Farmers on camera

Over eight months between 2020 and 2021, soon after the Shaheen Bagh protests went silent, farmers from all over the country — and largely from Punjab — made it to the street peripheries of Delhi from their homes. Thousands of them arrived at street-sides and highway cul-de-sacs to set up protest camps. They left their homes with spouses and children by their side, stocked up on food produce, makeshift kitchens and beds.

The key to sustained, effective non-violent resistance is organisation, and the farmers of Punjab aced their strategy: Prepare for the long haul, and stay put, no matter the circumstance. They made life on these North Indian plains, known for extreme weather conditions. Over the eight months-long protests, the farmers slept and cooked by the national highway, braving hostility from both climate and government. Along with the strong mobilisation by the farmer unions across the country, the way the protests unravelled was in accordance with the Sikh principle of ‘sewa’ or selfless service for the betterment of society and community and the expression ‘chardi kala’ or eternal optimism. The strategic and philosophical underpinnings of the movement made the spectacle unputdownable.
Large protests today often lack credibility because technologies and social media have made them easier to organise. It can take as little as a month or even a week to go from a Facebook page to millions in the street. In the 2020s, a protest doesn’t necessarily make the kind of statement it did in the past, which is why the farmer protests in India are so significant. It’s no surprise then that even after the farmer protests had a concrete end — repealing of the farm laws — the emotional scope of these protests inspired storytellers, poets and documentarians.
In September 2020, the Indian government passed three agricultural laws aimed at liberalising the farm economy. The farmers of Punjab, which included the oldest farmer union from Panjab — BKU (Ekta Ugrahan) led by Joginder Singh Ugrahan, protested the move because these laws would strip farmers of not only lands but also any indemnity as cultivators and farmers.
Expressing their concerns about the dangers of the corporatisation of agriculture, farmers articulated detailed and nuanced criticism against what they believed were unjust laws. The movement swelled rapidly. It became one of the biggest, most organised non-violent protest movements of modern times, which, as Bedabrata Pain’s documentary Déjà Vu — being screened at various venues across India now — chronicles, resonated with farmers even in America.
Among a glut of books and documentaries, both short and feature lengths, two narratives stand out, both full-length documentaries: Pain’s Déjà Vu and Farming the Revolution by Nishtha Jain, an incisive, cinematic documentarian known for The Gulabi Gang (2012), a pink-wearing group of defiant activist women from Bundelkhand, central India, who fight for the rights of women and Dalits. Jain’s The Golden Thread (2022) was about the weft and warp of jute work, and how workers on the outskirts of Kolkata weave the fibre of the future with dreams and primitive machinery.
Besides the monumental trigger point, and the protests themselves, the two films have little in common when it comes to structure or point of view. Pain’s film is a road trip, in which the narrator is front and centre with his subjects. Jain’s camera is ubiquitous — catching expressions and movements minutely, sometimes a beam of street light lighting up a swirl of mosquitoes articulating something about the protestors. But in their singular ways, both as inquiries into protest as cultural, social and community movements, both films, seen together, bring out the complete emotional and social scope of this revolutionary movement.
The view in Déjà Vu is big on the helicopter, historical-economical currents that inform the lives of farmers in a globalised world. He zooms in on subjects and retracts to the big picture view — much like the friendly, overused drone that accompanies him and his three fellow chroniclers on a pan-American road trip during the pandemic.
This is Pain’s first documentary film in a distinctly polymath journey — his last film was Chittagong (2012), which got him the National Award for Best New Director, which was long after he contributed to 87 patents as a scientist at NASA and was part of the team that invented the CMOS image sensor. Déjà Vu is set in the US and India, both homes of Pain. While the pandemic was peaking, Pain was in the US, and he happened to read a new article that reported on suicides by American farmers, driven by poverty. Weren’t Indian farmers alone doomed to meet that fate? No, as Pain found, during the months he spent taking this cross-country road with three friends and associates — Sristy Agrawal, Rajashik Tarafder and Rumela Gangopadhyay, all first-time filmmakers — to investigate what really has pushed farmers in the global home of capitalism, where farmers hardly ever get a mention either in public and media discourse or election manifestoes, to kill themselves.
The picture that emerges has a cautionary ring — not just for India, but for the whole world. Ronald Reagan was the American president who privatised agriculture in the US. Reaganomics, as we know, is bullish about privatisation, but as it appears from Pain’s film, capturing several voices and situations of farmers across the country, especially the deep South, there are proven reasons why privatisation has killed so many of America’s farmers.
Pain said, after a recent screening of the film in Mumbai, “When I read about American farmers driven to suicide, my immediate response was, was this correct, and how do I find out so the same story doesn’t repeat in India? I went with several questions in my mind: How did the Reagan-era reforms turn out? Who benefitted? Who lost out? Is it the farmers who benefitted, the consumers, or the corporates? What impact did the loss of MSP or ushering in of contract farming have on farmers?”
The only hero in Déjà Vu is the farmer himself, pushed to desperation, and in awe of the Indian farmers and the women who had a crucial role in the protests. “We are in solidarity with Indian farmers, their struggle is ours. And the fact that women are as much a part of these protests as men, make it so much more powerful and effective,” said a farmer couple that the Déjà Vu team interviews.
A combination of data insights, first-person accounts, and stark scenes of crop bankruptcy — Déjà Vu invites the viewer to make connections and take in the larger picture. By the time Pain finished filming, the farm laws were repealed in India, but the struggle of the farmers continues for a legal guarantee for Minimum Support Price (MSP) — the minimum price for select crops raised in kharif and rabi seasons that the government of India has long considered remunerative for farmers for all crops.
Jain’s motivation was equally investigative, but her gaze is less intellectual, more evocative and intuitive. “Behind the barricades, the farmers created a zone of new possibilities, a new language of people’s power. They had come to win. I did not once sense a doubt or crack in their determination. Roti had become their weapon. I knew quite soon that I wanted to record this moment for posterity,” Jain says, “The experience of the leadership, their organisation skills and their ethos and philosophy are admirable. Not surprisingly I discovered that they have a  history of successful resistance in Punjab.”
Jain quickly put together a very young, dedicated and talented team from Delhi – Akash Basumatri, (co-director and cinematographer), Lohit Bhalla (sound recordist) and Jaskaran Singh (assistant director, assistant cinematographer, doubling up as a driver at times). Jain and her team filmed for 135 days, spending her own money.
“After the farmers won, and we had a beginning, middle and end to the story, we managed to get some funding,” Jain says. Initially, Farming the Revolution was difficult to shoot at the borders because there was an atmosphere of distrust with the mainstream media. “Since we were not known faces or Panjabi-speaking, it took longer to gain their trust.” The team stayed put along with the protestors, going for the organically immersive treatment that works wonderfully for the film.  
Farming the Revolution won Best International Feature Documentary at Hot Docs, one of the most prestigious documentary film festivals in the world, founded in 1993 by the Documentary Organisation of Canada. This year, the Hot Docs Festival showcased 168 documentaries from 64 countries to audiences in Toronto cinemas. The Hot Doc win has qualified Jain’s film for a run at the Oscars. “We’ve been getting amazing responses to the film everywhere, especially in the UK where the screenings are ongoing at the Bertha Dochouse,” Jain says.
Farming the Revolution will be the opening film at the upcoming DMZ film festival, one of the largest documentary film festivals in South Korea, and part of a year-long travelling theatrical festival in Italy and an 18-city film festival in Germany. Jain says showing the film in India remains a challenge. “We are heavily dependent on film festivals and there are hardly any in Delhi, Haryana, UP and Punjab. I plan to hold screenings in Punjab in the coming months,” she informs.
The North American funds, festivals, and consequently markets have only recently woken up to support talent from Asia with the recent push for diversity and inclusion. Jain became one of the first to be inducted into the jury for the Academy Awards but it has taken her a few years to see her own film compete.
In the past three years, three Indian documentaries —- Writing with Fire by Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh, All that Breathes by Shaunak Sen, and Against the Tide by Sarvnik Kaur — have premiered and won awards at Sundance and then found themselves in the Oscars race. Jain is cautiously optimistic. “The success of other Indian documentaries hasn’t made a difference to my journey. It’s actually getting tougher and this may be because I’m not making character-driven narratives, I let the style emerge organically from the subject.” 
Pain’s film too is getting niche audiences across the world and is at a nascent stage when it comes to distribution. After watching Déjà Vu, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen said, “I am very moved by the film — a film with longstanding relevance. This is the kind of understanding that struggling people need all over the world.”
Both these films remind us why socially engaged filmmaking can be catalytic in the way they provoke and engage audiences, and yet be increasingly removed from mainstream discourse. In this moment of the spotlight that Indian documentary filmmaking is enjoying, Déjà Vu and Farming the Revolution have a long trajectory ahead. They also serve the important purpose of bringing the farmer back to the film screen.
The farmer’s protests inspired a few other notable films available to stream on YouTube:
Varrun Sukhraj’s Too Much Democracy was one of the first documentaries to come out on the protests. It is immersive and factually power-packed. The film offers a firsthand account of his experiences. The message that emerges is: Democracy transcends mere politics; it is an emotion rooted in the pursuit of equal rights for all.
Inspired by the everyday resilience of the farmers and their families, Chardi Kala follows the journey of the protest until the end. The one-person-crew film observes, listens and documents the farmers’ arguments, their acts of service and the spirit of optimism that imbues great grassroots-led movements in history.
Haravoo is a seasoned, acclaimed director in the Kannada language. His film on the farmer’s protests is equally immersive and has a critical lens on the way the government tackled the protests. It is like a visual diary of the days and nights at the camps. The film covers the whole span, ending with the scene of a car mowing down a group of farmers in Lakhimpur Kheri, Uttar Pradesh.
A short film that beautifully captures the circumstances of weather and hostility amid which the protests continued.
Sanjukta Sharma is a Mumbai-based writer and film critic. Write to her at [email protected]