farmer suicide | Pragya Tiwari

Not Without Our Farmers- I Want My Father Back Review

“GLOBALISATION IS nothing but the ultimate takeover of the planet’s resources by a few companies, whereby the freedom of the species and human beings will be killed by them,” sums up Suma Josson’s film, I Want My Father Back, after taking us through Vidarbha’s agrarian crisis and the resultant suicides. It is in the extremity of this view that it sets itself up as propaganda. Visuals that act as mere illustrations to the spoken narrative only augment the public service feel of this film. The problem with ignoring the aesthetic demands of the medium is that it greatly reduces the documentary’s potential to appeal to more than the mind — to actually move you.

As a journalistic exercise, the film is thorough, carefully sifting through all the aspects of the crisis from its singular position of the State as a homicidal conspirator and Washington ally in exterminating small farmers through its deliberate policies. The Green Revolution has favoured agents of globalisation over small farmers. Mono-cropping, abolition of mandis and Bt cotton seeds are wrecking agrarian economy, bio-diversity and animal and human health. Corruption at all levels is reducing the farmer to a loan junkie, condemned to fatal poverty. While few can argue against the failures of the policies in question, not providing a counterpoint to the State as a pure demon with an insatiable murder wish dilutes the credibility of a sound argument.

Thorough as the research may be, the success of narrative journalism lies in the arrangement of the evidence and its potential to engage with the reader. This film leaves you at sea with its relentless onslaught of information and opinion, to fish for points you can take home.

The problem of Vidarbha links up with Naxalism and the future of the country in every way. When you let a farmer die, you let the songs and life of the soil die slowly too. And nature, unlike man will not take deliberate termination lying down. Those who live in and around Vidarbha are protesting and crying before killing themselves. None of their pleas are picked up by the mainstream media. And in that context this film, for all its shortcomings, is incalculably precious.

(As it appears in Tehelka)

Fields of Death- Harvest of Grief

In popular imagination, Punjab is the land of agrarian abundance, picked for its fertile promise by the harbingers of the Green Revolution. And to date it provides for the bulk of India’s food needs. But within a decade of the revolution, seeds of agrarian crisis had begun to sprout in the land of promise. Anwar Jamal brings forth the yield from the darker side of Punjab’s paradox in his Harvest Of Grief.

Like the film points out, the Indian farmer has always been struggling with debt. What differentiates this climate of death is the cumulative nature of this debt coupled with receding opportunities for him to be able to pay up. At the heart of shrinking opportunities are the policies of the Revolution that are challenging the existence of small farmers in the absence of laws to protect them from utter desolation. But the politics of the state is committed to these policies in a way that makes it impossible for critical feedback to be integrated into their rigid implementation.

And there cannot be feedback more critical than the incidence of 40 to 80 suicides per village in certain areas. Jamal’s camera takes us into the living spaces of the dead, baring the catastrophic consequences for the families of the deceased through artful frames that canvas their testimony as well their silence. His eye is intrusive but never vulgar, like the tool of an artist chipping only to carve meaning. He distills the grief of his subjects offering us bitter fruits of their helpless plight, humanizing what is otherwise mere numbers on a broadsheet. The choice of accompanying folk music etches the plea of the forsaken as only their own songs can. The film focuses on this emotional core, contextualizing it with the essential theory of the problem but steering clear of the pitfalls of didactics.

The central force of Jamal’s visual document is directed towards the state machinery that is rigging figures to deny the suicides and their cause, depriving Punjab of the little relief the centre provides to other affected rural areas in the country. In a moment of entrenched irony, as relatives of one of the hundreds of farmers who have leaped into an irrigation canal, wait to recover his body, this central force becomes overwhelming. The state might remain impenetrable to desperate petitions but there is hope in the filmmaker’s impassioned attempt to move us enough to want to make a difference to our own people.

(As it appears in Tehelka)

Pragya Tiwari

Writing on theatre, books, cinema and politics

Tag Archives: farmer suicide

Not Without Our Farmers- I Want My Father Back Review

Fields of Death- Harvest of Grief

Follow “Pragya Tiwari”