Anurag Kashyap

Anurag Kashyap is an Indian filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, and occasional actor whose restless, provocative work has redrawn the boundaries of Hindi cinema over the past quarter-century. Born on 10 September 1972 in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, into a middle-class family with roots in the Indian bureaucracy, he grew up shuttling between cities as his father, an engineer with the state electricity board, was transferred from posting to posting. He was educated at Green School in Dehradun and Scindia School in Gwalior before moving to Delhi to study zoology at Hans Raj College. It was in Delhi, rather than in any film institute, that his cinematic education began, through a chance encounter with the films of Vittorio De Sica and a subsequent immersion in world cinema at the eighth International Film Festival of India. He has spoken often of walking into that festival as a young man with no plan and leaving it determined to make films.

Kashyap moved to Mumbai in the early 1990s with almost nothing, slept on footpaths and in the homes of acquaintances, and gradually found his way into television writing and street theatre. His break came when Ram Gopal Varma hired him, alongside Saurabh Shukla, to co-write Satya (1998), the Mumbai underworld drama that is now regarded as a foundational text of the Hindi new wave. The screenplay's unsentimental treatment of gangsters as working men in a corrupt city announced a new voice. He followed it with a co-writing credit on Shool (1999) and then stepped behind the camera for the first time with Paanch, a film loosely inspired by the Joshi-Abhyankar serial murders that was completed in 2003 but never granted a theatrical release by the Central Board of Film Certification on grounds of violence, drug use, and profanity.

The censorship troubles that would become a recurring theme of his career intensified with Black Friday (2004), his adaptation of S. Hussain Zaidi's book about the 1993 Bombay bombings. The film was held up for two years by court order until the trial concluded, and when it finally opened in 2007 it was received as a landmark of Indian docudrama, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles and a nominee for the Golden Leopard at Locarno. In between those releases, Kashyap wrote the English-language Partition drama The Last Lear and co-wrote Anurag Basu's Gangster. His second released feature as director, No Smoking (2007), a surreal Kafkaesque fable about a chain smoker, baffled audiences and critics on release but has since acquired a devoted cult following.

Dev.D (2009), a neon-soaked contemporary reworking of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's Devdas starring Abhay Deol, restored his commercial standing and earned him a National Film Award for Best Screenplay. Over the next few years he released the campus drama Gulaal, the noir-inflected That Girl in Yellow Boots, and the Cannes-selected two-part gangster epic Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), a sprawling multi-generational saga of coal mafia rivalries in Dhanbad that became his international calling card and a touchstone for a generation of younger Indian filmmakers. It was followed by the gentler small-town romance The Lunchbox, which he produced rather than directed, and by Ugly (2013), a harrowing procedural about a missing child that premiered at Cannes in the Directors' Fortnight.

Alongside directing, Kashyap has built a substantial career as a producer and cinema activist. With Vikramaditya Motwane, Madhu Mantena, and Vikas Bahl he co-founded Phantom Films in 2011, a production house responsible for Udaan, Shahid, Queen, Masaan, NH10, and Lootera before it dissolved in 2018. Through his earlier company AKFPL and the later Good Bad Films, he has produced or mentored work by Neeraj Ghaywan, Bhavesh Mandalia, and many first-time directors. He has championed independent distribution, spoken out repeatedly against the Central Board of Film Certification, and used his platform to back low-budget films that would otherwise never have been made.

His own directing credits through the mid-2010s and beyond include the boxing drama Mukkabaaz (2017), the audacious relationship study Manmarziyaan (2018), the brooding thriller Choked (2020), the Mumbai noir Dobaaraa (2022), and the self-reflexive Kennedy (2023), which premiered out of competition at Cannes. With Vikramaditya Motwane he co-created Sacred Games (2018-2019), Netflix's first Indian original series, adapted from Vikram Chandra's novel and starring Saif Ali Khan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, and Radhika Apte. Kashyap directed the Sartaj Singh timeline while Motwane handled the Ganesh Gaitonde flashbacks in the first season, and the show's combination of political paranoia, religious dread, and Mumbai street texture introduced his sensibility to a global streaming audience.

As an actor he has appeared in Akira, Imaiyada Nodigal, Zoya Akhtar's Luck by Chance, Rahi Anil Barve's Tumbbad (as a voice artist and producer), AK vs AK, Choked, Haddi, and Vasan Bala's Peddlers, usually cast as a heavy or as a version of himself. He has been candid about personal struggles with depression, weight, and alcohol, and about two divorces, first from editor Aarti Bajaj and then from actress Kalki Koechlin, both of whom have remained collaborators. His daughter Aaliyah Kashyap is a prominent lifestyle influencer.

His accolades include the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, conferred on him in 2013, multiple Filmfare Critics' Awards, a Special Mention at the National Film Awards for Black Friday, and festival recognition at Cannes, Venice, Sundance, and Toronto. He has served on juries at Cannes, Venice, the International Film Festival of India, and Marrakech, and has lectured extensively on screenwriting and independent production at film schools across South Asia and Europe. Whether directing, producing, acting, or agitating for a freer industry, Kashyap remains one of Indian cinema's most divisive and consequential figures, a restless polymath and occasional provocateur who has insisted, often at considerable commercial cost to himself, that Hindi film can look unflinchingly at violence, sex, faith, caste, corruption, and the grubbier corners of Indian political life without flinching or apologising for what it sees.