Screenshot from the Pink trailer
Amitabh Bachchan wore a mask in some scenes in the 2016 Bollywood film Pink
In the 2016 Bollywood hit Pink, a scene introducing Amitabh Bachchan's character shows the actor stepping out of his house one winter morning into the smog-filled streets of Delhi, wearing a mask.
The mask and the smoggy air of Delhi feature in other scenes in the film but have little importance to the plot.
Still, it's one of the rare examples of mainstream Indian films taking into account the deadly air that makes life dangerous in many parts of India every year.
Toxic air pollution and recurring winter smog in the Indian capital Delhi and other parts of northern India frequently make headlines, becoming a subject of public concern, political debate and censorship legal. But unlike disasters such as the devastating floods in Uttarakhand in 2013, Kerala in 2018 and the city of Mumbai in 2005 – each of which inspired films – air pollution is largely absent from Indian pop culture .
Siddharth Singh, author of The Great Smog of India, a book on pollution, says it is a “great failure” that air pollution is not a predominant narrative in Indian literature and cinema.
Much of the writing on pollution in India remains in the academic and scientific domain, he points out.
“When you say PM2.5 or NOx or SO2 (all pollutants), what are these words? They mean nothing to (ordinary) people. »
In his 2016 book, The Great Derangement, author Amitav Ghosh, who has written extensively on climate change, observed that such stories were lacking in contemporary fiction.
“People are strangely normal about climate change,” he said in a 2022 interview.
The writer described being in India during a heatwave.
“What struck me was the fact that everything seemed to be normal and that was the most disturbing thing,” he said. “It’s like we’ve already learned to live with these changes.”
Ghosh described climate change as “a slow violence” that made writing about it difficult.
This certainly applies to pollution: it can have devastating long-term health effects, but does not lend itself to dramatic imagery.
Saumya Khandelwal
All That Breathes tells the story of two brothers who tend to injured black kites falling from the smoky skies of Delhi.
The subject has, however, been explored in documentaries like Shaunak Sen's 2022 Oscar nominee All That Breathes.
In the film, Sen explores climate change, pollution and the interconnected nature of human-animal relationships in Delhi's ecosystem through the story of two brothers who nursed injured black kites that fell from the city's smoky skies.
Sen said he wanted to explore how “something as big as the Anthropocene” (a term used to describe the current moment in which humans are having a profound impact on the living, physical world) or climate change were linked. to small quarrels. and daily irritability.
A scene in the film shows the two brothers arguing. One of them then points to the sky and himself and says, “Yeh sab jo hamare beech mein ho raha hai, you are sab ki galti hai (What is happening between us is the fault of all this). »
“(The effects of climate change) are actually rippling through every aspect of our lives,” Sen says. “And the job of representation, whether it’s cinema or literature, is to give it that kind of robustness in its representation.”
Environmental films that are pedantic, prescriptive or hold the audience by the collar to make them feel bad do more disservice than good, he says.
“For me, the best films are the ones that are Trojan horses that can introduce ideas without the audience really knowing they're engaging in that conversation.”
Filmmaker Nila Madhab Panda, whose work on climate change and the environment spans more than 70 films, believes art can make a difference.
Panda, who began telling stories about climate change in 2005 with his documentary Climate's First Orphan, turned to more mainstream cinema to make his message reach a wider audience.
Nila Madhab Panda
Panda's film, Megha's Divorce, is a courtroom drama about a couple who divorce because they cannot agree on whether to continue living in Delhi.
The filmmaker was born and raised in the Kalahandi Balangir Koraput region in the eastern state of Odisha, which is prone to droughts and floods. He moved to Delhi in 1995.
“It’s incredible for me to live in an ecosystem where we see four seasons and drink water straight from the river. Natural resources are free for us: air, water, fire, everything. And I come to Delhi where they buy everything. I buy water, I buy air. Each room has an air filter.
In 2019, Panda made a short film for an anthology in which he explored the theme of pollution in Delhi through a courtroom drama about a couple who divorce because they couldn't agree on whether to move on. to live in the capital.
“You can’t just create something that’s not entertaining and show it,” Panda says.
Creators also face the challenge of humanizing difficult stories.
Singh, whose 2018 book focused on India's air pollution crisis, says he struggled to find the people behind the statistics when writing it.
“We always read these headlines about a million or two million people dying every year from pollution. But where are these people? Where are their stories?
Getty Images
Pollution can have devastating health effects, but it doesn't lend itself to dramatic imagery
While environmental themes have often found their way into the vast canon of Indian regional literature, many contemporary English writers, including Ghosh, have also placed emphasis on the subject – Delhi's Bhalswa landfill features in Nilanjana S Roy's detective novel, Black River. In Biopeculiar by Gigi Ganguly and Everything the Light Touches by Janice Pariat, the writers explore our relationship with the natural environment.
But there is still a long way to go.
Singh says one reason for the relative dearth of such stories could be that the people who create them are “isolated” because of their privilege.
“It is not the people who stand by the (polluted) Yamuna River, who see the poem there or who write stories on its banks.”
These days, it's memes and photos on social media that are most effective at capturing the severity of air pollution, he says.
“A meme that was popular a few days ago said something like: 'Sheikh Hasina (Exiled Bangladeshi Prime Minister who is now in Delhi) seen on her daily morning walk.' But the accompanying image was completely gray because the joke was that you couldn't see it because of the air pollution!
The author hopes that such creative outlets will find enough momentum to ultimately “trigger a response from those who can actually make a difference.”
“I think that’s what we’re missing right now,” he said.
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