Not in the form | Anant Nag

Anant Nag | Photo credit: Sreejith Ravikumar

“I would call it behavior, not acting,” veteran actor Anant Nag once said, summing up his approach to the craft. With his skills acquired on stage in Mumbai rather than film school, his reliance on what he called “behavioural” acting helped Naga as he moved easily between parallel and commercial film, exploring various genres from social drama to romance to comedy to horror.

The actor will receive the 2024 Dadasaheb Phalke Award for his contribution to Indian cinema over five decades at the 72nd National Film Awards in Gujarat on September 22. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan last year. Nag is after Dr. Rajkumar the second Kannada actor to win a Phalke.

Born in 1948 in the Uttara Kannada district of coastal Karnataka, Nag spent his childhood in a religious math and ashram where his parents worked. Moving to Mumbai in his early teens for schooling was a culture shock, but he found his feet in the vibrant Mumbai theater world of the 1960s and 1970s, performing in Konkani, Kannada and Hindi plays.

Naga’s transition to cinema came in 1973 with PV Nanjaraj Ursa’s Sankalpa, in which he played a rationalist against religious faith. A year later he was introduced to Shyam Benegal, with whom he collaborated on six films that remain milestones of the Indian New Wave of the 1970s and early 1980s, starting with Ankur, where he played the complex son of a landlord. Nishant, Manthan, Bhumika, Kondura and Kalyug followed, offering him a number of gray-shaded roles.

Commercial stint

Nag has often said that his move to commercial cinema followed his realization that a full-time career in parallel cinema was difficult. Bayalu Daari (1977) was his first major commercial hit as a romantic lead, followed by many others such as Chandanada Gombe, Benkiya Bale and Naa Ninna Bidalare. In many of them based on popular novels, he played a vulnerable middle-class hero and his on-screen pairing with Lakshmi was a particular hit. Interestingly, Nag was popular in the era of superstars like Rajkumar, Vishnuvardhan and Ambarish who had fan clubs that often rivaled each other. Nag, despite his huge fan base, avoided the phenomenon, perhaps in part because he was never an “action hero” and in part because he resisted being cast into a mold.

An important phase of his acting career was his collaboration with his younger brother Shankar Nag, an extraordinary talent of Kannada film and theater who died in an accident in 1990. While the films they made together like Accident, Minchina Ota and Nodi Swami Navirode Heege continue to hold a unique place in Kannada cinema, it was a series based on Kannada cinema that gained them national recognition in the early years based on the Malgudi series. TV. Nag wrote poignantly about this association in a memoir, Nanna Thamma Shankar.

After a lean period in the late 1990s, Nag resumed acting in the 2000s, but mostly in supporting roles in films like Mungaru Male. He returned to pivotal roles again in films like Godhi Banna Sadharana Maikattu with an outstanding performance as an Alzheimer’s patient and Kavalu Daari playing a retired police inspector.

Nag is also one of the few Kannada actors who have successfully dabbled in politics. He was influenced by the JP movement of the 1970s and was persuaded by the late Chief Minister Ramakrishna Hegde to join mainstream politics. He was nominated to the Karnataka Legislative Council in 1988 and later elected to the Legislative Assembly. In 1996, he became Bangalore Development Minister in the JH Patel government. He quit politics, as he himself admitted, when it began to demand his full attention, away from the cinema.

But Nag has never shied away from wearing his political views on his sleeve. He has been a staunch admirer of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the past few years and has supported Hindutva policies on many occasions, drawing criticism from liberal circles in Karnataka. When asked to comment on the Phalke award, Nag said the PM’s congratulatory contribution to X “was as good as getting two Phalke awards”.

Published – 20 Sep 2026 01:20 IST