Why no song and dance around India’s murderous winds

In the 2016 Bollywood hit Pink, the introductory scene of Amitabh Bachchan’s character shows him stepping out of his house on a winter morning into the smog-filled streets of Delhi wearing a mask.

Other scenes in the film feature a mask and the smoky air of Delhi that has little relevance to its plot.

Yet, it is one of the rare examples of mainstream Indian films taking note of the deadly air that pervades many parts of India. Dangerous to live in Every year.

Toxic air pollution and recurring winter smog in India’s capital Delhi and elsewhere North India It often makes headlines, becomes the subject of public concern, political debate and legal condemnation. But with devastating floods in Uttarakhand in 2013, Kerala in 2018 and the city of Mumbai in 2005 — each of which inspired movies — air pollution has largely been missing from Indian pop culture.

Siddharth Singh, author of The Great Smog of India, a book on pollution, says it is a “huge failure” that air pollution is not the prevailing narrative in Indian literature and filmmaking.

He points out that much of the writing on pollution in India remains in the realm of academic and scientific expertise.

“When you say PM2.5 or NOx or SO2 (all pollutants), what are these words? They mean nothing to (common) people.

In his 2016 book, The Great Derangement, author Amitav Ghosh, who has written extensively on climate change, noted that such stories are missing from contemporary fiction.

“People are weirdly naive about climate change,” he said He said In the 2022 interview.

The writer describes being in India during a heat wave.

“Everything seems normal and it’s very unsettling,” he said. “We have already learned to live with these changes.”

Ghosh described climate change as a “slow violence” that was difficult to write about.

That certainly has pollution – which can have devastating health effects over the long term, but doesn’t lend itself to dramatic scenes.

However, the topic has been explored in documentaries such as Shaunak Sen’s All breathingIt is nominated for an Oscar in 2022.

In the film, Sen explores the interconnected nature of climate change, pollution and human-animal relations in Delhi’s ecosystem through the story of two brothers who treat injured black kites that fall from the city’s smog-filled skies.

Sen says he’s interested in exploring how climate change is connected to smaller fights, “as big as the Anthropocene” (a term used to describe the current moment in which humans are having a profound impact on the living and physical world). And daily annoyances.

A scene in the film shows two brothers fighting. One of them then points to the sky and towards themselves and says, “Yeh sab jo hamare beach mein ho raha hai, ye sab ki galti hai (What is happening between us is all this fault).”

“(The effects of climate change) actually permeate every aspect of our lives,” says Sen. “And the work of representation, whether it’s cinema or literature, is to give that kind of tenacity in its representation.”

He says environmental films that are stern, prescriptive or held by the collar to make the audience feel bad do more harm than good.

“To me, Trojan horses are great movies that are able to sneak in ideas without the audience being fully aware that they’re engaging in that conversation.”

Filmmaker Nila Madhab Panda, whose work on climate change and the environment spans over 70 films, believes art can make a difference.

Panda, who started telling stories about climate change with the documentary Climate’s First Orphan in 2005, turned to more mainstream cinema for a message to reach a wider audience.

The filmmaker was born and brought up in Kalahandi Balangir Koraput region of eastern Odisha state which is prone to drought and floods and moved to Delhi in 1995.

“It amazes me that I live in an ecosystem where you see four seasons, you drink water straight from the river. Natural wealth is free to us – air, water, fire, everything. And I come to Delhi where you buy everything. I buy water, I buy air. Every There is an air filter in the room.

In 2019, Panda made a short film for an anthology in which he explored the issue of pollution in Delhi through a courtroom drama about a couple divorcing because they couldn’t agree on whether to move on or not. Lives in the capital.

“You can’t entertain and show off,” Panda says.

Creators also face the challenge of humanizing difficult stories.

Singh, whose 2018 book looked at India’s air pollution crisis, says he struggled to find the people behind the statistics while writing it.

“We always read these news headlines where a million or two million people die every year because of pollution. But where are these people? Where are their stories? “

Environmental themes feature frequently in India’s vast regional literature, a theme highlighted by many contemporary English writers including Ghosh – Delhi’s Bhalswa garbage dump features in Neelanjana S Roy’s crime novel Black River. In Gigi Ganguly’s Biopeculiar and Janice Parriat’s Everything the Light Touches, the writers explore our relationship with the natural environment.

But there is still a long way to go.

One reason for the relative dearth of such stories, says Singh, is that the people creating them can be “insulated” because of their privilege.

“They are not people on the banks of the (polluted) Yamuna, seeing poetry in it or writing about stories on its banks.”

Memes and photos on social media these days are more effective in capturing the gravity of air pollution, he says.

“A meme that went viral a few days ago said, ‘Sheikh Hasina (now Prime Minister of Bangladesh in Delhi) spotted on her daily morning walk’. But the accompanying picture was completely gray because she couldn’t be seen due to air pollution!

The writer hopes that such creative outlets will eventually find enough momentum to “trigger a response from those who actually make a difference.”

“I think we’re lacking at the moment,” he says.

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