This article by filmmaker Sharad Raj celebrates Jawahar Lal Nehru’s 126th birth anniversary by reflecting on Nehru’s impact on India’s cultural imagination, cinema education, artistic institutions, and the nation’s evolving social fabric across decades.

Jawahar Lal Nehru’s contribution to Indian cinema, cultural policy, and artistic education remains foundational to the country’s creative evolution. This reflective essay by filmmaker Sharad Raj revisits Nehru’s visionary support for film institutions, Satyajit Ray, and the development of cinematic modernity, while examining how education, social progress, and political awareness continue to shape India’s creative landscape today.

Those were the decades when political criticism meant critiquing Jawahar Lal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi. Political discourse in Uttar Pradesh and its capital Lucknow centered around left leaning and Lohiaite criticism of the Congress Party and its leaders.

Debates on Education and the Arts

It was in the eighties while I was at the Film & Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune that I critiqued Nehru’s vision of centralized education for the arts whether cinema, theatre or fine arts. The need for these haloed institutions versus decentralizing art education and creating space at college and state universities level for undergraduate and postgraduate courses. This, some of us thought would create a universal understanding of various art forms and a cinema culture will be nurtured from an early stage rather than 8 seats per course at FTII. We were not fully wrong. It would have made some difference, but the big question is how could this be achieved?

At FTII back then in just one film school barely had 2 teachers worth talking about, how on earth could a newly independent country find tens and thousands of film teachers of quality, exposed to the finest on Indian and world cinema to teach in these colleges in different nooks and corner of the country? Not to mention the huge infrastructure cost that film education needs. Today when I am a practicing independent filmmaker and a teaching film direction for more than a decade, I realize the folly in my earlier argument as a student in the eighties that Nehru was wrong in making film and art education centralized at these central institutes.

The issue is beyond infrastructure cost and faculty availability; it is about social progress and political and cultural awareness that is nascent even today and primitive if I may say so. Cinema education was a far cry.

Society, Maturity and Cinema Learning

I remember watching an Instagram reel a few days back where an old man was saying, “President kaun hai, ek post hai, Brahman sabse bada hai” (Who is a President, it is just a post, but Brahmins are the most superior). With this predominant mindset in a country where basic education was a challenge and in 78 years, we have not budged from de-casting ourselves amongst other primitive positions we take, socially and culturally, how any art school, leave alone a film course, functioned and what kind of filmmakers it will produce?

The even bigger realization is that at undergraduate level our 17- and 18-year-olds are not mature enough to learn cinema. They may be savvy now in the 21st century with the craft and technique of cinema but far from grasping the art of cinema. The maturity is absent, and our education system does not encourage creative thinking, most middle-class parents have “secure job anxiety”. To add to it, life experience at this age is missing for a young person to have the required understanding for say characterization.

We realized this and in fact altered our undergraduate film courses. This article gains significance in the light of the University Grants Commission (UGC) proposing direct Ph.D. after BA? B.Sc!!! Ph.d do they know what a doctoral study entails???

Nehru knew his country well.

We could not have copied the European or American approach as it is. Don’t we see our so-called Democracy in a primitive, underdeveloped form? Once Dilip Kumar was asked by Indira Gandhi why our films are backward, and he said because we are socially backward, filmmakers are not from outside the society. Dilip Kumar says he realized she is the daughter of Nehru, who was present, and apologized for his abrupt reply to which the statesman said, “If I were you Yusuf, I wouldn’t be so kind.” This has been narrated by the thespian himself. Nehru was aware of what art is and what good or great art is. He did.

Nehru’s Vision and Cinema’s Future

But for his understanding and discerning eye for good art, Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali would have languished or at least remained unknown in India. The year was 1955, Chidananda Dasgupta once told me during my interview with him for Patriot in 1987, that they got to know about a garish costume drama by V. Shantaram, Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje, which was to get the National Award over Pather Panchali so he and the other film society satraps of Calcutta wrote a fervent appeal to Nehru that what a travesty it would be if Pather Panchali was ignored. Nehru paid attention and responded, and Pather Panchali won the National Award for the Best Film that year and Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje had to make do with the Best Hindi Film Award.

Not only that, when Nargis lashed out at Pather Panchali as selling Indian poverty to the foreigners, Nehru defended the film as empathetic to poverty. It was the beginning of lifelong friendship between Nehru and Ray. In fact, the entire 1950s mainstream cinema was Nehruvian in its ethos from Raj Kapoor’s Awara to Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen and Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa.

India was left impoverished and devasted by the British in 1947. The country had to start from scratch and rebuild itself, and in that for the Prime Minister to realize the importance of cinema is quite something. The first International Film Festival was held in 1952. A Film Enquiry Committee (FEC) was setup by Nehru as early as 1949! In 1955, Nehru held a Film seminar that was attended by Prithviraj Kapoor and Devika Rani to discuss the recommendations of the FEC and the institutional changes needed to develop and later the course of filmmaking in India.

We all know that it was Nehru wo established the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) in 1960 that went onto become National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) in 1975, the FTII in 1960 as well and the National Film Archives.

Nehru in his inaugural address at the first International Film Festival highlighted the aesthetic growth of cinema and its importance. He said, “Film has become a powerful influence in people’s lives. It can educate them rightly or wrongly… I mean that they should introduce artistic and aesthetical values in life and encourage the appreciation of beauty in all its aspects. I hope that films which are just sensational or melodramatic or such as make capital out of crime, will not be encouraged. If our film industry keeps this ideal before it, it will encourage good taste and help pave its own way in the building of a new India…”

Perhaps it will take a lifetime to figure out Lata Mangeshkar, Mohammad Rafi and dare I say a Jawahar Lal Nehru!