Anant Nag picks up Indian cinema's highest honour on Monday. The actor receives the Dadasaheb Phalke Award for 2024 at the 72nd National Film Awards ceremony in Gujarat on September 22, according to a report in The Hindu, becoming only the second Kannada actor to win it after Dr. Rajkumar.

Nag, 78, has spent five decades moving between art-house cinema and mainstream Kannada hits without ever settling into one lane. He calls his own method "behaving, not acting," a line he's used to explain a career built on Mumbai stage training rather than film school.

His run through parallel cinema is the part that gets cited most. Shyam Benegal introduced him to that world in 1974 with Ankur, and the two went on to make six films together, including Nishant, Manthan, Bhumika, Kondura and Kalyug, all now treated as landmarks of the Indian new wave. But Nag didn't stay there. He's said plainly that a full-time career in parallel cinema wasn't realistic, and he pivoted to commercial Kannada films, starting with the romantic hit Bayalu Daari in 1977 and following it with Chandanada Gombe, Benkiya Bale and Naa Ninna Bidalare, often playing the anxious middle-class hero of popular novels.

What's notable, per The Hindu's account, is that he built this following in an era dominated by fan-club superstars like Rajkumar, Vishnuvardhan and Ambarish. Nag never had that machinery around him, partly because he wasn't playing the action hero, partly because he resisted being boxed into any single image.

The other thread running through his career is his brother. Shankar Nag, the restless talent of Kannada theatre and film who died in 1990, worked with Anant on films like Accident and Minchina Ota, but their most lasting collaboration was the television series Malgudi Days, adapted from R.K. Narayan, which brought both of them national attention. Anant later wrote about that bond in his memoir, Nanna Thamma Shankara.

His screen career dipped in the late 1990s and he shifted into supporting parts through the 2000s, in films like Mungaru Male, before returning to lead roles that got noticed again, including his performance as an Alzheimer's patient in Godhi Banna Sadharana Maikattu and as a retired inspector in Kavalu Daari.

Nag also had a real political run, not the ceremonial kind. Drawn in by the JP Movement of the 1970s and pushed by then Chief Minister Ramakrishna Hegde, he entered the Karnataka Legislative Council in 1988, later won an Assembly seat and served as Bangalore Development Minister under J.H. Patel. He walked away once politics started eating into his acting time, by his own account.

He hasn't gone quiet politically since. Nag has openly backed Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Hindutva politics lately, a stance that's drawn pushback from liberal circles in Karnataka. On the Phalke honour itself, Nag said Modi's congratulatory post on X "felt as good as getting two Phalke awards."

The ceremony in Gujarat on September 22 will make it official.