Shyam Benegal, an Indian filmmaker who in a career that began in the 1970s made many of his country’s best-loved films — mostly heavy-hitting features that addressed social issues head on, but also documentaries and television series — died on Monday in Mumbai. He was 90.
His daughter, Pia Benegal, told the Press Trust of India, a news agency that he died in a hospital of chronic kidney disease.
Mr. Benegal worked nonstop from the 1950s, when he apprenticed as a filmmaker on television advertisements. But it was during a particularly fecund phase, in the 1970s and ’80s, that he burst onto the scene and made his most distinctive impression on India’s imagination.
India in that period was notoriously impoverished, as it struggled to find its identity in the first decades of independence from British colonial rule.
Mr. Benegal captured some of the most pertinent social issues of the time in “Ankur” (“The Seedling”), a 1974 film that tells the story of a privileged landowner who takes advantage of a poor couple and addresses themes of caste, human cruelty and the plight of women in rural India. It was nominated for the Golden Bear, the highest honor for a feature film, at the Berlin International Film Festival.
This month, Mr. Benegal was photographed commemorating his birthday with some of India’s most highly regarded actors, including Naseeruddin Shah and Shabana Azmi, who posted a picture on social media.
Mr. Shah and Ms. Azmi, who are both household names in India, started their careers in Mr. Benegal’s films.
“I wonder what I would have become if he hadn’t had faith in me when no one else did,” Mr. Shah said in a statement after Mr. Benegal’s death.
Mr. Benegal’s films addressed contemporary issues and appealed to the educated classes. With their serious storytelling, they offered an alternative to the often melodramatic song-and-dance productions of mainstream Hindi cinema. In that, they were similar to India’s art-house productions, which had come to be known as the parallel cinema.
But while those productions had a niche audience and were more experimental in nature, Mr. Benegal’s films comfortably straddled the mainstream and parallel genres, even becoming box-office hits. Rather than trying to “break away from the confines of the narrative in popular cinema,” Piyush Chhabra, a research scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, said in an interview, he “worked with it.”
Mr. Benegal chose the characters he wrote about as carefully as he chose the actors who played them, even as he kept his storyteller’s eye fixed on injustices, their causes and effects. He paid heed to every element of filmmaking, including hiring people he met on location as technicians. “This,” Mr. Chhabra said, “brought in a kind of authenticity to his films.”
Mr. Benegal insisted on being called by his first name and sought to create a space where everyone felt welcome. “His style of work used to be that if you were cast in a film, you would be present on the set every day, regardless of whether you were shooting that day or not,” the actor and director Sunil Shanbag, who was given an early acting role in Mr. Benegal’s “Kalyug” (1981), said in an interview.
Mr. Shanbag, who went on to co-write both of Mr. Benegal’s most celebrated TV series, added that Mr. Benegal’s “non-hierarchical, generous way of working” was unique at the time.
Mr. Shanbag spent six weeks with Mr. Benegal on the set of “Kalyug,” a star-studded film that retold the Mahabharata epic, a 2,300-year-old story that can run to 13,000 pages, through the lens of two rival branches of a family business in Bombay. It won India’s Filmfare Award for best film, one of numerous awards he won, and was just one of three Indian films submitted to the Academy Awards that year.
“He was a great raconteur,” Mr. Shanbag said. “Meal times were fantastic. We would talk about so many things. I learned a great deal just being around him.”
Shyam Sunder Benegal was born on Dec. 14, 1934 in Hyderabad, then a royal enclave within colonial India, to Saraswati and Shridhar Benegal. His father was a professional photographer who had a small studio. Mr. Benegal graduated with a degree in economics from Osmania University in Hyderabad.
As a child of India’s independence — he was born an imperial subject of the nizam of Hyderabad — he took seriously the country’s struggle to live up to its founders’ ideals.
Other films from his most influential period addressed life in a brothel (“Mandi,” 1983) and the labor organization that remade India’s dairy production for the modern era (“Manthan,” 1976). If the subjects of some of his films sounded dry on paper, they never were by the time they were projected on the screen. They roared with anger, agony, flashes of beauty and sometimes wry wit. Many were filmed in India’s bucolic countryside, where Mr. Benegal insisted on being on the set each day.
His most recent film, released in 2023, was “Mujib: The Making of a Nation,” a biopic about the founder of modern Bangladesh.
In addition to his daughter, a renowned costume designer, Mr. Benegal is survived by his wife, Nira.
By all accounts, Mr. Benegal did not set out to make films about the whole of India; he simply went where his curiosity took him. He was especially inspired by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. In 1988 he directed a 53-part TV series adapted from Nehru’s book “The Discovery of India,” published in 1946 during India’s fight for freedom.
Mr. Benegal “has constantly taken a stand against intolerance,” Sohail Hashmi, a filmmaker and activist, said, “and has stood up for the inclusive, secular values of this country.”
Those values were universal, or at least universally applauded, in the first decades of India’s independence. Mr. Benegal was not regarded as a partisan figure. But in the last decade of his life, as Indian politics became dominated by a right-wing, Hindu-first program, politics seemed to push Mr. Benegal to one side.
In 2014 he signed a petition in support of L.G.B.T. rights, at a time when the courts were still criminalizing gay sex. In 2017 he signed a petition against the building of a Hindu temple (or any other religious building) on the site of a mosque that had been demolished by a mob in Ayodhya. The temple went up anyway, with much fanfare, last year.
Some aspects of the social reality depicted in Mr. Benegal’s early films changed during his career, but others did not. Indians today, regardless of their politics, remember him for his work and its power both to uplift and to entertain.
That became apparent after his death, when Nehru’s great-grandson, Rahul Gandhi, now a leader of the opposition in Parliament, called him “a visionary filmmaker who brought India’s stories to life with depth and sensitivity” in a statement and his rival, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, posted on social media that he, too, was “deeply saddened” by Mr. Benegal’s death.
Mr. Benegal’s work, Mr. Modi added, “will continue to be admired by people from different walks of life.”
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