Shyam Benegal passes away at 90: An iconoclastic filmmaker who pioneered Indian Parallel Cinema movement

Working on two to three movies despite undergoing dialysis at the age of 90 years, and going to the hospital about three times a week — such was the dedication of veteran filmmaker Shyam Benegal.

Benegal passed away at 6:30 pm on Monday, December 23. The director, who celebrated his 90th birthday last week, breathed his last at the Wockhardt Hospital in Mumbai due to kidney ailments.

Known for his ‘un-Indian’ approach, Shyam Benegal’s directorials offered a social commentary on the Indian society. An iconoclast, Benegal was a pioneer in the Indian parallel cinema movement of the 1970s and 1980s, along with Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and others. 

Born in 1934 in Andhra Pradesh, Shyam Benegal worked in the advertising industry, producing over 900 advertisements, before transitioning into film-making. Shyam Benegal’s last film was the 2023 biographical Mujib: The Making of a Nation.

Shyam Benegal and Indian Parallel Cinema

During its early years, Indian Parallel Cinema had limited commercial success. However, it was Shyam Benegal’s films, particularly his 1970s uprising trilogy—’Ankur’ (1974), ‘Nishant’ (1975), and ‘The Churning’ (1976)—that broke through to cinema audiences. 

Shyam Benegal’s work continues to be scrutinised for what came to be known as ‘middle cinema’ — which film critics often see as a ‘compromise’ between mainstream and alternative filmmaking. 

For many years, Benegal’s films were linked to stark depictions of Indian realities, often featuring recurring characters seen in many works associated with the New Indian Cinema: the oppressive landlord, the corrupt official, the hypocritical politician, the subjugated tribal woman, and the struggling villager.

In more recent years, Benegal engaged deeply with questions of narrative structure. In Suraj Ka Satvan Gora (The Seventh Horse of the Sun, 1993), the same story is told from multiple perspectives, with each narrative containing further stories, echoing the structure of the Mahabharata. A similar experiment in narration appears, though less successfully, in ‘Sardari Begum’ (1996), which is often described as a fictional exploration of the life of the renowned vocalist Begum Akhtar.

Shyam Benegal’s awards 

Shyam Benegal was honoured by the Government of India with the Padma Shri in 1976 and the Padma Bhushan in 1991. Some of his other successful films include ‘Manthan’ and ‘Zubeidaa’.