Anant Nag dedicates Dadasaheb Phalke Award to Karnataka: ‘Couldn’t have done this elsewhere’

Veteran Kannada actor Anant Nag has dedicated his Dadasaheb Phalke Award to the people of Karnataka.

Veteran Kannada actor Anant Nag has dedicated his recent Dadasaheb Phalke Award to the people of Karnataka, crediting the state’s filmmakers, audiences and cultural environment for making his career possible. The 77-year-old actor said that the opportunities he found in Karnataka allowed him to work across both art films and commercial cinema in a way that would not have been possible anywhere else in the country.

“This would not have been possible for me anywhere else,” Anant Nag told ANI. He described Karnataka’s audiences as “a very, very educated audience and very discerning audience” and credited the state’s cultural ecosystem, its producers, directors, actors, actresses and most importantly its people, for creating the conditions that shaped his five-decade career.

Anant Nag traced his journey back to his childhood. He was born in Shirali in the Uttara Kannada district in 1948, but was sent to Bombay at the age of 12. While there, he observed that making art films in Mumbai was difficult, with filmmakers like Shyam Benegal and Satyajit Ray being exceptions rather than the norm. It was only when he returned to Karnataka for a film that he realised the atmosphere was fundamentally different.