'Peepli [Live]- A chronicle of death foretold!

'Peepli [Live]' did not just live up to my expectations, it exceeded them. Giving me a side splitting and yet brooding glimpse to an India i have experienced first hand, but an India I rarely hear about. An India most urban dwelling Indians think exists only in movies. actually , that India does not exist in movies because movies are mostly about urban subjects. 'Peepli [Live]' is rustic, charming and satirical. A satire on the poverty that runs across the nation and the mockery we have made of it. 'Peepli [Live]' is powered by exceptional screenplay and the most original dialogues I have heard in a long time. And it is rustic-generously populated by slang that designer wear, polished, English speaking Indians might cringe at. But the language spoken by numbers greater than the entire population of the US.

The characters are real and believable. The clothes they wear depict the reality of their existence. Their scraggly beards, dirty loins, and hand woven beds are common sights in rural India. The movie has its flaws but they do not interfere with the story telling. I will have a nitpick to tell you where the movie fell short. Yes , it was that good an act.

The storyline is simple. The farming brothers Budhia and Natha are facing the prospect of losing their land. The way out? Natha will commit suicide. Budhia will collect money that the government will pay to the dead farmer’s family and use that money to pay off the debt on the land. Around this simple plot is woven the story of greed, treachery, labor, honor, politics, shamelessness, conscience and most importantly a complete lack of empathy. The only other primetime Bollywood movie from recent times that scratched the vast but overlooked subject of abject poverty was Swades. But unlike Swades, 'Peepli [Live]' has no parallel stories. There is no love story here, it is an honest cinema.

 

What are the lessons of 'Peepli [Live]', both for the purposes of this course and for the broader scheme of things? The primary lesson, as far as I can see, is that no matter what one thinks about capitalism, introducing it into an enormous country such as India with little planning, and effectively by brute force, can be disastrous. This point is highlighted early in the film when the Minister of Agriculture himself starts arguing that farmers should turn to industrialization to ease their woes. But it is surely a sign of moral bankruptcy when a government offers, in effect, to pay the poor to kill themselves.

The nation’s farmer suicide crisis, which has become more pronounced over the last decade, is driven by bad policy, corruption and rapacious money lenders. Although it’s unclear how many farmers’ deaths can be directly linked to financial hardship, few would dispute that India’s rural laborers are struggling. In recent decades, as the country’s economy has boomed, more of the nation’s populace has migrated to sprawling mega-cities such as Mumbai searching for jobs. The remaining agrarian masses, who still constitute the country’s majority, increasingly must compete against international agribusiness and Western government-subsidized farm interests.

The bizarre reality on which the film’s plot turns is that the Indian government makes compensatory payments to suicidal farmers’ surviving family members. In the film, Natha (played by Omkar Das Manikpuri) and his marginally savvier brother Budhia (Raghubir Yadav) are despairing of losing their land over an unpaid government loan. So they hatch a hare-brained scheme to cash in by having Natha kill himself.

Reporters flood into the small village his family inhabits. At first it is just a good opportunity for journalists to get a good story, but soon the affair evolves into something like a national debate. Because it is near election time, each party seeks to turn Natha’s dilemma to his or her advantage. What no one seems to care about, however, is the plight of the Indian farmers—increasingly displaced and indeed destroyed by the intrusion of capitalism—that Natha’s case symbolizes. The theme of the film is perhaps best summarized by a random person in the film, commenting upon Natha’s dilemma and his plan: ‘They [the Indian government] can’t pay for the living; how are they going to pay for the dead?’