India, Nov. 25 -- If you were to make a pie chart showing the distribution, by language, of the winners of the 71 National Film Awards for Best Feature Film given out since 1954, when the National Film Development Corporation and the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting began awarding them, you will see that the biggest slice belongs to the Bengali film industry, which has won 22 times (the Malayalam industry slice, at 13 awards, is a distant second).

It is another matter that the chart doesn't tell the whole story; it has been 17 years since a Bengali film won - in the same duration, Malayalam films have won four times, Marathi films thrice, and Kannada not at all.

It wasn't always this way. Kannada films have received the honour six...