Shah.Benegal’s influences were wide-ranging. His worldview and technique were shaped as much by Soviet trailblazers Eisenstein and Pudovkin as by domestic great Satyajit Ray, whom Benegal interviewed for a 1984 documentary. But they were also heavily informed by Benegal’s decade-long apprenticeship making industrial and public information films, fashioned on such diverse topics as steel production, epilepsy, raga music and the artificial insemination of cattle. These shorts gave Benegal a sense of the issues affecting the India beyond Bombay; as he later told one reporter, “I film to report on changes in the world around us.”
His feature debut Ankur/The Seedling (1974) formed a statement of intent. Made after the dire failure of the 1971/72 harvests, and privately funded by the advertising company Blaze, it used the framework of a caste-blighted romance to paint a sorry picture of an India that was still some measure from modernisation. If the rural setting wasn’t especially new – Ray, after all, had been there – the stinging social critique was. “I have always felt that the Indian countryside was never really represented properly on the Indian screen,” Benegal later reflected. “But if you really wanted to understand the Indian psyche, you needed to look at rural India.”
Absorbing yet rigorous, the film hit a nerve, turning a healthy profit upon its initial run and being selected to compete at the Berlin film festival. Benegal followed it with two further films that – together with Ankur – became known as his Uprising trilogy, united by their agrarian settings and unsparing gaze. Nishant/Night’s End (1975), a taut crime drama about a woman’s abduction at the behest of a landowner, played in competition at Cannes the following year; Manthan/The Churning (1976) dramatised the White Revolution led by Verghese Kurien, an engineer who oversaw the formation of dairy farmers’ co-operatives in remote communities.
When the Parallel Cinema came under threat from TV in the late 1970s, Benegal shifted closer to the movie centre. Bhumika/The Role (1977) was a spiky, unromanticised riff on the life of Hansa Wadkar, a star of the 1940s, but smartly constructed vehicles for producer-star Shashi Kapoor – period drama Junoon (1979) and thriller Kalyug (1981) – flopped commercially. (Kapoor had been told Benegal was “to be admired, not hired”.) “When you make a film that contests a whole value system, obviously you shouldn’t expect that to be exceedingly popular,” Benegal told the BBC in 2006. “These are some of the things you keep grappling with.”
Shyam Sunder Benegal was born in 1934 to a Hyderabad family with strong visual connections: his father Sridhar was a stills photographer, while the writer-director Guru Dutt was a second cousin. He made his first amateur film aged twelve and founded the Hyderabad Film Club while studying economics at Osmania University. Upon graduating, he moved to Bombay, where he was hired as a copywriter at the Lintas ad agency; on his way to becoming creative head, he made some 900 adverts and eleven corporate films. His first professional credit came with the short Gher Betha Ganga/Ganges on the Doorstep (1962).
After his initial breakthrough, Benegal served as a director of the National Film Development Corporation, even as he pivoted into TV with Yatra (1986) and the staggeringly ambitious Nehru adaptation Bharat Ek Khoj/The Discovery of India (1988-89), compressing 5,000 years of history into 53 episodes. In the wake of the 1992-93 riots, however, Benegal returned to the cinema, initiating a trilogy of films with the screenwriter Khalid Mohamed – Mammo (1994), Sardari Begum (1996) and Zubeidaa (2001) – which centred on the lives of Muslim women. In 2005, Benegal received the Dadasaheb Phalke award, India’s highest film honour.
In later life, Benegal moved into politics, serving in the Rajya Sabha between 2006 and 2012. His creative endeavours took a parallel turn towards the statesmanlike: to a 1984 documentary on Nehru, a longstanding personal hero, Benegal added the biopic Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero (2005) and the TV miniseries Samvidhaan: The Making of the Constitution of India (2014), featuring appearances from Gandhi, Jinnah and B.R. Ambedkar among others. His final credit, Mujib: The Making of a Nation (2023), paid dogged tribute to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, founding father of Bangladesh.
Though several of his key films fell subject to the vagaries of Indian film preservation, Benegal lived long enough to witness Manthan screen in Cannes’ Classics sidebar in 2024. By then, India was facing a new wave of struggles, about which Benegal remained characteristically sanguine: “I consider myself a realist, neither optimistic nor pessimistic, because there is society and individuals, and society and individuals are not always the same thing… The ideal of men has always been to cancel out this imbalance. [But] it is not only about changing society, it is also about changing man. These two things are sometimes incompatible.”
He is survived by a spouse, Nira Mukerji Benegal, and a daughter, the costume designer Pia Benegal.
Shyam Benegal, filmmaker, born December 14 1934; died December 23 2024.
