Hindi
Indian American filmmaker and stage director Krishna Shah passes away
Indian American filmmaker Krishna Shah, who had made several films in India before immigrating to the United States where he gained fame in Hollywood and the Broadway stage, passed away earlier this week in Mumbai.
Aged 75, he had been ill since he suffered a stroke last year.
Shah is best remembered in India for ‘Shalimar’, which he wrote and directed in 1978. It starred Dharmendra, Zeenat Aman, O P Ralhan, Shreeram Lagoo, Rex Harrison, Silvia Miles, John Saxon, Shammi Kapoor, Prem Nath, and Aruna Irani among others.
Other films that he is remembered for include ‘Cinema Cinema’, a documentary about Bollywood that screened at the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes which he co-wrote and directed; ‘Hard Rock Zombies’, released by Cannon; and ‘American Drive-In’, which he also co-wrote, directed and produced. Indian films included ‘Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Ramayana’ (1992), which he re-wrote as ‘The Prince of Light’ in 2000 when it was directed by Yugo Sako.
In the last few years, Shah had been more involved with films about India, and had been working since 2009 on the research on an ambitious biopic of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
He held a series of story-telling seminars for aspiring filmmakers in Mumbai; while he also helped fledgling diaspora filmmakers such as Harish Saluja and Nagesh Kukunoor by presenting the films at festivals and in the marketplace in India.
Born in India and a graduate of Yale and UCLA, Shah was probably the first Asian-American writer/director/producer to win critical acclaim both in Hollywood and on Broadway.
He co-authored and directed a South African stage play called ‘Sponono’ on Broadway, and adapted and directed an adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘The King of the Dark Chamber’ which ran for a year and received two OBIE awards.
Other off-Broadway productions included Kalidasa’s ‘Shakuntala’, Athol Fugard’s ‘Bloodknot’ and Milton Hood Ward’s ‘Kindly Monies’ staged at the New Arts Theatre in London.
His screenplays included ‘Island in Harlem’ for MGM, ‘April Morning’ for Samuel Goldwyn Jr. and the psychiatric thriller ‘Rivals’ which he also produced and directed. ‘River Niger’ starring Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones and Lou Gosset Jr. earned awards at festivals and a Golden Globe nomination as well. His animated feature film ‘The Prince of Light’ was long listed for the 2002 Academy Awards in its feature animation category.
He was known in American television as well, having written and/or directed several hit shows such as ‘The Man From UNCLE’, ‘Love American Style’, ‘The Flying Nun’ and ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’; and was an entertainment entrepreneur who served as president and CEO of Double Helix Films, the Carnegie Film Group and MRI Inc., a production and distribution company.
Hindi
Remembering Gyan Sahay, the lens behind film, television and advertising
From a puppet rabbit selling poppadums to Hindi cinema, he framed it all.
MUMBAI: There are careers, and then there are canvases. Gyan Sahay, the veteran cinematographer, director, and producer who passed away on 10 March 2026 in Mumbai, had one of the latter. Over several decades in the Indian film and television industry, he turned lenses, lights, and the occasional puppet rabbit into something approaching art.
A graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune, Sahay built his reputation as a director of photography across a career that stretched from the early 1970s all the way to the digital age. He was the kind of craftsman who understood that a well-composed shot is not merely a technical achievement but a quiet act of storytelling.
For most Indians of a certain age, however, Sahay will forever be the man behind the rabbit. His direction of the iconic long-running television commercial for Lijjat Papad, featuring its now-legendary puppet bunny, gave the country one of its most cheerfully persistent advertising images. It was the sort of work that sneaks into the national subconscious and takes up permanent residence.
His big-screen credits as cinematographer include Anokhi Pehchan (1972), Pagli (1974), Pas de Deux (1981), and Hum Farishte Nahin (1988). In 1999, he stepped behind a different kind of camera altogether, making his directorial debut with Sar Ankhon Par, a drama that featured Vikas Bhalla and Shruti Ulfat, with a cameo by Shah Rukh Khan for good measure.
On television, Sahay was particularly prized for his command of multi-camera production setups, a skill that made him a go-to technician for large-scale shows and reality programmes. In an industry that has never been especially patient with complexity, he was the calm hand on the rig.
In later life, Sahay turned teacher. He participated regularly in masterclasses and Digi-Talks, often hosted by organisations such as Bharatiya Chitra Sadhna, sharing hard-won wisdom on cinematography, the comedy of timing in a shot, and the sweeping changes brought by the shift from celluloid to digital. He was also said to have been involved in a project concerning a biographical film on Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy.
Tributes from the film industry poured in following the news of his passing, with colleagues remembering him as a senior cameraman who served as a rare bridge between two entirely different eras of Indian cinema. That is, perhaps, the finest thing one can say of any craftsman: he kept up, and he brought others along with him.
