The Indian film-maker Shyam Benegal, who has died aged 90, was a pillar of the “parallel cinema” movement, the informal grouping of independently minded and funded creatives whose work stood in stark, socially committed contrast to the song-and-dance escapism of Bollywood.
Responding to real events and centred on marginalised characters (often women), Benegal’s breakthrough films of the 1970s rejected the cosmetic, crowd-pleasing approach of the Hindi mainstream. Yet they found an appreciative audience both at home and abroad, helping to make household names of such performers as Shabana Azmi, Om Puri and Naseeruddin Shah.
