This film turns the conventional worldview of the farmer on its head by evoking empathy, not pity. We care about Natha because he is one of us
The kisan strikes back! Or so goes the popular verdict on Peepli [Live] which opened to great critical acclaim last week. This daring exception to Bollywood’s assembly line of slick, feel-good fluff is being credited for single-handedly rescuing the lowly farmer from the brink of cinematic extinction. There are no fast cars or women; no bucolic, green pastures to frolic in song; and — unlike the faux-tribals of Raavan — not one country maiden draped in a Sabyasachi creation in sight. Peepli [Live] offers instead a dust-choked, dreary village inhabited by the likes of Natha, an unkempt, not-too-bright zero with an affection for country liquor, mithai and goats.
Although a comic satire, many critics compare the movie to old rural melodramas such as Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin (1953). “In the nearly six decades since the Roy classic was made, India has become a very different place, moving from socialism to the unabashed capitalism of the post-liberalisation era. And yet it’s remarkable how little has changed for the onscreen Indian farmer,” writes Namrata Joshi in Outlook. Suffering, eternally oppressed, yet persevering — much like the ‘bharatiya nari’ — the simple kisan has always served as a means to a greater ideological end. His long and hallowed cinematic history stretches back to V. Shantaram’s 1925 silent classic Sawkari Pash. In early post-independence films, the farmer played leading man in left-leaning morality tales; his soul-crushing penury evidence of both socialism’s unfulfilled promise and urgent necessity. Yet for all their claims to social realism, movies like Do Bigha Zamin, Jaagte Raho andMother India were deeply romantic. Their farmer was an unidimensional good guy defined by his struggle against evil landlords, bureaucrats or city dwellers.
In the 1960s, the kind-hearted rustic was resuscitated as the airbrushed patriot, most famously by Manoj Kumar. The village in Purab Aur Paschim became the fount of true Indian-ness, the place where corrupt, westernised NRIs returned to reclaim their identity. Rural poverty now a mark of virtue and authenticity. As patriotism lost its bloom, villages became the setting for daku dramas, and the usual litany of rural injustices — repossessed land, lecherous landlords, marauding bandits etc — reduced to standard plot devices that enabled the dishum-dishum battle between good and evil. The arrival of the urban anti-hero exiled the village to the mandatory flashback; the past-as-prologue scene of the original crime that sends our hero headlong into a life of vice and vengeance.
Over the past 20 years, mainstream Bollywood has turned rural India into a location shoot, a cheery setting for the de rigeur “ethnic” song-and-dance number. The few exceptions to the rule — Namastey London and Lagaan — are updated versions of old classics, but stripped of any kind of contemporary social critique. Yet in all this, the Indian farmer has remained the same: a good, brave man in search of a life of dignity. “Peepli... takes all of that further, and also takes us back to square one; it marks the thumping return of the classic peasant of 1950s and 1960s cinema, albeit in a contemporary mode,” claims Joshi. But is Natha merely a 21st century version of the celluloid farmer of yore? Not quite. Peepli [Live] does indeed revive a time-honoured genre only to flout its conventions entirely.
The farmers of Peepli may be as poor and powerless as ever, but they also break every one of Bollywood’s cherished stereotypes of the noble peasant. Natha is a kind man, yes, but also weak and easily led. He doesn’t choose to commit suicide, but is bullied into it by his self-serving brother. Natha has little real interest in either rescuing his land or saving his family, whose women are loud, unsupportive shrews. There are no Mother Indias here. His fellow villagers — eager to ham it up for the cameras and make a quick buck off Natha’s misfortune — are no innocent gaon-walas, but every bit as shrewd as their urban peers. Peepli [Live] is remarkable precisely because it refuses to stage the cliched encounter between the good village and bad city.
On the matter of the Indian peasant, Jawaharlal Nehru would often quote his favorite Edwin Markham poems: Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans/Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground/The emptiness of ages in his face, and on his back the burden of the world. The Indian elite have long been guilty of a pernicious romanticism that valourises the struggling farmer by denying him his humanity. He becomes instead an expedient symbol, be it of innocence, courage, authenticity, or injustice. In the guise of political satire, Peepli [Live] turns this worldview on its head by evoking not pity but our empathy. Sitting in the comfort of an air-conditioned Inox theatre, we care about Natha not because he is a martyr or a saint, but because he is human, just like us.
| The story in brief... Natha and Budhia are perched precariously on the brink of abject penury. The bank is threatening to repossess their ancestral land because of an unpaid loan. An unlikely solution to their woes is a government scheme that pays one lakh to any farmer who commits suicide. Convinced by his brother, Budhia, to sacrifice his life for the greater good of the family, Natha becomes fodder for village gossip and very soon a media circus, as the news spreads from the local newspaper all the way up to the big English-language news channels. As a swarm of reporters descend en masse on the obscure village of Peepli, various politicians desperately jostle for position on the eve of a national election. Everyone is waiting for Natha to die. The movie pairs a biting critique of a scoop-frenzied media and a rotten political system with a humorous, perceptive view of rural poverty. We laugh all the way right upto the last, heart-breaking scene. Peepli [Live]'s message: there are no happy endings for farmers in our shiny, new India. And that's nothing to laugh about. |
Lakshmi Chaudhry is a Bangalore-based freelance writer