Article 370 and a Savarkar biopic take top honours at India's 72nd National Film Awards

On the morning of 18 July 2026, in a sparsely attended press conference at the National Media Centre in New Delhi, the jury for India's 72nd National Film Awards named its winners. The slate was dominated by two titles carrying sharply different political weather: the Kashmir-flagship thriller Article 370, which had framed last year's general-election debate over the abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, and the long-gestating biopic on Hindutva ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. Both films walked away with the top honours, with the Tamil military drama Amaran named best feature film, per Scroll.in and The Indian Express.

The choice reads less as a verdict on Indian cinema than as a verdict on what the state wants cinema to be saying. Three of the loudest titles of the past year traded on contemporary political temperature, and the jury, chaired by filmmaker Ashutosh Gowariker, chose to ratify the trade.

What the jury picked

Article 370, directed by Aditya Suhas Jambhale and produced by Jio Studios and B62 Studios, swept the Hindi-language categories: best Hindi film, best director for Jambhale, and acting honours that lifted both Yami Gautam and Priya Mani to recognition for their portrayals of intelligence and security officials operating in the run-up to the 2019 constitutional change that stripped Jammu and Kashmir of its special status. The film had already done the work of a campaign artefact in the months before the 2024 Lok Sabha election, when Kashmir policy was once again a coalition-shaping issue.

The Savarkar biopic, helmed by Pawan Kulkarni and produced under the tent of the Maharashtra Mandal of the Sangh Parivar's cultural ecosystem, took the award for best feature film in Marathi, with the lead actor's award going to its principal cast. Scroll.in noted the film's long shadow over the jury's slate: a project that travelled from limited-screen release to aggressive streaming promotion to citation as state-cultural recognition in the space of a single award cycle.

Amaran, a Tamil-language action-drama about the 2018 Pulwama-era counter-terror operations and built around the Indian Army's hyper-kinetic counter-terror playbook, took best feature film overall. The award formally goes to its two leads, Sai Pallavi and the late Muralitharan, an uncharacteristic shared honour that drew immediate attention because the Indian Express tally listed Amaran as the night's biggest winner alongside Article 370.

What the awards are, and aren't

The National Film Awards are administered by the Directorate of Film Festivals, an arm of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, and the winners are formally announced by a jury convened by the government of the day. The slate is the largest publicly funded film honour in the country, with categories running across regional languages, technical crafts, and writing.

That makes the awards two things at once: an industry recognition of craft, and a read of the cultural line the incumbent executive is prepared to certify. This year's slate leans hard on the second reading. The two political-coded titles that dominate the headlines were also the two that received the most sustained promotional muscle from state-aligned broadcasters and streaming platforms in the year preceding the jury's deliberations.

A counter-reading is that the jury simply rewarded what Indian audiences actually watched. Article 370 and Amaran were both commercial hits; the Savarkar biopic travelled furthest through subscription-funded streaming recommendation engines that do not depend on theatre revenue. If the awards ratify box-office behaviour as much as ideological posture, the slate looks less political than it does industrial. The two explanations are not mutually exclusive, and the juries do not have to choose.

Why the choices travelled

Coverage in Scroll.in and The Indian Express both flagged the dominance of Article 370 and the Savarkar biopic as a defining feature of the 72nd cycle, and in the hours after the announcement the response split along predictable lines. The BJP and its cultural affiliates read the result as belated official acknowledgement of films that had already done political work in the public sphere. The Congress and a section of the regional-party commentary treated the slate as evidence that the jury had become an extension of the incumbent's communications stack rather than an independent measure of cinematic merit.

Outside the partisan fight, the choice of Article 370 for top Hindi honours continues a pattern in which films about Kashmir policy are evaluated as much by their political utility as by their craft. The film itself is competently made, with Yami Gautam's intelligence-officer role earning particular notice; the question of whether the jury would have conferred the same set of honours on a film that took the abrogation as grievance rather than as triumph was answered, by implication, on Friday morning.

Stakes and what to watch next

Two questions now sit in the open. First, the streaming pipelines. Both Article 370 and the Savarkar biopic built their reach through subscription platforms whose recommendation algorithms rewarded topicality; the National Award citation will, in turn, feed the recommendation system a fresh burst of demand. The economics of politically engaged cinema in India is now a closed loop with the cultural-policy state.

Second, the precedent for the 73rd cycle. If this jury's reading holds, films built around the ideological perimeter of the incumbent, Kashmir policy, the Hindutva canon, military operations, the new temple landscapes of Uttar Pradesh, will continue to find both production finance and post-production amplification. If the next year's slate tilts further in that direction, the awards will have ceased to be even the ambiguous cultural-bureaucratic institution they were a decade ago, and become something closer to an honours list.

The 72nd National Film Awards did not break new ground in Indian cinema. They confirmed, with more clarity than usual, what kind of cinema India's current cultural-policy arrangement is willing to put its seal on.

Desk note: this publication reads the 72nd National Film Awards as a state-mediated certification of last year's most politically conspicuous Hindi and Marathi releases, with regional-category recognition for Tamil war film Amaran framed as craft recognition rather than political statement. Coverage in Scroll.in and The Indian Express flagged Article 370 and the Savarkar biopic as the cycle's defining winners; Monexus carries that framing forward and asks whether the industry-effect reading fully accounts for the slate.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/72nd_National_Film_Awards
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate_of_Film_Festivals