Among these new auteurs were Mani Kaul, Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G.
This support via NFDC led to the emergence of several talented filmmakers who were provided access to funds and a license to experiment with aesthetics, form and style in their work.
The Indian establishment (government) at the time was also in favour of producing quality films that could match the technical brilliance of international films while at the same time reflecting the social realities and cultural history of the country’s heartland. Before parallel cinema snowballed into a wave across all Indian languages during the 1970s and 80s, the roots for its genesis were being put down in Bengali-language cinema by filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, who discarded the flamboyance of popular cinema to embrace simplicity inspired by Italian neorealism specifically, and European arthouse films in general. Steeped in realism, they came to be bracketed by media and film scholars as parallel cinema, a category also called new cinema. Meagre budgets enforced austerity in the production values of such offbeat films, which were stripped of the commercial tropes of popular cinema, including song-and-dance sequences. In the previous century, films that strayed from mainstream narratives had to depend on the state-funded National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) for production and distribution. Arthouse films like Dhobi Ghat (2010), The Lunchbox (2013) and Masaan (2015) perhaps wouldn’t have been able to raise capital before the twenty-first century. The financial success of these films encouraged major studios and A-listers to back smaller films with rich and innovative content. Vishal would later bridge the gap between the mainstream and parallel worlds by employing popular actors in his acclaimed ventures Omkara (2006) and Kaminey (2009). Music composer-director Vishal Bhardwaj took Hindi parallel cinema by storm with Maqbool (2003), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth set in Mumbai’s criminal underworld. The 2000s also witnessed another exceptional filmmaker, Dibakar Banerjee, who made a mark with his uniquely entertaining films Khosla Ka Ghosla (2006), Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (2008) and Love Sex Aur Dhoka (2010), which captured the quirks and varying hues of the North Indian middle class like never before. D (2009) and Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) – an epic crime saga spanning several decades and generations – found a fan in Martin Scorsese. With his directorial debut, Paanch (2003), Black Friday (2004), based on the Bombay bomb blasts of 1993, and the political drama Gulaal (2009), Kashyap has given Indian cinema some of its finest films. One of the brightest talents to flourish post- Satya is its writer Anurag Kashyap, who has been championing novel and high-quality films ever since. Satya’s acceptance by mainstream audiences instilled hope in many budding writers, actors and directors who didn’t wish to tread the beaten path of conventional escapist cinema. Unlike the uber-rich backdrops of most Bollywood films, Satya tapped into the gritty underbelly of Mumbai, which until then had mostly found space in the films of Saeed Akhtar Mirza and Sudhir Mishra, icons of parallel, or new, cinema. In 1998, the spark for the resurgence of an alternative to mainstream Hindi-language cinema (Bollywood) was ignited by the massive commercial and critical success of Ram Gopal Varma’s gangster drama Satya.
Shifting social values and non-Hindi films have driven a new golden age in Indian arthouse, but the sociopolitical climate has become increasingly worrisome