Consider the following statements about a prominent film personality of India: He was born in Hyderabad. He emerged in the 1970s with a series of films that challenged mainstream Bollywood. He became widely known for Bharat Ek Khoj, a landmark 53-episode television series. He directed a 2023 biopic about Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Identify the personality from the following:

Correct — C, Shyam Benegal. Four clues are given and all four fit one man. He was born on 14 December 1934 at Trimulgherry in Hyderabad State, now in Telangana. He opened the 1970s parallel- cinema wave with Ankur in 1973, followed by Nishant, Manthan and Bhumika — films made on small budgets about caste, land and rural power, deliberately unlike the mainstream Hindi cinema of the decade. Bharat Ek Khoj, his 53-episode Doordarshan serial of 1988, adapted Nehru's The Discovery of India and remains the work by which a general audience knows him. And in 2023 he directed Mujib: The Making of a Nation, the India-Bangladesh biopic of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, made when he was in his late eighties. He held the Padma Shri, the Padma Bhushan and the Dadasaheb Phalke Award of 2005. One honest present-day note: Benegal died in Mumbai on 23 December 2024, some four months before this paper was written.

• (a)Govind Nihalani — A real parallel-cinema director, which makes this the strongest wrong option — Aakrosh and Ardh Satya are his, and he was Benegal's cinematographer on the early films. He was born in Karachi, did not make Bharat Ek Khoj, and did not direct the Mujib biopic.
• (b)Girish Karnad — A playwright and actor of the same movement who appeared in Benegal's films and directed a few of his own. Born at Matheran and raised in Karnataka, he wrote in Kannada, and he died in 2019, four years before the 2023 film named in the stem.
• (d)Mani Ratnam — Born in Madurai and working mainly in Tamil cinema from the 1980s onward, with Nayakan, Roja and Bombay. Neither the decade nor the two works named in the stem belong to him.

Parallel cinema, or the New Indian Cinema, was a movement of realist, low-budget, socially engaged films that ran alongside commercial Hindi cinema from the late 1960s. Shyam Benegal is its central Hindi-language figure: Ankur in 1973 is usually taken as the wave's arrival, and the group of actors he worked with — Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil, Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Amrish Puri — went on to define serious Indian acting for a generation. Much of the movement's funding came from the Film Finance Corporation, later the National Film Development Corporation.

Identify-the-person items are solved by finding the clue only one candidate can satisfy. Here that clue is the 2023 biopic: Girish Karnad had died in 2019, and neither Nihalani nor Mani Ratnam made a film about Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Bharat Ek Khoj works almost as well, since it is a single famous credit. The birthplace clue is the weakest of the four, because being born in Hyderabad is shared by many. Manthan, made in 1976 and financed by five lakh dairy farmers contributing two rupees each through the Gujarat cooperative movement, is the Benegal fact most likely to appear in another paper — it connects cinema to the White Revolution.

• Shyam Benegal was born on 14 December 1934 at Trimulgherry, Hyderabad, and died in Mumbai on 23 December 2024.
• His 1970s films Ankur, Nishant, Manthan and Bhumika opened the parallel-cinema wave in Hindi.
• Bharat Ek Khoj was his 53-episode Doordarshan serial of 1988, adapted from Nehru's The Discovery of India.
• He directed Mujib: The Making of a Nation (2023), an India-Bangladesh biopic of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
• He received the Padma Shri in 1976, the Padma Bhushan in 1991 and the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 2005.
• Manthan (1976) was financed by contributions of two rupees each from about five lakh Gujarat dairy farmers.

• Picking Govind Nihalani, who belongs to the same movement and worked on Benegal's early films.
• Letting the Hyderabad birthplace decide the answer; it is the least discriminating of the four clues.
• Forgetting that Girish Karnad died in 2019 and so cannot have directed a 2023 film.

As an identify-the-personality item built from three or four clues, or as a director-to-film match.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following films by Shyam Benegal was financed by small contributions from Gujarat's dairy farmers?

  • (a)Ankur
  • (b)Nishant
  • (c)Manthan
  • (d)Bhumika

  Answer(c) Manthan — about five lakh dairy farmers contributed two rupees each towards the 1976 film about the cooperative movement.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Bharat Ek Khoj, the television series directed by Shyam Benegal, was based on which book?

  • (a)An Autobiography by Jawaharlal Nehru
  • (b)The Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru
  • (c)India Wins Freedom by Abul Kalam Azad
  • (d)The Wonder That Was India by A. L. Basham

  Answer(b) The Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru — the 53-episode serial aired on Doordarshan in 1988.