Eyebrows Raised As National Film Awards To Be Hosted In Gujarat

For seventy-two years the National Film Awards behaved as if they were, well, national. Instituted in 1954, they lived mostly in Delhi; Vigyan Bhawan, the President, one capital so that Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil and Hindi could all take the same train. The one famous exception was 1970 in Madras: awkward, but at least Madras made films. IFFI wandered Mumbai–Delhi–Chennai–Kolkata until someone had the sense to park it in Goa and give the country a Cannes of its own. That was geography in the service of cinema. Now the 72nd ceremony on 22 September 2026 will unfold at Ekta Nagar, formerly Kevadia, under a German aluminium dome in the bus bay of the Statue of Unity. Government has not explained the shift; it has only built the dome. Gujarat’s film industry is not Chennai, not Hyderabad, not Kolkata, and it is certainly not Mumbai. No Indian industry is bigger than Hindi cinema, and no serious map of Indian cinema begins at Narmada district. The last time we moved the awards for cinema, we went to a city that actually produced them. This time we have gone to a monument inaugurated in 2018. The official poetry writes itself. A non-feature on the Statue of Unity wins Best Direction, so the awards will be given in the statue’s shadow. Delhi was national because it belonged to nobody’s industry. Gujarat is “national” because everything else is already moving there. The Swarna Kamal will still shine. It will simply shine next to a souvenir shop. The question is not whether the President can present an award at Ekta Nagar. Of course, she can. The question is why Indian cinema had to become a tourist attraction to receive its own medal.