Shyam Benegal’s Ankur (The Seedling, 1974) marks the arrival of ‘alternative cinema’ or ‘parallel cinema’ in India. The wave of such films was an initiative taken by the Film Finance Corporation (FFC). The body was formed in 1969 with the objective of promoting national culture, education and a healthy entertainment by offering loans for offbeat films. However, Benegal’s Ankur was not financed by FFC. The first two of his films were financed by Blaze Advertising Agency, for which he had already made a good number of commercials. His experience in the field of advertising films had taught him the lesson of economy of expression and that made him stand apart from his contemporary filmmakers in Bombay. Right from the beginning, Benegal wished to make films rooted in the ‘regional-nationalist’ spirit. He had composed the short-story version of Ankur more than a decade earlier, when his cousin Guru Dutt had been a prominent director in Bollywood with a string of commercially successful films. Sangeeta Datta, in her book Shyam Benegal, selects an excerpt from Benegal’s interview, where the filmmaker reveals his intention with a gesture of candour:

Benegal justifies his claim in the first three of his films, which are considered to be the ‘emblematic trilogy’ of new cinema in India. These three films project the exploitation of villagers in a feudal socio-political set-up with an emerging conflict between tradition and modernity. In each of the three films, the entry of a city-bred educated protagonist poses a threat to the age-old system, and especially in Ankur the lure of modernity makes the plot more complicated than in that of Nishant (Night’s End, 1975) and Manthan (The Churning, 1976), as the metaphor of modernity problematises the plot by negotiating with the patriarchal ideology of feudalism.