Manoj Kumar's Directing Debut Upkar Won Seven Filmfare Awards, and He Went On to Receive India's Highest Cinema Honour, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award

Upkar, the first film Manoj Kumar directed, won seven Filmfare Awards, among them Best Film, Best Director and Best Story, and the National Film Awards for 1967 named it Second Best Feature Film. The Information and Broadcasting Ministry says it was made after Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri asked Kumar, following the 1965 war, for a film on his slogan Jai Jawan Jai Kisan, which means Hail the Soldier, Hail the Farmer.

His hero in Upkar, Purab Aur Paschim (1970) and Roti Kapda Aur Makaan (1974) was called Bharat, and audiences began calling him Bharat Kumar. On 3 May 2016 President Pranab Mukherjee presented him with the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, which the BBC describes as India’s highest cinematic honour.

From Abbottabad to Hindu College

The ministry’s 2016 release gives the outline. He was born in Abbottabad, then part of undivided India, in July 1937 and moved to Delhi when he was ten. After graduating from Hindu College at the University of Delhi he decided to enter films, and he made his debut in Fashion in 1957. ThePrint and Scroll give his birth name as Harikrishan Giri Goswami and his birthday as 24 July.

At a ministry session in 2025, his son Kunal Goswami said his father lost everything in Partition, lived in refugee camps and began by writing scripts in Urdu. Scroll adds that he took the screen name Manoj Kumar, supposedly after Dilip Kumar’s character in Shabnam (1949), and that stardom came with Woh Kaun Thi in 1964.

Shaheed: four years of reading about Bhagat Singh

Shaheed came out in 1965. The Indian Express lists S. Ram Sharma as director and Kewal Kashyap as producer, with Manoj Kumar as Bhagat Singh, Prem Chopra as Sukhdev, Anant Marathe as Rajguru and Kamini Kaushal as Bhagat Singh’s mother. Kumar told the paper in 2014 that he had in effect directed it. Box Office India’s obituary says he did so without a credit.

He described four years of preparation: newspaper offices, old books, evenings at the Hindu Library in Madras after other shoots, and meetings with Bhagat Singh’s lawyer and surviving revolutionaries. Shooting began in 1963. The Indian Express reports that the film won the National Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi and the award for Best Feature Film on National Integration.

Kumar recalled that Bhagat Singh’s mother, Vidyavati, attended the award function in Delhi and that the prize money went to her. His son told the 2025 session that his father had also brought her to the premiere. The songs were composed by Prem Dhawan, a newcomer Kumar had proposed. Mohammad Rafi sang “Aye Watan”, and Manna Dey, Rafi and Rajendra Mehta sang “Sarfaroshi Ki Tamanna”.

The ministry’s release says his image as the patriotic hero began with this film. The history it dramatises is told in tuput’s accounts of Bhagat Singh’s life and hanging at 23 and of the 1929 Assembly bombs and the ordinance that followed.

Who asked for Upkar, and when

The accounts agree on the request and differ on the occasion. The 2016 ministry release says Shastri asked for the film after the 1965 war. Rachel Dwyer, writing in Open magazine, and the Hindustan Times say he asked after seeing Shaheed. ThePrint says the idea is believed to have begun at the Shaheed premiere. At the ministry’s 2025 session, the author and lyricist Raajeev Shrivastav described a Delhi screening of Shaheed that Shastri attended, and said Kumar wrote the story of Upkar on the overnight train journey back to Mumbai.

India was short of grain at the time, and ThePrint notes that Shastri had asked citizens to fast one day a week. The wheat output that followed is in tuput’s account of M. S. Swaminathan and the Green Revolution. Shastri died in Tashkent in January 1966, hours after signing the declaration that ended the 1965 war. The film was shot in 1966 and released in 1967, after his death.

In the story, Bharat (Manoj Kumar) is a farmer who gives up his share of the land to his brother Puran (Prem Chopra) and later fights in the war. Kamini Kaushal plays their mother, Asha Parekh a young doctor who settles in the village, and Pran an upright farmer called Malang Chacha. ThePrint lists the themes as grain shortage, hoarding, black marketing, population growth and the lack of doctors in villages.

A village in north-west Delhi played Bharat’s home

The Hindustan Times traced the shoot to Nangal Thakran, a village in north-west Delhi about 45 km from Connaught Place. The crew arrived in the summer of 1966 and filmed in pieces over several months. Villagers lent their fields and bullocks. Jhuman Chowdhry, one of the village’s largest farmers, offered his house, which stood in for Bharat’s home, and his fields. His great-grandson, Pawan Kumar, told the paper that Manoj Kumar offered compensation and Chowdhry would not take it.

Chowdhry’s name appears in the opening credits, and Pawan Kumar said Manoj Kumar sent him a special invitation to the 1967 release. Azad Singh Bhardwaj, a villager who was 19 during the shoot, said it left young people in the village prouder of farming.

Seven Filmfare awards and a song that outlived the film

Filmfare’s list for 1968 gives Upkar Best Film, Best Director and Best Story and Dialogue for Manoj Kumar, Best Supporting Actor for Pran, Best Editor for B. S. Glaad and Best Lyricist for Gulshan Bawra, for “Mere Desh Ki Dharti”. In the National Film Awards for 1967, the Times of India’s list shows Upkar as Second Best Feature Film, credited to Manoj Kumar and R. N. Goswami, and Mahendra Kapoor as Best Playback Singer of the Year for the same song.

Kalyanji-Anandji composed the music. Scroll writes that “Mere Desh Ki Dharti” still plays on loudspeakers every Independence Day and Republic Day. Pran, who was usually cast as a villain, played a decent man here, and Scroll says the role changed the course of his career.

Box Office India, a trade site, called Upkar the third-highest grosser of its time in an article on the film Kick. Scroll’s obituary notes that the film has no anti-Pakistani jingoism, which it contrasts with patriotic dramas made since.

Purab Aur Paschim and Roti Kapda Aur Makaan

Purab Aur Paschim (spelled Pachhim in some credits) came out in 1970, with Manoj Kumar directing and playing another Bharat. The University of Iowa’s Indian Cinema site describes a prologue in black and white set in the independence struggle, in which Bharat’s father, a freedom fighter, is killed. The grown Bharat travels to London, meets a family of settled Indians who have drifted from Indian ways, and falls for their daughter Preeti (Saira Banu). Dwyer calls it a founding film in the depiction of the Indian diaspora.

Box Office India says it reached Britain in 1971, played for more than 50 weeks in London and grossed around 285,000 pounds in the United Kingdom. That figure stood as the British benchmark for 23 years, until Hum Aapke Hain Kaun in 1994, in the trade site’s account.

Roti Kapda Aur Makaan (1974) was, in the ministry’s words, a social commentary with an all-star cast including Zeenat Aman, Shashi Kapoor and Amitabh Bachchan. Scroll describes an educated man struggling with unemployment, which it calls a major issue then, while trying to stay clear of corruption. Filmfare’s list for 1975 gives Manoj Kumar Best Director for it, Mahendra Kapoor Best Playback Singer (Male) for “Nahin Nahin Bas Aur Nahin”, and Santosh Anand Best Lyricist for “Main Na Bhulunga”. Box Office India counts it among his “huge hits”, along with Kranti (1981), the independence-movement film that he directed and starred in with Dilip Kumar and Hema Malini.

What the Bharat films say about the nation

Dwyer studied the three films in which he played Bharat: Upkar, Purab Aur Paschim and Roti Kapda Aur Makaan. She writes that they were all commercial successes with hit songs, and that audiences remembered them for the speeches in which Bharat speaks for the nation. In her reading, patriotism is the entertainment, and politics and economics give way to romance and family. She notes that the films show the state favourably through the army and the police, and stress the virtues of peasants and traditional values. She adds that the films have been mocked for their melodrama, and that audiences responded strongly to them anyway. Her conclusion is that they are patriotic without being necessarily nationalistic: they uphold Indian values based largely on tradition, and they value the state’s institutions while criticising the state.

Scroll’s obituary describes the same pattern from another side: a son-of-the-soil Indian set against Westernised Indians who have lost touch with their values, with Bharat bringing them back.

The Padma Shri, the Phalke Award and April 2025

The government gave him the Padma Shri in 1992, according to the ministry. Scroll and Outlook report a Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999.

The Phalke Award was announced on 4 March 2016 as the 47th, for the year 2015. It carries a Swarn Kamal (Golden Lotus), Rs 10 lakh (1 million rupees) and a shawl. A five-member jury of Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, Salim Khan, Nitin Mukesh and Anup Jalota recommended him unanimously, and Information and Broadcasting Minister Arun Jaitley telephoned to congratulate him. Kumar, then 78, told IANS it was “a pleasant surprise”. President Pranab Mukherjee presented the award at the 63rd National Film Awards function in New Delhi on 3 May 2016.

Box Office India’s obituary says health problems followed Kranti and that Clerk, delayed to 1989, did not do well. His last big-screen appearance was Maidan-E-Jung in 1995, the Indian Express recorded in 2016.

He died early on 4 April 2025 at Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital in Mumbai, aged 87. The Prime Minister’s Office published Narendra Modi’s message that morning, saying his work “ignited a spirit of national pride”. The BBC reported tributes from fellow actors, including Akshay Kumar and Ajay Devgn.

His last rites were held at the Pawan Hans crematorium in Vile Parle on 5 April, with his body wrapped in the tricolour. Outlook reports that Maharashtra minister Pratap Sarnaik announced state honours. On 1 May 2025 the Information and Broadcasting Ministry held a session at WAVES 2025 in Mumbai titled “Remembering Manoj Kumar: Ace Filmmaker, True Nationalist”.