In that last light of day before it is all gone and the crickets have begun calling, a man hurries through paddy fields swollen with the rain that has fallen all day to a hovel that stands across his sturdy home, the lantern in his hand casting a luminous, almost painterly glow in the darkness.

Inside the hovel, in the somewhat brighter light of the stove in the enclosed space, he deflates a bit, as if his eagerness has been caught out. “Who will make the tea?” he asks, looking suddenly embarrassed at the banality of his words.

“Who will cook the food? The upkeep of the house — who will do that? Come to work from tomorrow,” he says. And the young woman he addresses can’t help smiling at the man’s artless plea.

Anant Nag, who plays the impulsive young man, is the son of the big landlord in the village and mostly called sarkar (master) for the duration of his screen time here.

It is one of Nag’s first films; he also debuted in a Kannada film called Sankalpa made around the same time. He worked on the stage before this. The young woman he hurries to, Lakshmi, is played by a debutante Shabana Azmi.

The year is 1974. It is Shyam Benegal’s debut feature Ankur, based on a newspaper report that Benegal had read about the Telangana Movement of 1946-1951, in which peasants resisted the feudal extortion of landlords who owned obscenely large tracts of land.

The landlord’s young son reluctantly returns from the city — with a third-class degree — and is put to work looking after the estate by his domineering father.

Sarkar drives a motorcar through the unpaved muddy roads of the estate and a tyre comes badly stuck in the mud. He listens to songs from the cinema on his Long Play (LP). The young man is remoulded a little by the changes he has seen in the city: he does not believe in caste he says, although we shall see that this is not as true as he thinks it is.

But he does make it a point to ask Lakshmi, the lower caste woman who serves him, to cook for him, eschewing the village priest’s offer to send him meals from his home. He is attracted to Lakshmi and enters into a relationship with her that cannot be called consensual, but he speaks with her with kindness.

Her husband Kishtaiyya is a deaf-mute potter who has taken to drink, and sarkar assures her that he will take care of her. But he panics when he learns Lakshmi is pregnant with his child. The city-educated landlord wants to be different from his father but finds himself unable to be the man he thought he was, the old ways sucking him in like the slush on the ground slipping, tripping, tricking his beautiful motorcar.

When his father, “the barray sarkar”, orders his young daughter-in-law to start living with the son, he abandons Lakshmi, pregnant with his child, and without a source of income.

The young man’s guilt finds an outlet in Lakshmi’s deaf-mute husband Kishtaiyya: at the film’s close, when he approaches the “sarkar” for a job, delighted that his Lakshmi will be a mother, the sarkar whips him. My reading is that Kishtaiyya is well aware that he is unable to father a child.

The landlord’s anger precipitates a sort of collective breaking point for the village, too. Lakshmi vents, finally, cursing her lover. A small gathering of residents collects to help the couple away. And a young boy flings a stone at a window in the chhotay sarkar’s home.

Change is afoot, the malignance of the old feudal ways is more palpable (and ugly) than ever in the democratic light of the long 20th century, and the sense that something is shifting is unmistakable.

I see the motif of the young man’s desire to be different again and again in the film, including the gorgeous scene where Nag hurries out with the lantern, luminous against the inky black evening. A young landlord tells his lower-caste “servant” that he needs her help; it is an entreaty rather than an instruction, isn’t it?

Or is it the animal gleam of lust that the lantern embodies, sexual desire animating the young man to act impulsively against the grain of everything the monumental patriarchal feudalism of South Asia has shaped him into?

Towards the end of this sequence, a snatch of flame in the “servant’s” hut is visible across the glow of the lantern — two bodies drawn to each other by the heat of desire.

Or is it, simply, the beauty of the image that pulls me — an orb of light darting in the fast-falling night towards a flickering flame, illuminating in its wake the outline of a figure in white kurta pyjama. There is a painterly quality to the way the light has been captured in the sequence, bringing to mind that luminous Diwali greeting image (happily) over-shared in our smartphone era — S.L. Haldankar’s painting titled “the woman with the lamp.”

The next year, in Sholay’s quietest and perhaps most critically admired sequence, the white-clad Jaya Bhaduri dims one lantern after another in a cavernous old house while Amitabh plays a melancholic tune on his harmonica in the growing gloom of dusk.

The dying of each lamp pushes her face deeper in darkness. The last lantern that Bhaduri carries to her bedroom is extinguished after she lays down on the bed. I find it the opposite of the sequence in Ankur — the extinguishing of desire of a still very young woman, imprisoned in widowhood.

An Indian new wave

Ankur is regarded as a landmark film in what is known as the Indian New Wave movement dated to the ’70s — the coming together of film professionals trained in the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, and a distinctly non-mainstream aesthetic of filmmaking.

What does non-mainstream mean? The prominent use of actors who are not “stars”, for one. Smaller budgets that did not rely on established producers; rather this crop of films frequently utilised the funds available from the state, typically National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), raised money from unconventional sources such as donations from milk cooperatives, as Benegal did for Manthan.

Then, the use of new patterns of editing, shot-taking and sound design, including natural sound. Shooting in real-world locations rather than on studio sets. And not least, told stories of the lived realities of people — the stories of a society still steeped in feudalism and caste and pre-modern modes of livelihood, yanked into modernity through a violent colonial experience and an equally violent post-colonial state.

When does a set of experimental projects become a movement? My answer is when there is momentum. Stories about contemporary social crises had been made sporadically in the ‘40s and ‘50s, largely the work of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) members, such as Khwaja Ahmad Abbas (Raj Kapoor’s screenwriter), the writer-director Bimal Roy, the playwright and writer Bijon Bhattacharya.

But the 1970s saw a certain regularity of such films, likely because there was now a pipeline of film professionals produced by a prestigious institute. Additionally, there was the adoption of a new film idiom at this time — IPTA filmmakers, for instance, shot song and dance in the conventional manner, with actors lip-syncing. The New Wave eschewed this.

A more close-to-the-ground approach to storytelling, however, does not necessarily mean serious, or even true to life. Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome (1969), a delightful May-December rom-com about a self-important bureaucrat’s (Utpal Dutt) infatuation with a charming young village “belle”, is often named as the first film in the Indian New Wave movement.

It employs many inventive, winking little touches, such as the animated piles of files that grow by the second in a pompous bureaucrat’s office, the pens that start writing in the files by themselves, the telephone that starts echoing ominously and is answered by multiples echoes of said stuffed bureaucrat’s voice.

Then there are delicious touches of sound design — the most charming being the delicious tingling of ankle bells accompanying an elegant, long-legged bird’s walk. Not to mention, a superb use of voiceover with the voice that would become iconic to Hindi cinema — Amitabh Bachchan, offering a terrific tongue-in-cheek account of said high-handed babu, “who had never allowed his wife a moment of peace in their 25 years of married life”.

The New Wave does not disdain song-and-dance either, but it moves away from the conventional lip-syncing of songs for less literal depictions. And the use of non-stars does not mean that the Indian New Wave cinema lacked in star power — indeed, it developed its own set of stars.

In an essay titled ‘An India New Wave’ in the collection, Our Films, Their Films, the filmmaker and writer Satyajit Ray wrote, “A star is a person on the screen who continues to be expressive and interesting even after he or she has stopped doing anything.

This definition does not exclude the rare and lucky breed that gets five or ten lakhs of rupees per film; and it includes anyone who keeps his calm before the camera, projects a personality and evokes empathy. This is a rare breed too, but one has met it in our films. Suhasini Mulay of Bhuvan Shome is such a star; so is Dhritiman Chatterjee of Pratidwandi; so are the two girls of Uski Roti.“

Arguably, Benegal has bequeathed Hindi cinema the largest number of such stars, “stars” who were known most of all for their acting chops, stars who were not defined by looks (or mannerisms) that befit matinee idols. Which is not to say they were not attractive, or to suggest that mainstream Hindi film actors were not good actors. But this cohort, the class of Benegal so to speak, came trained in performing, aided by the setting up of acting programmes in the National School of Drama and the FTII.

Who comprised the cohort of Benegal? Off the top off my head — Azmi, Smita Patil, Naseeruddin Shah, Amrish Puri, Om Puri, Mohan Agashe, Dina Pathak and Kulbhushan Kharbanda, to name an incomplete list.

Hasn’t each of these gone on to produce incandescent performances in Bollywood too? If you can imagine Bollywood without Smita Patil, then you are thinking of a firmament where Bachchan and Smita set Bombay aflame on a night that pours (’Aaj rapat jaaye tau humain naa uthaiyo’). If you can think of Bollywood without Azmi, then you are thinking of a world without the madcap joy of Amar Akbar Anthony.

And Naseeruddin and Amrish Puri? Imagine passing through this life without having those eyes burning themselves onto our memories? Or, living a few centimetres away from our skin, some inches removed from our hearts. Ankur is Azmi’s first full-fledged film performance, a complex, central role of a young woman who gives in to desire knowing well the devastating consequences it may have.

I say full-fledged because, as a graduate of FTII, she must have performed for student graduation projects. Even in a career as rich as hers, it is hard to think of a performance as controlled and bursting with life as this.

Shining with love, overflowing with loneliness, still and quiet as a stone. A dam swelling threateningly close to danger point. She is Lakshmi, an untouchable agricultural worker married to a mute drunk whom she mothers like her child, in love with the charismatic, handsome young landlord who treats her with dignity and desire before slipping back into the sludge of centuries-old feudal habits.

A husband like a child and love in other places is a situation that is not unfamiliar to women in the Subcontinent. Many stories have mined the emotional vulnerability of this situation. Azmi plays Lakshmi without a milligram of self-pity, with the accumulated wisdom of centuries of knowing her place in this feudal world and the management of the attendant macro- and micro-humiliations that come with it.

Remarkably, there is no knowingness in her Lakshmi — the sense of cynicism or scorn that comes from knowing disappointment well — but an openness to life and the little pleasures it has to offer. She’ll take her chances with what she wants, because her heart has learned how to field everything this life has thrown at her. At the end, when Lakshmi finally vents her anger, you feel the pressure of the dam wall giving away.

Azmi would go on to do seven feature films with Benegal — these include his most celebrated works such as Nishant, Mandi and Junoon (aside from Ankur), and build a formidable career that enjoyed a good number of mainstream releases.

But it wasn’t only such actors that Benegal bequeathed to mainstream Hindi cinema. His legacy is also the outstanding non-acting professionals he introduced. Ankur marks the second film (going by IMDb) of cinematographer and director Govind Nihalani, writer Satyadev Dubey, and the debut of composer Vanraj Bhatia — collaborators he would work with throughout his career, whose work was frequently commissioned by Bollywood.

Other frequent collaborators were the screenwriter Shama Zaidi (who has written iconic films like Garm Hava and Umrao Jaan) and the cinematographer Ashok Mehta, who like Azmi went on to be successful in the mainstream industry as well. But Mehta has done some of his best work for Benegal. Nihalani chose to be more selective with his mainstream commissions.

Then again, think of the lamp extinguishing sequence in Sholay. Once you have seen Ankur, it’s hard not to think of Nihalani. Sholay released in 1975.

Benegal was a force of nature, but it was also a terrific, rich season of cinema. Graduating batches from the two institutes, particularly the FTII, facilitated a pipeline of superb fresh film talent. Directors like Kundan Shah, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Ketan Mehta and Saeed Akhtar Mirza were all FTII graduates, although Benegal himself was not.

Each of these directors has made unforgettable films — Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron (Shah, 1983), Mirch Masala (Mehta, 1987), Khamosh (1986) to name one of Vinod Chopra’s before he branched into more mainstream work and Albert Pinto ko Ghussa Kyun Aata Hai (Mirza, 1980). But no one has worked as prolifically and as firmly in the new wave idiom as Benegal has. In this sense, it is truly he who is the father, or shall we say anchor, of the Indian New Wave movement.

The purple patch

Ankur marked the start of a terrifically fertile decade and a half of filmmaking by Benegal. Nishant followed in 1975, Naseeruddin’s screen debut (he had appeared in a non-speaking role in Aman), Charandas Chor also in 1975, Manthan in 1976, Bhumika in 1977, the Telugu language film Kondura (Anugraham in Hindi) in 1978, Junoon in 1979, Kalyug in 1981, Mandi and Arohan both in 1983, Trikal in 1985, Susman in 1987 and three major TV serials in the late ’80s, including the sprawling 53-episode Bharat Ek Khoj series based on The Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru.

In fact, Benegal averaged his amazing pace of one project per year and a half until the mid-1990s, including ambitious films like The Making of the Mahatma and the delightful Mammo.

But it was in the ’70s and early ‘80s that Benegal made the films he is known for: Nishant and Manthan complete his trilogy of rural change, Bhumika is a superb complex biopic on the Marathi screen legend Hansa Wadkar, Junoon (based on Ruskin Bond’s novel A Flight of Pigeons) is celebrated for being one of the first films to seriously depict the chapter of the revolt of 1857, Kalyug is a contemporary imagining of the Mahabharata and Mandi is an outrageously funny social satire.

These are ambitious projects, taking on the prospect of telling complex and prominent stories of India — the revolt of 1857, the epic Mahabharata, the 20th-century stirrings in India’s deeply feudal heart (the rural change trilogy), a series based on Nehru’s best-known book.

As socially committed and idealistic as Benegal is, he also has a zany sense of fun. He injects humour in unexpected places, suggesting that life itself is unexpected and funny, and even the hardest, most deprived lives are not bereft of the possibility of lightness and laughs.

The Indian Hindi new wave

The year 1969 is marked as the start of the Indian New Wave: aside from Bhuvan Shome, there was Uski Roti by Mani Kaul, a director who trained in the FTII. Kaul made a handful of features, including Duvidha which was reworked as Paheli with Shah Rukh Khan, and several documentaries after this. Mrinal Sen had made several films before Bhuvan Shome.

Why 1969? In part, because the term French New Wave, associated with Francois Truffaut, Jean Luc-Godard, Alain Resnais, Claude Chabrol and Louis Malle had gathered currency in the 1960s. The mark of some of their influential experiments — jerky, swift edit patterns from Godard’s Breathless for instance, the choice of prickly, not entirely likeable protagonists — is evident in the Indian New Wave.

We see this in Bhuvan Shome, where the titular character is a pompous clown. The heroine, Gauri, is a delicious charmer who believes bribes are a matter of right for salaried employees. Benegal’s filmography is full of wonderfully complex protagonists — not just Azmi in Ankur, but Nag’s young landlord is a decent man undone by cowardice.

But the term Indian New Wave is a mislabelling. What began in 1969 is really the Hindi New Wave movement. When he made Bhuvan Shome in 1969, Sen was already an established experimenter, even if it was his first box office success. He is a contemporary of Satyajit Ray, whose debut Pather Panchali, released in 1955, marked a natural and astoundingly moving style of filmmaking in India, and brought Indian cinema a degree of international renown that it had not seen until then.

Sen would make his debut the same year with Raat Bhore, and go on to build a career that enshrined him in the holy trinity of the film school community of India — Ray, Ghatak, Sen.

Pather Panchali is made in the Italian neo-realist style. Sen experimented more with the playful French new wave style of Godard, Truffaut, Resnais and others. And Ghatak went in the opposite direction — employing folk melodrama style storytelling to craft crushing portrayals of poverty and the crisis of human dignity in post-Independence India. All three worked on stories of social crisis set in grounded realities, and they are only the best-known ones.

I don’t say this to claim Bengali primacy in the movement (hard as that may be to believe). It is likely, rather, that there were similar experiments underway in the other filmmaking centres in India — erstwhile Madras, Kerala and Bombay. In fact, India’s first Cannes win went to the Hindi film Neecha Nagar by Chetan Anand, (alongside eight other films) a story about caste. In other words, several new waves were possibly underway in India when the movement that is given the honour of capital letters began in Hindi film in the 1970s.

Why was this movement called the Indian New Wave and not the others? I would argue, language. Hindi was and is projected as the national language, even if it is not technically the national language. The National Movement certainly projected Hindi as the language of a new national unity.

In real terms, the Bombay film industry has long served to project the hopes and vision of New Delhi, the political capital of India. Through this lens of language politics, the nomenclature of Indian new wave for a Hindi film movement is correct.

What happened to the new wave?

Did the New Wave subside? It is perceived that by the second half of the 1980s, the movement had run out of steam. Chopra made the tremendously successful (and compelling) Parinda with three mainstream stars — Anil Kapoor, Jackie Shroff and Madhuri Dixit. Chopra’s previous, Khamosh (1986), now rated as a superb thriller, had found no producers.

Despite the tremendous acclaim for Mirch Masala, Ketan Mehta would manage to make his next film Maya Memsaab (an adaptation of Madame Bovary) only in 1993. Kundan Shah would make Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa, a charming comedy starring Shah Rukh Khan and Deepak Tijori, only in 1994.

Benegal alone continued to make films at his old pace, of one film every one and a half years, until 1998, more than one decade after Chopra, Mehta, Mirza and Shah had largely stopped working in the idiom. He made seven feature films between 1987 and 1998. He launched the career of another star actor in this decade, Rajat Kapoor, who, like his other acting protégés, has gone on to build an enviable filmography in mainstream and non-mainstream cinema.

I remember at least three of these being projects that received reasonable play on television — The Making of the Mahatma, Mammo and Sardari Begum. They may lack the prestige and power of his work as a director in the decade between the mid-1970s and ‘80s — his first, purple, decade as a director. On what basis do I say this? The arguably subjective basis of reputation. Benegal’s films in this first decade — the rural change trilogy (Ankur, Nishant, Manthan), Bhumika, Junoon, Mandi and Kalyug are the ones that appear to have the most recall value.

In 2001, Benegal cast the ’90s superstar Karisma Kapoor in Zubeida and the iconic Rekha in a smaller part, along with his usuals Amrish Puri, Surekha Sikri, Rajat Kapoor and, not to mention, the composer AR Rahman, with whom he worked for the first time. Was this the signal that the New Wave was dead?

Or had it been dead for more than a decade by then, when Chopra, Shah, Mehta and Mirza had run out of energy? Had Benegal alone kept it alive like a life-saving machine, working overtime on an ageing, bloodless body? The scholar Vikrant Dadawala (2022), an assistant professor at York University, dates the death of the movement to the mid-90s in his superb paper ‘Literature, Print Culture and the Indian New Wave.’

Naseeruddin, an icon shaped by the Hindi New Wave, holds that the wave was over by the late ’80s. My own sense is closer to the perspective of the film critics Uday Bhatia and Jai Arjun Singh, who brought out a thoughtful list of 50 films to mark 50 years of the Indian New Wave. This list continues well into the 2000s and ’10s, ending with Soni, a film that came out in 2019; that is the year they wrote this list.

If you were to see the New Wave movement through a set of defined parameters that include state/NFDC funding, the casting of stars who are not from the mainstream, a certain social commitment to social consciousness, then the evidence is undeniable: The New Wave was dying by the late ’80s and dead in the mid-’90s.

But if you were to see the movement as a set of ideas that shaped a generation of later writer-directors such as Anurag Kashyap, Tigmanshu Dhulia, Kanu Behl and Ritesh Batra, who found a place first through the indie film and now through the over-the-top (OTT) ecosystem, then the New Wave is very much around us still.

Think of the actors and stories on OTT. In fact, think of the careers of Naseeruddin, Azmi, Smita, Om Puri and Amrish Puri in Bollywood, and the Irrfans, Konkona Sen Sharmas and Nawazuddin Siddiquis that Bollywood has hungrily sought after them. If anything, the New Wave has reshaped mainstream Hindi film. And Benegal had a lot to do with it.

I find myself returning often to the last scene in Ankur — a boy flings a stone at the young zamindar’s home and runs away. The first move had been made. I think of Benegal filming the shot, and I see him waiting and watching long after the unit has packed up for the day. I think of him as the man who cast a stone and made us open a window, and kept waiting and working patiently till we stepped out to see what was afoot.

Sohini Chattopadhyay is a National Award-winning film critic and award-winning journalist. Her book The Day I Became a Runner: A Women’s History of India Through the Lens of Sport was published by HarperCollins India in October 2023

Excerpts of this essay, first published on the author’s website, were carried in the print version of Icon on December 5, 2025. The full article can also be accessed online at The Wire.

By arrangement with The Wire

Published in Dawn, ICON, January 5th, 2025