On September 22, the President of India, Droupadi Murmu presented the 72nd National Film Awards in Ekta Nagar, Gujarat marking a departure from the recent tradition of holding the ceremony at Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi. As a major policy initiative by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the shifting of venue is foreseeing the possibility of future editions of the country’s highest cinema honour to travel across other states and cities rather than stay anchored within the national capital. It may be perceived as a small logistical decision but it holds a symbolic weight for cinema that the ceremony belongs to every region, not just to the corridors of New Delhi.
This year’s list of winners, announced on July 18, 2026, reflects the similar spirit of the country’s central measure of cinematic merit. In the category of the Best Feature Film, Article 370 was given the award along with its lead actress Yami Gautam who won the Best Actress award. Similarly, Mammootty and Kartik Aaryan were given the Best Actor honours for Bramayugam and Chandu Champion respectively, while Rajkumar Periasamy won Best Direction for the Tamil film Amaran. Interestingly the most quietly significant win came in the non-feature category, where Angen, directed by Ravi Raj Murmu, became the first Santhali-language film to be honoured — a marker of how far the awards’ linguistic reach now extends. This year, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, cinema’s lifetime achievement honour was given to veteran actor Anant Nag, whose five-decade career spans over 300 films across six languages.
Meanwhile, to understand the context why national awards matter so much in present circumstances we need to look back at where the process began in the country prior to partition of the subcontinent. In 1913, Indian cinema’s own story started when Dadasaheb Phalke completed Raja Harishchandra, the country’s first full-length feature film. It took four more decades for the Indian state to formally recognise the art form: following recommendations from the 1949 Film Enquiry Committee, the government instituted the State Awards for Films in 1954, honouring the films of 1953. That first edition was modest — just seven honours across feature films, documentaries and children’s films, with Shyamchi Aai winning the top feature film prize. The awards grew steadily with the industry itself. Acting honours arrived only in 1967-68, when Uttam Kumar and Nargis won the first Best Actor and Best Actress awards.
“Diverse, Decentralized, Unbound: The 72nd National Film Awards bridge tradition and inclusion—celebrating groundbreaking debuts from Santhali, Garhwali, and Tulu cinema while moving beyond major industry hubs to champion India’s true cinematic breadth.
The Dadasaheb Phalke Award followed in 1969, first given to Devika Rani. Administration passed to the Directorate of Film Festivals in 1973, and in 2022 that body merged into the National Film Development Corporation, which now runs the awards. Each of these shifts added new categories, new crafts, and new regions to the fold — a process the 72nd edition continues, most visibly through its recognition of films in Garhwali and Tulu, languages outside the Constitution’s Eighth Schedule that nonetheless now have a place on the national stage. The awards’ purpose has stayed remarkably consistent since 1954: to encourage films of technical and aesthetic merit, to help audiences understand the country’s regional cultures, and, through that understanding, to strengthen national unity. They are not simply trophies.
A National Award pulls a film out of a narrow regional audience and onto a country-wide platform, often reshaping a filmmaker’s career in the process. That mission carries real economic weight today. India’s media and entertainment sector is now the fifth largest in the world, powered by millions of digital creators and a strong cost advantage in animation and VFX work. Cinema is not just cultural expression — it is a livelihood engine and a form of soft power that carries Indian storytelling to global audiences.
The 72nd National Film Awards capture an industry in transition: still rooted in the two-tier jury system introduced decades ago, still measuring films against the same core standards of craft and social relevance, but increasingly willing to look beyond the familiar centres of Hindi and major regional cinema. A Santhali film winning for the first time, a Garhwali and Tulu film earning separate recognition, and the ceremony itself relocating to Gujarat all point in the same direction — toward an award that is finally trying to look as diverse as the country whose films it honours. If that trajectory holds, the National Film Awards may end up doing more than crowning the year’s best films; they may help build the audience for cinema that has, until now, rarely reached beyond its own region.
(This is a PIB background article on National Film Awards mailed by Press Information Bureau-PIB, Srinagar for publication in “Kashmir Horizon”. The views, opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the authors and aren’t necessarily in accord with the views of “Kashmir Horizon”)
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