🇮🇳 Anurag Kashyap

He was born in 1972 in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, the eldest son of an electrical engineer at the state power board. He grew up in small UP towns — Obra, Varanasi, then a longer stretch in Allahabad — watching whatever the local theatre played, often pirated Bruce Lee tapes alternating with Mrinal Sen. He moved to Delhi to study zoology at Hansraj College, then drifted into the Jana Natya Manch theatre group with director Safdar Hashmi's troupe, where he learned to write scenes on the back of cigarette packets.

He arrived in Bombay in 1993 with five hundred rupees in his pocket and slept on Juhu beach for several nights before finding a slum room to share. He found his way to Ram Gopal Varma, co-wrote Satya (1998) with Saurabh Shukla — the screenplay that essentially reset Hindi crime film — and assisted on Kaun and Shool. His own directorial debut, Paanch, was banned by the Censor Board in 2003 and was never released theatrically. He spent the next four years writing for others, watching projects collapse, drinking too much, and once attempting to leave the city for good.

Black Friday (2007), his fictionalised account of the 1993 Bombay bombings, was held back by the Bombay High Court for two years until the verdict against the accused, and was finally released to widespread acclaim. Dev.D (2009), a contemporary Devdas with Abhay Deol, made its lead a star and gave the Hindi indie aesthetic its first commercial proof of concept. Audiences in single-screens in tier-two towns walked out shocked; multiplex audiences in Bombay walked out converted.

Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) — a two-part, five-hour-long generational saga about the coal mafia of Dhanbad — premiered at Cannes Directors' Fortnight and changed everything. Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Manoj Bajpayee, Pankaj Tripathi, Tigmanshu Dhulia and a cohort of writers including Zeishan Quadri and Akhilesh Jaiswal all emerged from its orbit. Hindi cinema's tonal vocabulary widened overnight. Sholay, the previous benchmark for crime epic, was now politely retired.

He co-founded Phantom Films in 2011 with Vikramaditya Motwane, Vikas Bahl and Madhu Mantena, building one of the first indie production houses in modern Hindi cinema. The company was dissolved in 2018 amid the #MeToo allegations against Bahl, which Kashyap has said he wishes he had acted on faster. He has since been an unusually candid voice on the industry's failings, often at considerable personal cost — both legal and reputational.

His Netflix series Sacred Games (2018), co-directed with Vikramaditya Motwane and adapted from Vikram Chandra's novel, was the first Indian original on the platform and one of its most successful global launches. He has since directed Manmarziyaan, Choked, Dobaaraa, Kennedy and the festival favourite Almost Pyaar with DJ Mohabbat. He acts often — sometimes in his own films, sometimes as the villain in someone else's commercial film when he needs the money — and produces relentlessly.

He is twice-divorced — from editor Aarti Bajaj and from actress Kalki Koechlin — and a single father to writer-actor Aaliyah Kashyap. He left Bombay in 2024 to live more quietly in Goa, citing political pressure and tax investigations he has called retributive. He continues to produce films by younger directors at a rate few in the industry can match, often without ever taking a producer credit.