In this candid interview with Khalid Mohamed, filmmaker-actor Ananth Narayan Mahadevan reflects on cinema, theatre, rejection, National Awards, artistic struggles, media neglect, streaming platforms, and his enduring pursuit of meaningful storytelling beyond commercial conventions and industry validation.

Veteran filmmaker, actor and theatre personality Ananth Narayan Mahadevan speaks to Khalid Mohamed about his extraordinary journey through Indian cinema, theatre and television. From working with legendary filmmakers and navigating mainstream Bollywood to directing socially-conscious films like Red Alert, Mee Sindhutai Sapkal, Mai Ghat and The Storyteller, Mahadevan discusses artistic integrity, media invisibility, plagiarism controversies, OTT platforms, and the evolving language of cinema in India.

Let’s say he has been a quiet presence in the lives of Old School Journalists for close to five decades now. And he’s played multiples of roles from working during the 1980s at the publicity center of the veteran V.P. Sathe, diversify into theatre as an actor and director, filmmaking again in both the capacities, and has ventured towards web series.

Despite winning four National Awards over time, however, he has been an invisible force, ignored by the media mavens rather than being celebrated for his estimable body of work. Baffling as that may be, he soldiers on in a gamut of the performing arts sturdily, belying his age of 65.
Here's an interview by Khalid Mohamed with the unarguably blindsided Ananth Narayan Mahadevan:
On his origins

My father had migrated from the conservative Palakadd in Kerala during the early 1960s, to be employed in the administrative section of an engineering firm. Living in a cocooned flat of Wadala, my schooling at the Don Bosco, Matunga, in the fine arts and sciences inculcated a discipline that still sees me through.

In fact, my affinity with theatre began with participation in10 Annual Day school plays. Subsequently, the inter-collegiate fests were a sub-conscious calling towards the performing arts.
The orthodox Tam-Bram family’s dream of their son turning to scientific research or medicine was restricted to a bachelor’s degree in the sciences, a stint as a medical representative and as sub-editor of the technical journal Chemical Age of India. It was an ambiguous phase that made me restive, waiting as he was for Godot.

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On lessons learnt from V.P. Sathe, the veteran screenwriter and founder of a film advertising and publicity agency.

At the Eucharistic Congress building in Colaba, below the offices of The Chemical Age of India, I discovered the Blaze Minuet preview theatre. Its manager, Mr. Commissariat, would sneak Ananth into press previews.
Mr. V P Sathe, who owned Bombay Publicity was impressed by my interest in cinema recruited me as a copywriter. From networking with movie Mughals Gulshan Rai, N N Sippy, Shakti Samanta, Pramod Chakraborty, Dev Anand, Rajendra Kumar, V. Shantaram and of course Raj Kapoor (with whom Mr. Sathe shared a long personal and creative relationship) to educating myself in the arts, Mr. Sathe became my unlikely godfather, giving me the leeway to take off for theatre rehearsals and shows.

I was introduced to Sight and Sound, American Cinematographer and other global cinema journals. As importantly, I was inducted into the Prabhat Chitra Mandal film society. At the Tarabai Hall on Marine Lines and Sunday morning shows at Bandra’s New Talkies cinema, I was exposed to the masterworks of Francois Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, David Lean, Vittorio De Sica, Sergei Eisenstein, Billy Wider, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Andrzej Wajda and Werner Herzog, among others. Here was a master course in cinema that no school could impart.

While on one hand, I was thoroughly enjoying Amar Akbar Anthony, Caravan, Teesri Manzil, Sholay, Deewaar as entertainment, the international masters instilled in me the real language and vision of cinema. But I tilted more towards the cinema of Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G. Aravindan, Girish Kasaravalli, Basu Bhattacharya, Kumar Shahani, Bimal Roy and Mani Kaul for cinematic nourishment.
At the press preview invitations, a lot was imbibed by me by getting to know you, Iqbal Masud, Mathili Rao, Bikram Singh and Abad Karanjia. I also found opportunities to interact with RGK of the Illustrated Weekly of India. Gradually I was inspired to analyze, appreciated and review films. Russi Karanjia’s tabloid, The Daily, offered me space as a film critic. I had found my calling.
On his foray into professional theatre as actor and director.
Theatre became an extension of a childhood hobby. The Prithvi Theatre offered an almost threatening intimacy with the audience. Unlike the proscenium stage the projection had to be tapered down to the scale of ‘whisper-and-you-can-be-heard’. Gogol’s Inspector General performed as a navtanki was my first go at professional theatre. The live singing, dancing and execution of the mayor of the town caught the eyes of Shashi Kapoor, Gulzar and Sai Paranjpye. Sai who was amused by my performance in an adaptation of Anton Chekov’s The Good Doctor (directed by Salim Ghouse) cast me in her first TV serial Ados Pados.

Theatre continues to be my mainstay since 1980. Shakespeare, Neil Simon, Vijay Tendulkar, Arthur Miller, Badal Sircar, Ray Cooney, Mohan Rakesh, Mahesh Dattani and J. B. Priestley are some of the great writers whose works put me to the acid test. Forty-six years down the line, I am still discovering the joy of a stage performance – of transmitting an energy and receiving the vibes of the audience.
I have restricted myself to acting in theatre -- except for Mujhe Rang De, which I directed, with Ayesha Jhulka and Divya Dutta in the cast. It’s the only space without the Damocles sword hanging on the head of a film director.

On the video you released of your two-handler film, Staying Alive, with Saurabh Shukla.
It’s a full-length feature, a hospital chamber piece, based on a true story by the late Sujit Sen (Saaransh, Arth), and his confrontation with an underworld goon in the ICCU of a hospital. Sudhir Mishra who was heading Zee’s new initiative of experimental feature films told me “Make the film you will not be allowed to make.”

Staying Alive was completed on a shoe-string budget of Rs 27 lakhs, shot on 16mm, in sync sound. Ketan Maroo of Shemaroo was moved by the film and bought it over from Zee. Officially selected for the Kerala film festival, he even gave it a two-week release in cinemas. The exercise was a turning-point on how I would look at filmmaking in the future.
On important roles in films.

Frankly, the memorable challenge in film roles has yet to come. I rue not pursuing Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani and other breakthrough directors. The occasional Gardish, Evening Shadows and the recent Yes Papa had meat. Films like Khiladi, Baazigar, Ishq and Badshah, strangely disproved the fact that public memory is short. The role of Shah Rukh Khan’s father in Abbas-Mustan’s Baazigar was in fact an afterthought. The test audience of the initial rushes felt that Shah Rukh’s character was a needless killer, knocking off helpless girls. There was no justification for the violence. So., the track of his father who was cheated of his business empire and reduced to penury was, woven in. It became the film’s fulcrum, besides luck by chance I could co-star with my favorite actress Raakhee!

I would rather look back at my television and web-series roles with satisfaction: Ghar Jamai, The Sword of Tipu Sultan, Nupur, M.S. Sathu’s Kayar, Avrodh , Hansal Mehta’s Scam 1992, and a two-episode part in the more recent Daldal.
On your debut as a film director, a dedication to to RD Burman, the phase of murder mysteries and then move towards biopics and socially-concerned cinema.

After a successful run as director on television with major shows: Chamatkar with Farouque Shaikh, Ghar Jamai with Satish Shah, Devi with Mohnish Behl and Hera Pheri with Shekhar Suman, the urge to graduate to the big screen was getting stronger. I had tested waters with my feature film debut on television, Ghunghat ke Pat Khol, which the late veteran Hrishikesh Mukherjee watched twice and loved. But the big screen funders were harder to please, as they continue to be even today. Viveck Vaswani meanwhile joined hands with Sudesh Iyer, one of the directors of Sony Television then and got me on board as director for Dil Vil Pyar Vyar, written as a tribute to R D Burman. It was the first retro-musical with published music, not remixes but recreations by Bablu Chakraborty, R D Burman’s arranger.

It wasn’t easy though. Weaving in Panchamda’s numbers with a fresh perspective while following the romantic fortunes of three pairs had its issues. The film had a four-week run at the Eros and retains its appeal even today for the experimentation that unwittingly spawned the remix genre with classic hits being thoughtlessly borrowed in films down the decades.

Perhaps carried away by the gloss and glamour of mainstream cinema, I succumbed to the temptation of thrillers like Aksar and made the cardinal mistake of remaking Victoria No 203, which shouldn’t have been. But I realized that too late. Here I was squandering away all the golden nuggets I had assimilated from the international masters instead of applying them to cinema of substance. That’s how Staying Alive happened. It instilled courage and confidence in me.
I would never want to return to ‘la-la land’ ever, though the oath was broken on two occasions because of financial economic pressures. I’ve deleted them from my memory files.

I was more cut out to direct Red Alert, a true story of an Andhra farmer trapped in a crossfire between cops and Naxals, Mee Sindhutai Sapkal on her incredible survival story, Gour Hari Dastaan on the irony of a freedom fighter and Doctor Rakhmabai on India’s first practicing woman doctor. These were concerted attempts to rid myself of the conventional tropes. I felt my growth as a filmmaker gradually tackling disruptive cinema like Bittersweet on the hysterectomy racket amongst women sugarcane cutters and Mai Ghat on a mother’s 13-year struggle for justice for her teenage son’s death by torture in police custody.
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On his book Once Upon A Time on television, returning to the Doordarshan era.
Forty years as an actor and director on television, had left me with a flood of memories. Also, there wasn’t a single record of our serials on Doordarshan and its founders like Sai Paranjpye, Basu Chatterjee, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Kundan Shah, Yash Chopra, Ramesh Sippy, Gulzar, Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani and several filmmakers who had crossed over to a limited format successfully.
My book is not just an autobiography but first-hand accounts of the creations of those I had not worked with. It turned out to be a bird’s eye-view of how shows were conceived and executed before the curse of the ‘dailies’ reduced the earlier exemplary work to nought. The book is both a personal diary and a saga of the small screen.

On the lack of still not being rated as a talking-point director despite winning National Awards… and the lack of media exposure.
True! I remain a non-entity despite the internationally acclaimed films and the National awards to boot. For someone who has directed 23 feature films to date, only 15 of which are to my liking, this is quite a paradox. I wouldn’t blame it on lack of PR. That’s a choice I made. On principle, I would not want to spend a rupee on promoting/advertising myself in the media. Anyone can make out that it is paid for. I continue to believe in the dictum that good work will find its audience and critics. The only coverage I have received is at the request of journalists.

Yet, I get this feeling that my stubborn refusal to pander to the media had isolated me from that must-go-to-zone nowadays. There have been deliberate attempts to ignore my films, avoid reviews and if reviewed, nitpick to such an extent that even an adaptation of Satyajit Ray’s The Storyteller is scoffed at. ‘He doesn’t belong to our fraternity because he doesn’t entertain us,’ seems to be the credo. This exclusion by some well-known reviewers and even by filmmakers touted as new wave film ‘legends’ exiles me from the charmed circle. Thankfully, I haven’t sunk into depression, the black hole they are pushing me into.

On why his protests about plagiarism and other issues are ignored.
See, Laapata Ladies and its similarity to my 1999 film Ghunghat Ke Pat Khol, plays out like a black comedy. Frankly I am flattered that a star like Aamir Khan found the concept of my film worth emulating. It’s their silence that is amusing.
Alright, one buys the theory that stories can be alike. But it cannot be a coincidence that several crucial plot points and scenes are similar.
Apparently, the writer who won a prize at a screen-writing competition has denied ever watching my film on YouTube. So, I’ve laughed it off. Laapata Ladies was also India’s entry for the Best Foreign Film Oscar. If only I had known that my film was Oscar material, I would have made a feature out of it decades ago.

On the altering film industry and streaming channels.
Cinema down the decades has seen a thought-changing, process-altering change. The days of the masters are over.
The Bengali, Assamese, Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada, Hindi auteurs are either no more or not making films. Sai Paranjpye has stated that she cannot fall in line with the twisted system. And Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s last film, Pinneyum (2016) indicated that he was trying to align to the changing trends.

The millennials are a group of half-baked ‘look-at-me’ talent. Drawing inspiration from Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese and Korean hits, using the camera like a sweeping broom, is not new-age filmmaking. The brand of western graphic gore and abuses has misled the current crop. Streaming channels, which are nothing but a mutation of the good old Doordarshan 13-episode season, were supposed to be the antidote for the failing television scene. But the uncensored liberty that they enjoy have resulted in mindless, repetitive content. Moreover, the descent into questionable selection practices at the helm of the streaming channels has resulted in genuine talent being shooed off. The vicious cycle continues.

Do you feel like an 'outsider' denied his just dues?
I don’t consider myself qualified to declare that I haven’t received my dues. But yes, I am keen to break the glass ceiling and people concerned could be kinder to me. In return I cannot be patronizing. I can only try to raise the bar of my work. To that extent, their rejection does give me the feeling of being an ‘outsider.’

On where you may have gone right or wrong
I should have started off with more thoughtful cinema than the mainstream films I indulged in. Also, networking has never been my forte. A Martin Scorsese blessing or an Alfonso Cuaron Presents would have done a world of good and made me a more recognized thinker. I have only myself to blame for not taking the initiative. I hope to seek support of some such masters to share my future screenplays.

On you latest projects Aata Vel Zaali and The Storyteller.
The Marathi film Aata Vel Zaali (It’s Time To Go) is an attempt to advocate active euthanasia. Based on the life of a couple in Mumbai, it was tough going. But I did not make compromises.

Simultaneously, The Storyteller fulfilled my long-nurtured desire to pay homage to Satyajit Ray. Fortunate Sandip Ray agreed to sell the rights of an original story by his father. I had to think like Ray and yet execute the film with today’s techniques. The overwhelming response from critics and audiences was a lesson for me…be steadfast, brave, unrelenting.

The ambition to open up and do a widescreen epic had happened with Phule which is relevant to date. Although it ruffled quite a few social and political feathers, the response was rewarding.
On whether creative satisfaction been worth the struggle.

Serve in heaven or rule in hell-- I have thought about this very seriously. I cannot regress back to mundane cinema. Creative satisfaction is a relative term, but I’d rather live with that for whatever it’s worth.
On anything you might like to add.

I need to re-invent myself, turn myself inside out. The goal is obviously to match world cinema. The urge is strong, the opportunities are not. We cannot continue to live in a world of crass commercialization. Cinema isn’t a consumer product. We need to rise above ourselves to make the film we will not be allowed to make.”

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