A Beginner's Route Into Parallel Cinema (In the Right Order)

Most people bounce off Indian art cinema because they start with the hardest film. Start here instead.

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The Indian New Wave has an access problem. Someone tells you it's important, you look it up, and the first title you find is Mani Kaul's Uski Roti — a film in which a woman waits by a road for most of the runtime and the cutting deliberately refuses you the pleasure of continuity. It is a great film. It is a terrible place to begin.

Here is a working order. Six films, roughly in ascending difficulty, each of which makes the next one legible.

1. Start with the one that is also a thriller

Canon #19 Ardh Satya अर्ध सत्य Govind Nihalani · 1983 · Crime, Drama

Govind Nihalani's police film has everything a mainstream viewer wants — a cop, a case, escalating violence, a bar, a girl — and everything the parallel movement was arguing for. Om Puri's sub-inspector is destroyed by his father's authoritarianism before any criminal touches him. You get a functioning genre film and a thesis about the Indian state at the same time.

2. Then the one that is basically a workplace drama

Canon #37 Manthan मंथन Shyam Benegal · 1976 · Drama

A vet arrives to start a milk cooperative. Caste politics, a local monopoly and village factionalism immediately try to kill it. It is the most straightforwardly satisfying film Shyam Benegal made — it has goals, obstacles and a scoreboard — and it was funded by five hundred thousand farmers contributing two rupees each, which is the single best piece of trivia in Indian film history.

3. Now the one about an actress, which teaches you the movement's real subject

Canon #39 Bhumika भूमिका Shyam Benegal · 1977 · Drama

Smita Patil moves through four men who each want ownership of her. The film is structured as memory, which is your first proper encounter with parallel cinema's non-linear instinct, but it is anchored by a performance so magnetic that the structure never becomes an obstacle.

4. Then the funny one, so you learn the movement had jokes

Canon #16 Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro जाने भी दो यारो Kundan Shah · 1983 · Comedy, Satire

Kundan Shah's builder-corruption farce ends with a corpse being passed around a live staging of the Mahabharata. It is anarchic, technically scrappy, and the single most influential Indian comedy ever made. Crucially it shares its cast — Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Pankaj Kapur — with the serious films, which is the point: this was one ecosystem, not two.

5. Then the hard, quiet, perfect one

Canon #25 Garam Hava गरम हवा M. S. Sathyu · 1974 · Drama, Historical

A Muslim shoemaker in Agra keeps deciding not to leave for Pakistan while Partition takes his family apart one departure at a time. Balraj Sahni's last performance. There is no formal difficulty here at all, just an unbearable accumulation. By now you have the context to feel what it is doing.

6. Now, and only now, the avant-garde

In the canon Uski Roti उसकी रोटी Mani Kaul · 1970 · Avant-garde, Drama

Mani Kaul's debut, made under Ritwik Ghatak's influence, refuses conventional continuity entirely. Having watched the five above, you will recognise what he is arguing against, and the film converts from an ordeal into an argument.

Two rules for the whole exercise

• Watch the restored versions. The Film Heritage Foundation and NFDC restorations of Manthan, Ankur and Garam Hava are transformative — many of these films were only ever seen as bad VHS transfers, which is half of why they got a reputation for being drab.
• Do not treat 'parallel' and 'commercial' as opposed. Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil, Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri all worked constantly in mainstream cinema. The wall was built by critics, not by the people making the films.

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Filed under Shyam Benegal · Smita Patil · Naseeruddin Shah · Parallel Cinema. Written for The Bollywood 100.