When Adoor Looks, What Do We See?

The iconic filmmaker’s scathing verdict on India’s National Film Awards exposes how India’s highest cinematic honour has drifted from art to appeasement.

Adoor Gopalakrishnan is not a man who intervenes casually in public debate. He does not issue press releases, chase relevance or offer opinions to stay in circulation. His appearances in the public square are infrequent, and when he speaks, it is usually in the measured cadences of someone who has spent a lifetime observing rather than declaiming. That is precisely why his recent remarks have unsettled so many. At 84, as the pioneering figure of Malayalam cinema’s new wave prepares to direct another film, Adoor chose to speak with unusual bluntness. The National Film Awards, he said, have in recent years honoured “some of the worst films”; the juries have grown mediocre; and there would be “no harm” if the awards were stopped altogether.

For a filmmaker who has won nearly every major international honour, this was not the bitterness of someone overlooked. It was the irritation of someone who believes an institution has forgotten its purpose. The question, therefore, is not why his comments offended some but why they resonate with so many others who have watched Indian cinema and its systems of recognition drift away from their founding ideals.

Cinema in India has never been merely diversion. From its earliest decades, it functioned as an art form, a mass educator and a subtle carrier of ideas. For a country emerging from colonial rule, fractured by language, caste and region, cinema became an unexpected adhesive. Long before television penetrated the countryside, films carried images of modernity, morality and social change to audiences who could not read but could watch, listen and absorb.

That power was recognised early. Jawaharlal Nehru, acutely aware of culture’s role in nation-building, inaugurated the International Film Festival of India in 1952. Two years later, the National Film Awards were instituted. Their purpose was not to celebrate box-office success or celebrity, but to encourage serious cinema and to place Indian film in conversation with the world. The very first award went to Shyamchi Aai, a quiet and humane Marathi film directed by Acharya Atre and far removed from spectacle. Adapted from Sane Guruji’s beloved autobiographical novel, the film told a spare, emotionally exacting story of maternal sacrifice and moral formation in rural Maharashtra. Its power lay in the everyday heroism of poverty endured with dignity, and in the belief that cinema could educate the emotions without sermonising. By honouring such a film, the fledgling National Awards announced a philosophy that that seriousness of intent, cultural rootedness and ethical depth mattered more than scale or commercial ambition.

Moral Authority

For decades, winning a National Award became the highest recognition an Indian filmmaker or actor could receive. It carried moral authority, not just professional prestige. Much like the Sahitya Akademi in literature, the awards represented a canon-forming institution, anchored to a coherent idea of excellence. They told filmmakers that craft and courage mattered more than commerce.

Rich Ethos

This ethos proved decisive in the 1970s and 1980s, when the parallel cinema movement took shape. Filmmakers working with modest budgets and unglamorous themes like social inequality, political hypocrisy, personal alienation found validation through these awards. The recognition did not make them rich, but it made them visible. A new cinematic language emerged. The National Awards were active participants in its growth.

Somewhere along the way, that clarity seems to have faded. In recent years, the National Awards have been discussed less for what they celebrate than for what they reveal. Films that would once have been considered squarely commercial have begun to occupy space once reserved for artistic risk-taking. Performances calibrated for mass appeal have been elevated over those marked by nuance or experimentation.

This is not an argument against popular cinema. India’s film culture has always thrived on plurality. The problem arises when an institution designed to protect one endangered ecosystem begins to behave as if it must imitate the logic of the market. Awards meant to correct for commercial bias start reproducing it instead. In doing so, they abandon their original function.

Equally troubling has been the opacity surrounding the juries themselves. The credibility of any award depends less on its trophy than on the discernment of those who bestow it. When juries appear underqualified, ideologically skewed, or uncomfortably close to those they judge, faith erodes. Even the perception of partiality can be corrosive. Cultural legitimacy, once lost, is rarely recovered by procedural fixes alone.

It is this erosion that Adoor is pointing to. His remarks were not about individual winners or isolated misjudgements. They were about the weakening of standards. If juries lack artistic depth, he suggested, the outcomes cannot aspire to excellence. And if excellence is no longer the goal, the institution becomes ornamental and empty in meaning.

The danger extends beyond awards ceremonies. Cinema shapes a society’s emotional and moral imagination. It tells people what is admirable, what is normal, what is possible. When shortcuts are repeatedly rewarded, younger filmmakers learn the wrong lessons. Depth begins to look optional; seriousness appears quaint. An art form that once asked difficult questions starts settling for easy answers.

This matters particularly in India, where cinema remains the most influential cultural medium. A country of many languages and uneven literacy relies on film to reflect, interrogate and sometimes reconcile its contradictions. To dilute the standards by which cinema is honoured is to impoverish that conversation. Over time, the loss is not merely artistic; it is civic.

Adoor speaks from a position few can claim. His films redefined Malayalam cinema and reshaped global perceptions of Indian film. With their restraint, moral seriousness and visual poetry, they introduced a grammar that owed more to introspection than spectacle. Critics abroad have spoken of him in the same breath as Bergman, Ozu and Tarkovsky because his work addresses universal questions with a distinctly Indian sensibility. He represents a tradition that sees cinema not as noise, but as thought.

To dismiss his critique as nostalgia is to misunderstand both the man and the moment. This is not a plea to return to some ‘golden age.’ It is a reminder that institutions decay when they forget why they were created. Awards do not merely reflect culture; they shape it by signalling what deserves attention.

The solution is neither abolition nor cosmetic reform. The National Film Awards do not need to disappear; they need to remember themselves. They must recommit to recognising films that challenge complacency rather than flatter taste, that observe society rather than merely exploit it. This requires juries of intellectual seriousness and aesthetic courage, chosen transparently and entrusted with independence. It requires accepting an unfashionable truth: that excellence is not democratic, and that cultural institutions exist precisely to defend minority values against majority pressures. In cinema, as in literature, what lasts is rarely what sells most easily.

Indian cinema is far more than just an industry; it is a civilisational archive in motion. It records how a nation sees itself, argues with itself, dreams for itself. The institutions that honour it must be held to the highest standards, not the lowest common denominator.

When a quiet man speaks sharply, it is usually because something important is at stake. The National Film Awards would do well to listen to the anxiety beneath Adoor’s anger.

(The writer is a scriptwriter and director. Views personal.)