Indian parallel cinema pioneered ecological consciousness long before climate change entered mainstream discourse. Filmmakers like Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Shyam Benegal used their art to treat land as a living character rather than a mere backdrop, showing how environmental distress is deeply intertwined with social injustice, displacement, and feudal exploitation. By centering Adivasi communities as true ecologists and examining the impacts of industrialization and rapid urbanization, these films established that ecological loss is cultural and human loss—a legacy that continues to inspire modern Indian cinema’s approach to environmental and climate themes.
Environment Pulse Desk: Long before climate change became mainstream media, long before hashtags or green economic concern, Indian parallel cinema was doing the seed planting.
Mainstream Bollywood may have been selling dreams in Swiss meadows, but the parallel filmmakers had trained their lenses on the parched back home.
Launched in the 1960s with Mrinal Sen, Satyajit Ray and later Shyam Benegal — it had never only been about aesthetics. It was about interrogation. And one of those most stubborn questions was: what are we doing with our land?
Land as Character, Not Setting
In mainstream cinema, nature is a setting for romance. Which is a character that endures, hits back and grieves in parallel cinema. Look at Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder, 1973) by Satyajit Ray. In Bengal in the middle of a famine — it had just filmed in Worlds War, its not Bookmakers-selling type film. The emptying of the dense green colored paddy fields. This is where the green grows sardonic — yes, there is abundance, but human systems produce hunger. Ray muted His green message: ecological distress is social distress. Mrinal Sen correctly pushed this further with Mrigayaa (1976) Set in Santhal tribal lands of the 1930s, it portrayed the forest as Adivasi home, pharmacy and god systematically being taken over by zamindars and the British. The beheading of a tree staged like an amputation.
The Adivasi and his Ecological knowledge
Parallel cinema always placed the Adivasi as the real ecologist. There were also films that, as Gautam Ghose’s Paar (1984), Jahnu Barua’s Assamese Halodhia Choraye Baodhan Khai (1987) and later Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Tahader Katha (1992) demonstrated displacement from forest is not only economic loss it is cultural death. The Greenest Statement As in the strongest for green Elippathayam (Rat Trap, 1982) (dir. Inside a crumbling feudal house, rats have taken over — but so too have the paddy fields outside them. The hero’s unwillingness to adapt to the evolving socio-political conditions of land, so their refusal to change with time and live sustainably. Shyam Benegal linked ecology to labour in his Manthan (1976) and Susman (1987). Manthan — on the dairy cooperative movement — rejoiced in self-sufficiency rather than predatory production. Susman offered us images of handloom weavers being squeezed by machine-made cloth, a subtle jab at energy-consuming industrialization versus sustainable craft.
The Urban Shadow
As India entered an age of rapid urbanization in the 80s and 90s, parallel cinema turned its attention to urban ecology. In Naseem (1995), Saïd Akhtar Mirza connects communalism and environmental apathy as births of forgetting roots in a dying tree in a Bombay chawl, juxtaposing it against the Babri Masjid demolition. But if Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala (1987), for example, has been read as a feminist film, it is also deeply ecological. Equal parts indigenous and low-impact, the chilli factory of arid Kutch – red, fiery, collective labour against mononous modernity.
Parallel cinema — the legacy today
The new wave – on forests as Naxal and ecological conflict zones from Newton (2017) to Sherni (2021) to Kadvi Hawa (2017) confronting human-wildlife conflict and climate change – is indebted for its grammar to parallel cinema. It never begged for “Save the Planet.” It said: Look at this tree! Look at who lived under it. Look at who cut it. And ask why. Soil is the tale of caste, class, gender and tribe. That strategy codified the message. As slogans go out of style, Ray’s desolate paddy field and Sen’s timber-laden tree remain with us – a stark reminder that to lose green is not merely to lose colour but ourselves.
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