Cinema, Song & Sport

A barber by caste who built a touring Bhojpuri theatre company and wrote plays about the men who left for the city and the wives left behind. Performed for audiences who could not read, in a language the literary establishment ignored, for roughly fifty years.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Trained in London, co-founded Bombay Talkies, ran a studio in the 1930s and 1940s when almost no woman anywhere did, and later walked away from all of it to grow flowers in Bangalore.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Has been on set since 5 a.m., knows where everything is, and is credited nowhere. Every film in this hall exists because of a version of this person.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Rejected by All India Radio for his voice, which is now the most recognisable in the country. Survived a near-fatal on-set injury in 1982, went bankrupt in the nineties, and rebuilt the whole career on a television quiz show.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Ran the National School of Drama for fifteen years and rebuilt Indian theatre training from the ground up — text, design, lighting, discipline, and a great deal of shouting. Also a serious collector and gallerist, which is how much of modern Indian art history got documented.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Mixed pigment with animal glue and painted on plaster in a cave with no natural light, producing faces so alive that art students still copy them.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Studied theatre in Europe, came home, and concluded the actors he wanted were Chhattisgarhi folk performers who had never seen a proscenium. Built Naya Theatre around them and kept their dialect, timing and songs intact instead of smoothing them out.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Sold his wife's jewellery to finish his first film, shot it on weekends with a mostly amateur crew, and won at Cannes. Also designed typefaces, wrote detective fiction for children, scored his own films, and drew every shot before filming it.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Has died in eleven films, danced in two hundred, and been in focus exactly once, in 1994, for four frames.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Has spent as much time on housing rights and public health campaigns as on set, and is the daughter of a poet who taught her that the two are not separate activities.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

India's first full-length feature. The publicity promised a performance with 57,000 photographs, each the size of a grain of pea, which is a wonderfully literal way to advertise a film.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Made films about people the film industry ignored, in black and white so beautifully lit that cinematographers still study the shadows. His most personal film flopped completely and is now regularly listed among the best ever made anywhere.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Wrote Marathi plays about power and cruelty inside ordinary rooms — a classroom, a household, a political office — and got picketed for most of them. Several were banned or blocked before opening, which tended to confirm the point.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Carried a film about a woman farming alone through flood, debt and moral ruin, and turned it into the biggest Indian film of its era. Later became a member of the Rajya Sabha and a serious campaigner for spastic children.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Has played dozens of roles requiring full prosthetics, made a silent film in the 2000s, and financed several projects that everybody told him were commercially insane. Some of them were.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Recorded live on a single-system camera with the musicians hiding just outside frame. Silent films limped on for another three years and were finished by about 1934.

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Gave up the proscenium entirely for what he called Third Theatre — performed in courtyards and open ground, without sets, tickets or a raised stage, with the audience close enough to touch. Trained as a town planner, which possibly explains the interest in space.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Brought a quiet, interior style of acting to an industry built on volume, and every serious male lead since has been compared to him. Reportedly turned down the role that made another man a global star.

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Worked through a hole in the heart that nobody in the industry knew about, in an era with no surgical option in India. Died at 36.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Trained as a lawyer, three National Awards, and a filmography so long that Kerala measures eras by it. Kerala's two biggest stars have coexisted for forty years without either winning, which is a minor social miracle.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

A Rhodes Scholar who wrote his plays in Kannada, reaching for myth and folk tale to talk about very contemporary questions of power and identity. Also acted in a great many films, which funded the writing.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Inherited a vegetable oil company after his father died, turned it into a software giant, and has since pledged the large majority of his wealth to a foundation working on school education.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Made a sports drama in an invented dialect that got India its third Oscar nomination in the category, then a television series about social issues that changed several laws. Reads scripts for a living and acts occasionally.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Took an instrument played at weddings and outside temples and made it a concert instrument. Played at the Red Fort on the first Independence Day, and refused to leave Varanasi even when offered better everything.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Bhanu Athaiya for costume design in 1983 (shared), an honorary award to Satyajit Ray in 1992, A. R. Rahman and Resul Pookutty in 2009, and in 2023 both a song and a documentary short in the same night.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Studied kathak seriously enough that the choreography in her films is technically correct, which is not something you can say about most of the decade.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Performed street theatre for factory workers and urban poor with Jana Natya Manch. Attacked while staging a play in Sahibabad and died the next day, aged thirty-four; the troupe returned to the same spot to finish the performance.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Spent fifteen years in small television roles before anyone noticed, then built an international career on doing almost nothing visible with his face while conveying everything.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Local tradition says the 80-tonne capstone went up a ramp several kilometres long. Whether or not that is true, somebody in this position solved it, and nobody wrote down how.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Made films about landlords, milk cooperatives and rural power that were funded in one case by five lakh farmers contributing two rupees each. That is, genuinely, how it was financed.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

India releases well over 1,500 features a year across more than twenty languages. Hindi is not even the biggest of them by output — Telugu and Tamil regularly out-produce it.

Find it on the floor: Studio Bhoomi

Faced open discrimination for her caste and her voice — too deep, they said, for a woman — and became one of the defining Hindustani vocalists of the century.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

The first musician to receive the Bharat Ratna, and the first Indian to perform at the UN General Assembly. Gave away most of her concert earnings and kept an unfashionably plain house.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Beat Ding Liren in Singapore to become the youngest undisputed world chess champion in history. India now has over eighty grandmasters, most of them younger than the record.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Sang thumri and ghazal with a slight, deliberate crack in the voice that became the most imitated sound in the genre.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Trained in Bharatanatyam and Kathakali, founded the Darpana academy in Ahmedabad, and spent decades making dance about dowry deaths, environmental ruin and other things classical dance was not supposed to be about.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Took a dance form that had been pushed to the margins and rebuilt it as a performing art with a school behind it, then declined the offer to be President of India because she was busy.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Taught the sitar to a Beatle, played Woodstock, wrote concertos for Western orchestras, and spent the rest of his life gently correcting people who thought that was the interesting part.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Sangam poetry is full of poets describing exactly how generously a chieftain rewarded them, which tells you a great deal about the business model.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Deployed iron-cased war rockets against the Company in such numbers that captured examples were shipped to Woolwich and copied, becoming the ancestor of British military rocketry. Died on the walls of Srirangapatna.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Plays the drum slung at his waist while jumping, spinning and dropping to his knees, and does not miss a beat doing it. The dance and the percussion are the same job, performed by the same person.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Sang in Assamese, Bengali and Hindi about rivers, ferrymen and everyone the state forgot, and turned regional folk into something the whole country could hear.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Sang in more than forty languages and dialects and was, in Assam, less a singer than a civic institution.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Started singing professionally at thirteen after her father died, to support four siblings. Recorded in more than thirty languages across seven decades. Producers rebuilt studios around her microphone technique.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Style transmitted from teacher to student over decades, in the teacher's house, with the student often doing the washing up. Inefficient, unscalable, and it produced most of what is in this room.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Sang the songs her sister turned down and made a career out of exactly that — cabaret, ghazal, qawwali, pop, and a run of collaborations in the 1960s and 70s that redefined what a film song could sound like.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Could sing as a comedian, a heartbroken lover and a devotional singer in the same afternoon, in three completely different voices, and did so for about thirty years.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

A carved steatite bust with a trefoil shawl and a headband, staring calmly past everyone. We know nothing about him except that he was almost certainly neither a priest nor a king.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Issued coins in her own name, signed imperial orders, designed textiles, hunted tigers, and ran the empire while Jahangir attended to his opium and his memoirs.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Never trained formally, yodelled on purpose, acted in comedies, directed films nobody understood, and put a sign outside his house warning visitors about himself. Also one of the finest singers the country has produced.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Can be heard from three streets away and considers that the minimum acceptable standard.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Whoever ends up on the far right of this floor in fifty years is currently in a classroom somewhere arguing with a teacher.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Recorded around 40,000 songs in sixteen languages, once completing 21 in a single day. Also dubbed for actors, hosted television, and acted.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Trained in Carnatic music, sang film songs in a dozen languages, and has opened almost every Malayalam morning on the radio for half a century.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Wrote scores for over a thousand films, brought counterpoint and full orchestration into Tamil film music, and later wrote a symphony for a London orchestra.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Has been in position since 7 a.m. Has excellent range. Recognises no ceasefire.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

A set of rules about which notes may be used, in which order, with which ornament, and at what time of day — inside which the musician improvises for an hour. Roughly a framework with a personality.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Ten books, 1,028 hymns, memorised syllable-perfect and passed down by voice for a thousand years before anyone wrote them down. The most impressive feat of backup and version control in human history.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

A policy note arguing that a single shelf of European books was worth the whole literature of India and Arabia, written by a man who read neither. It set the medium of Indian higher education for the next century.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

Started as a session keyboard player at eleven after his father died, scored his first film at twenty-five, and changed the sound of Indian film music inside one release. Works at night, almost exclusively.

Find it on the floor: Sangeet Mahal

India's first track-and-field Olympic gold, then silver in Paris 2024, then the first Indian past 90 metres, at Doha in May 2025. Took up javelin to lose weight.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

The first Indian since independence to win two medals at a single Olympics, in the 10m air pistol and the mixed team, four days apart, aged 22.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

Survived Partition as an orphan, joined the army, and ran a 400m final so fast that his time stood as the national record for nearly four decades. Never got over looking back on the final bend.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

The closest an Indian has come to an Olympic track medal. Ran barefoot as a schoolgirl in Kerala, and now runs an academy and the Indian Olympic Association.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

Has an on-screen ease that directors describe as impossible to teach. Also, at one point, a serving Lieutenant Colonel in the Territorial Army.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

Opened the batting against the fastest bowling attacks of the era without a helmet, for most of his career, on purpose.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

World number one in 2015 and India's first Olympic badminton medallist in 2012, which is the reason the queue behind her exists.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

Wrote in Urdu and Persian through the collapse of the Mughal world, and considered his Persian the better work — a judgement almost nobody has agreed with since. Perpetually in debt, fond of mangoes, and unmatched at making a couplet turn on itself.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

Captained a team at 66–1 odds to a win at Lord's, having earlier played an innings of 175 not out that nobody has video of, because the BBC crew was on strike that day.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

On the UN commission drafting the Universal Declaration, she is credited with getting "all men are born free and equal" changed to "all human beings". One word, everywhere, forever.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

Debuted at sixteen against a bowling attack that had no interest in his age. Retired twenty-four years later having carried the expectations of a very large number of people with unusual grace.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

A ticket collector at Kharagpur station before the India call-up. Won the T20 World Cup in 2007, the ODI World Cup in 2011 and the Champions Trophy in 2013, then walked off without a farewell match.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

Won India's first Paralympic shooting gold in Tokyo, then defended the 10m air rifle title in Paris in 2024, setting a Paralympic record on the way.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

India were 66 to 1 outsiders and bowled out the two-time champions for 140. The country's entire relationship with cricket dates from that afternoon.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

Turned run-scoring into a fitness discipline and dragged an entire dressing room's standards up with him. Still winning matches in his late thirties, which he would tell you is the whole point of the fitness.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

Publicly insulted at the Nanda court, he found a boy, built him an empire, and used it to take the whole kingdom down. Then wrote a manual about it. The Arthashastra covers taxation, spycraft, mining law and, at length, how not to be poisoned.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

Most runs in women's ODIs, captained India to two World Cup finals, and was once photographed reading a book in the dugout waiting to bat, which became the most quietly powerful sports image of the decade.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

Spent two decades carrying Indian football largely on his own, and at one point had to publicly ask people to come and watch.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

Grew up in a village outside Kolkata, travelled four hours a day to train, and finished as the leading wicket-taker in women's ODI history.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

A sport whose entire rule set is: go into enemy territory, touch someone, get back, and do not inhale. India has won every Kabaddi World Cup it has taken seriously.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

The first host nation ever to win the final on home soil, and the tournament in which a team finally won the trophy for the man who had waited twenty-two years for it.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

Captained India to the country's first Women's Cricket World Cup, beating South Africa at Navi Mumbai in November 2025 — thirty-two years after the men had to wait for theirs.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

India's first grandmaster, in 1988, when the country had almost no chess infrastructure at all. Everything since has grown out of the gap he made.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

India beat New Zealand by 96 runs at the Narendra Modi Stadium to become the first team to win three men's T20 World Cups, the first to defend the title, and the first host to win it.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium

One silver and five bronzes. Also the disqualification of a wrestler for being 100 grams overweight on the morning of a final she had already reached.

Find it on the floor: Khel Ratna Stadium