Genre : Documentary
Year : 2009
Running time : 1 hour
Director : Deepa Bhatia
A quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995. Sound shocking ? Well, I’m not making this stuff up – this is still happening, in present day “shining” India. And this is the subject of Deepa Bhatia’s documentary “Nero’s Guests”, which I happened to watch via the NDTV Documentary series. In it, Bhatia and her crew follow around P. Sainath as he visits and documents the conditions of the farming community in Maharashtra.
Sainath, along with being the Rural Affairs Editor for The Hindu is also the recipient of the Ramon B. Magsaysay Award (sometimes called the Asian Nobel) for Journalism. Sainath reports widely on marginalized sections of society and his writing has appeared on India Together besides the Hindu.
In “Nero’s Guests”, which is presumably so named because of the the legend in which Emperor Nero burnt his guests for light, Sainath is the heartfelt and vociferous voice for the marginalized farmers, and brings to attention the agrarian crisis in modern India. In the film, Sainath visits many of the affected areas, and you see him talk to the farmers and document their woes . He also talks directly to the camera, presumably at his home, where he brings from his documents photos of the people who have passed.
One is affected as you see him talk of hapless folk like the woman farmer who committed suicide, and whose family was ineligible for compensation from the government because the state did not recognize females as farmers – women could only be the wives, mother, sisters or daughters of male farmers. He tells us, as he shows us a photograph of a mother and son, of the emptiness in the boy’s eyes after the father has committed suicide. He talks of the feeling of humiliation and helplessness he feels when he faces desperate farmers and knows that there is nothing that he can do to alleviate their troubles. And he tells with visible emotion of the cold hard fact that when he meets family members of a deceased farmer he can see that they are planning the same fate for themselves. Such is the desperation.
India’s farmers are a poor lot. In this film they relate their woes. With the cost of farming having gone up and the returns paltry in comparison farmers find it hard to make ends meet, and are often indebted to corrupt moneylenders. With debt multiplying (farmers in the film talk of debts of 2 lakh rupees, about $4000) and no ray of hope in sight farmers are committing suicide. In the film, Sainath visits a local village hospital and while he is there, two men bring in a third who is violently throwing up. As the camera follows the three into the dark, dank, dismal looking hospital building, we are told that the man has swallowed pesticide.
This is an important film, and it tells an important tale. Well-directed, this film gives us news that the mainstream media deems unfit to report on. “Nero’s Guests” is a must-see. Kudos to Bhatia and Sainath !
