The Hindi New Wave: Indian Parallel Cinema, 1969-1985

01Origins: FFC, FTII Pune, and the 1969 break

The Hindi New Wave was institutionally enabled by two state structures. The Film Finance Corporation, founded by the central government in 1960 to provide low-interest loans for film production, shifted in the late 1960s under chairman B.K. Karanjia toward direct funding of non-commercial, art-cinema projects. Karanjia, a former Filmfare and Blitz editor with a literary critic's reading of cinema, was the unsung administrator of the entire movement; the funding rules he wrote effectively made the Indian New Cinema possible. The Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, founded in 1960 on the campus of the former Prabhat Studios, trained the directors, cinematographers and editors who would go on to make the work — Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, John Abraham, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, K. Hariharan, Mrinal Sen's later collaborators — under faculty including Ritwik Ghatak, whose two-year tenure as vice-principal in 1965-66 has produced more myth than archival record but whose pedagogical influence on Kaul and Shahani in particular is well documented.

Mrinal Sen's Bhuvan Shome (1969), funded by the FFC at a budget of approximately ₹2 lakh, shot in Gujarat with a tiny crew, was the announcement film. It won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi, reached a critical audience that the commercial-Hindi distribution apparatus could not have produced, and proved that a state-funded, formally adventurous Hindi-language film could clear the institutional thresholds the country had set. Mani Kaul's Uski Roti (1969), released the same year and also FFC-backed, was the formal counterweight to Sen's playfulness — a slow, durational study of a punctuality-obsessed bus driver and his patient wife, structurally indebted to Bresson's Pickpocket and to dhrupad's treatment of duration. Together, the two 1969 films marked the institutional birth of the movement and established the FFC-FTII pipeline that would fund and staff the next fifteen years.

02Shyam Benegal and the rural-realist core

Shyam Benegal, who came to film from the Mumbai advertising industry rather than from FTII, became the single most prolific and commercially viable director of the Hindi New Wave. His debut Ankur (1974), set in rural Andhra and dealing with feudal landlord-tenant violence, launched Shabana Azmi as a leading actress and established what would become the Benegal house style: realist village settings, ensemble performances, lightly Marxian political readings, and traditional narrative shape that did not break with audience expectation as sharply as Kaul's or Shahani's work did. The Benegal compromise — formally legible cinema with politically engaged content — was the strategic move that gave the movement its widest reach. Nishant (1975) extended the same political register through Vijay Tendulkar's screenplay; Manthan (1976), funded by 500,000 dairy farmers contributing ₹2 each at the suggestion of Verghese Kurien of the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation, dramatised the Operation Flood dairy cooperative movement and remains one of the most institutionally unusual films in Indian cinema history.

Bhumika (1977), based loosely on the memoir of the Marathi actress Hansa Wadkar and adapted by Girish Karnad and Satyadev Dubey, gave Smita Patil the lead role that established her stature — a film about an actress's autonomy and dependence that Patil played with a controlled stillness no Hindi commercial cinema of the period was equipped to capture. Junoon (1979), produced by Shashi Kapoor's Film-Valas, was Benegal's largest-budget work and dealt with the 1857 uprising through a mixed-marriage romance; Kalyug (1981) reset the Mahabharata into corporate Mumbai. Across the decade, Benegal essentially built a parallel Hindi-language star system around Patil, Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah and Amrish Puri that the rest of the New Wave drew from. He continued working into the 2000s and 2010s — Mammo (1994), Sardari Begum (1996), Zubeidaa (2001), Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008), the television commission Bharat Ek Khoj (1988-89) — but his 1974-1980 Hindi run remains the canonical Benegal.

03Govind Nihalani, Saeed Mirza, and the urban political turn

Where Benegal's New Wave was largely rural, the second major strand was urban and explicitly political. Govind Nihalani, Benegal's longtime cinematographer through the 1970s, debuted as director with Aakrosh (1980), a courtroom-set drama about Adivasi-landlord violence written by Vijay Tendulkar and starring Om Puri as a near-mute tribal accused, Naseeruddin Shah as his ineffectual public defender, and Amrish Puri as the landlord. Aakrosh won the Golden Peacock at IFFI Delhi and established Nihalani's directorial register — long takes, courtroom blocking inherited from Tendulkar's stage practice, and a refusal of melodramatic resolution. Ardh Satya (1983), again a Tendulkar script, gave Om Puri his defining performance as a morally compromised Mumbai police inspector whose institutional rot the film reads through the lens of a poem by the Marathi writer Dilip Chitre. The closing shot — Anant Velankar choking the gangster Rama Shetty to death — is one of the most precisely framed acts of violence in Hindi cinema, and the film effectively wrote the template for every Hindi cop drama that followed, from Ab Tak Chhappan to Ardh Satya's spiritual descendant Shahid.

Saeed Akhtar Mirza, an FTII graduate and Mumbai filmmaker of the same cohort, made Arvind Desai Ki Ajeeb Dastaan (1978), Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai (1980), Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho! (1984), Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro (1989) and Naseem (1995). Each was an explicitly political examination of Mumbai's Muslim and working-class communities, and Mirza's films — less visually elegant than Nihalani's, more discursive in their dialogue — were among the New Wave's most explicitly leftist work. Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro, Mirza's Bombay-Muslim-petty-criminal feature released in the year of the L.K. Advani Rath Yatra, prefigured the Babri-era reordering of Mumbai's Hindu-Muslim coexistence in a way no other Hindi film of the period attempted. Together, Nihalani and Mirza built the urban-political wing that ran parallel to Benegal's rural-realist core.

Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro, Mirza's Bombay-Muslim-petty-criminal feature released in the year of the L.K.

04Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, and the formalist wing

The third major strand of the Hindi New Wave was the formalist, durational, classically aesthetic work of Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani, both Ritwik Ghatak students at FTII Pune. Mani Kaul's Uski Roti (1969), Ashad Ka Ek Din (1971, adapted from Mohan Rakesh's play), Duvidha (1973, the Vijaydan Detha story Amol Palekar would later remake as Paheli) and Satah Se Uthata Aadmi (1980, based on the poetry of Muktibodh) made him the New Wave's most uncompromising formalist. The reference points were not Hindi commercial cinema but Bresson, Tarkovsky, Ozu and the durational logic of dhrupad — Kaul, who studied dhrupad with Zia Mohiuddin Dagar and produced the documentary Dhrupad (1982), explicitly framed his cinema as an extension of the same temporal aesthetic. He continued working through the 1990s on Siddheshwari (1989), a documentary on the thumri singer Siddheshwari Devi, and on adaptations of Dostoevsky in Russia, where he taught and worked through his last decade.

Kumar Shahani, Kaul's contemporary at FTII and a Bresson assistant in Paris in the late 1960s through a French government scholarship, made Maya Darpan (1972), a slow, formally rigorous adaptation of a Nirmal Verma story; the long-gestating Tarang (1984), a four-hour study of capital and labour in industrial Mumbai built on the structure of the epic shloka; Khayal Gatha (1989) on the khayal classical-music form; and Kasba (1991), an Anton Chekhov adaptation. Shahani's body of work is small — six features in forty years — but is widely treated as the most uncompromising formal achievement of the Hindi New Wave. Together, Kaul and Shahani gave the movement a formalist wing that distinguished it from Italian Neorealism (whose social-realist orientation Benegal and Nihalani were closer to) and from the French New Wave (whose pop-cinema affection neither shared). The closer reference, in the Indian critical tradition, is to Ghatak's three-tier ambition — formal, mythic, political — held in single films, even if Kaul and Shahani each pulled the inheritance toward different ends.

05Middle cinema, the actor cohort, and the wind-down

By the late 1970s, a third register had emerged that mediated between the formal seriousness of the New Wave and the commercial mainstream — the so-called middle cinema, anchored by Sai Paranjpye, Basu Chatterjee, Hrishikesh Mukherjee (who pre-dated the New Wave but operated in adjacent space), Kundan Shah and Ketan Mehta. Sai Paranjpye's Sparsh (1980), Chashme Buddoor (1981) and Katha (1983) brought a lighter, comedic urban realism with Naseeruddin Shah and Farooq Shaikh as the recurring leads. Basu Chatterjee's Rajnigandha (1974), Chhoti Si Baat (1976) and Baton Baton Mein (1979) had pioneered the middle-cinema register a few years earlier with Amol Palekar. Kundan Shah's Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983), produced by NFDC, became the most widely loved film of the entire New Wave through its absurdist comedy of corruption and its ensemble of New Wave actors — Naseeruddin Shah, Ravi Baswani, Om Puri, Pankaj Kapur, Satish Shah — who would otherwise have been confined to the realist-prestige tier. The film's Mahabharata-as-stage-play closing sequence is the New Wave's only sequence that has fully crossed into popular Hindi-cinema vocabulary.

Ketan Mehta's Bhavni Bhavai (1980), Holi (1984) and Mirch Masala (1987) brought a more theatrically stylised idiom drawn from Gujarati folk forms; Mirch Masala's chilli-powder-as-collective-resistance climax remains the period's most striking single image. Across all three registers — formalist, realist, middle — the same actor cohort recurred: Naseeruddin Shah, Smita Patil, Shabana Azmi, Om Puri, Amol Palekar, Farooq Shaikh, Pankaj Kapur, Anupam Kher, Amrish Puri (in his pre-Hollywood, pre-DDLJ phase) and Deepti Naval. That cohort essentially constituted a parallel Hindi-language acting tradition for fifteen years. The movement wound down through the second half of the 1980s. NFDC funding tightened, the parallel-cinema theatrical circuit collapsed under competition from satellite television and the emerging video-cassette economy, Smita Patil died at 31 in December 1986 from complications of childbirth, Mani Kaul moved toward documentary and a Russian residency, Benegal moved into the Bharat Ek Khoj television commission and later into the gentler register of his late films, and Mirza moved toward documentary work. The institutional moment closed. The legacy did not.

06Legacy and reassessment

The Hindi New Wave's reception has cycled through several phases. At release, the movement's films were treated by the commercial Hindi press as a state-funded indulgence and by the English-language critical establishment, particularly through the Iqbal Masud-Chidananda Dasgupta-Maithili Rao register, as the only serious Hindi-language cinema being produced. Through the 1990s and 2000s the films largely fell out of theatrical circulation as parallel-cinema venues closed, and the next generation of Hindi viewers encountered them mainly through Doordarshan retrospectives, NFDC's struggling DVD distribution, and university film-society screenings. The reassessment came through the 2010s indie wave: Anurag Kashyap, Vishal Bhardwaj, Dibakar Banerjee, Neeraj Ghaywan and Vetri Maaran (from across the linguistic line) have all cited the New Wave as direct or indirect inheritance, and the parallel-cinema actor cohort — Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapur, Manoj Bajpayee through his proximity to it — has carried the movement's performance vocabulary into contemporary streaming.

The critical reassessment has also become more honest about the movement's blind spots. The New Wave's caste politics were rarely as developed as its class politics; its women characters, even in the Patil-Azmi-Karnad-Tendulkar films, were often instruments rather than subjects of the political readings being staged; its formal experiments were largely a male-director project, with Sai Paranjpye the major exception. The contemporary Hindi indie wave has corrected several of these absences only partially. What the New Wave durably left behind — the FTII-trained-director-as-author, the actor-as-craftsman, the realist village or the textured urban location as the default visual register, and the assumption that Hindi-language cinema could carry political weight without sacrificing formal seriousness — is the foundation that every interesting Hindi film of the last twenty years has stood on, whether or not its makers have acknowledged the inheritance.

The critical reassessment has also become more honest about the movement's blind spots.