| | 1 | ''''1972: Key Events''' |
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| | 3 | * Government nationalises the coal-mining industry. |
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| | 5 | * Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and Indira Gandhi reach agreement over Kashmir (the Simla Accord). |
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| | 7 | * Amol Palekar’s staging of Sadanand Rege’s Marathi play Gochee starts the Chhabildas experimental theatre movement, deriving its name from a school in a lower- middle-class neighbourhood in Bombay, which the theatre group Aavishkar had earlier acquired to stage low-budget theatre experiments to a small audience. |
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| | 9 | * Television starts in Bombay (October). Stations are started the following year in Srinagar, Amritsar and Calcutta. Madras and Lucknow follow in 1975. |
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| | 11 | * First art-house cinema opened by the FFC. First features in Manipuri (Matamgi Manipur) and Coorgi (Nada Manne Nada Koolu). |
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| | 13 | * The first film co-operative run by technicians, the Chitralekha Co-op, starts production with Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s début, Swayamvaram. |
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| | 15 | * In Tamil Nadu, M. G. Ramachandran is expelled from the DMK and forms the Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. |
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| | 17 | * The Malayalam film weekly Nana starts, occasionally publishing filmographies and listings in between features on the Malayalam film industry. |
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| | 19 | * Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche establishes the Ramsay Brothers and the horror genre in Hindi. |