Sunil Dutt & Priya Dutt

Sunil Dutt (1929–2005) and his daughter Priya Dutt (born 1966) are the two generations behind the Nargis Dutt Foundation, and both moved from film and public life into sustained social work. Dutt was a leading Hindi film actor and later a five-term Member of Parliament from Mumbai North West and Union Minister for Youth Affairs and Sports; Priya Dutt succeeded him in Parliament in 2005 and sat for Mumbai North Central until 2014.

Dutt's charitable work began with a bereavement. His wife, the actor Nargis, died of pancreatic cancer in 1981, and he founded the Nargis Dutt Foundation in her memory to help cancer patients who could not pay for treatment. Separately, he became one of the earliest figures from the film industry to put himself physically at risk for communal peace: in the early 1980s, at the height of the Punjab insurgency, he undertook a peace march through the state lasting close to a month. He was later given the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Award for National Integration and Communal Harmony and the Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan Award for International Peace, Communal Harmony, Unity and National Integration, both in 1997, and the Rajiv Gandhi National Sadbhavana Award in 1998. He had received the Padma Shri in 1968.

Priya Dutt trained in media in New York and worked with Muslim families displaced by the Bombay riots of 1992–93, an involvement that drew threatening telephone calls and public harassment. She took over as chairperson of the Nargis Dutt Foundation after her father's death in 2005 and established its Indian arm, her father having originally registered it in New York. Under her the foundation runs holistic support for cancer patients, cancer screening camps, diagnostic equipment for rural hospitals and a mobile medical van in slum and rural areas, alongside scholarships from class VIII to postgraduate level and a rural school development programme. With her sister Namrata she published a memoir of their parents, Mr and Mrs Dutt, in 2007.[1][2][3]