Part 2 of The Celluloid Fields series. Read the first part here
The chilling moments (that we laughed at) in Peepli Live (2010) comes not when the debt-ridden farmer announces his intention to commit suicide, but when the media descends on his village like locusts.
News anchors compete for the best angle on his despair, politicians promise compensation while cameras roll, and the farmer’s potential death becomes prime-time entertainment. The film’s genius lies in showing how farmer suicide has become a public spectacle, with everyone gaining except the farmers themselves.
This satirical work marked a turning point in Indian cinema’s treatment of the country’s agrarian crisis. Well, almost.
No longer content to romanticize the farmer as a noble victim, more filmmakers started exposing the toxic ecosystem that pushes cultivators toward despair: predatory lending, corporate agriculture, media sensationalism, and political opportunism. The result has been a body of work that serves as both historical record and urgent warning.
Since 1995, more than 270,000 Indian farmers have reportedly committed suicide, making it the world’s largest occupational health disaster outside of war.
Cinema has become the primary medium through which this crisis is processed, with at least 18 films in the past two decades directly addressing farmer suicide and debt.
But these films reveal something more troubling than individual tragedy: they document the systematic dismantling of India’s agricultural foundation.
The immediate trigger is almost always debt. In Ringan(2015), a Marathi film set in suicide-prone Vidarbha, a farmer embarks on a pilgrimage with his young son, unable to tell the child that he can no longer afford to feed him.
The film’s Marathi title means “The Quest,” but it’s really about the absence of hope. Similarly, Gabhricha Paus(2009) shows how the psychological pressure of debt transforms farming from a way of life into a form of torture.
What makes these films particularly damning is their systematic exposure of the forces that create this debt. The traditional villain, the feudal landlord with henchmen, has been replaced by a more insidious enemy: the corporate supply chain.
In Kaththi (2014), a Tamil blockbuster that grossed over ₹120 crore, a multinational corporation diverts groundwater from a farming village to supply its factory, leading to drought and farmer suicides. The film’s commercial success proved that audiences were hungry for stories that named the real culprits.
But this corporate critique has become increasingly layered. Bhoomi (2021) features a NASA scientist who returns to Tamil Nadu to discover that a corporation is forcing farmers to use genetically modified seeds that require expensive chemical inputs, creating a cycle of debt and dependency.
The film explicitly links corporate agriculture to farmer suicides, suggesting that the Green Revolution’s promise of modernization has become a poison pill.
The most insidious aspect of this corporate control is how it transforms farming from a cyclical, sustainable practice into a linear, extractive process. Traditional farming involved saving seeds, using organic fertilizers, and working with natural cycles.
Corporate agriculture demands purchased seeds, chemical inputs, and adherence to global market rhythms. Farmers become franchisees of multinational corporations, bearing all the risk while surrendering all control.
Climate change has accelerated this crisis, creating new forms of displacement that cinema is only beginning to document. Kadvi Hawa (2017) introduces the concept of the climate refugee, whereby people are forced to migrate not by war or economic opportunity, but by environmental collapse.
The film’s protagonist, Gunu, flees his coastal village as cyclones become more frequent and violent, only to find himself in drought-stricken Bundelkhand, where he must collect debts from farmers facing their own climate catastrophe.
This climate displacement is creating new forms of narrative that challenge cinema’s traditional structure.
How do you tell a story about slow-moving environmental disaster? How do you create dramatic tension from rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns? Films like Kalira Atita (2021), about a man whose village is swallowed by rising seas, experiment with new forms of storytelling that mirror the disorientation of climate change itself.
The regional variations in this crisis are telling. Tamil cinema, particularly after the 2017 Jallikattu protests that mobilized farmers across the state, has produced a wave of “save the farmer” films.
Yet many of these, like Kadaikutty Singam(2018), romanticize farming while ignoring the caste and class hierarchies that make agriculture sustainable only for dominant social groups. The “farmer” in these films is almost always a landowning male from a dominant caste, whose problems can be solved through individual heroism rather than systemic change.
This romanticization serves a political purpose: it allows audiences to feel sympathy for farmers without confronting the structural inequalities that make agriculture unviable.
It’s telling that many of these films feature “NRI saviors”, such as characters who return from NASA or Silicon Valley to solve India’s agricultural problems. Films like Swades (2004) and Maharshi (2019) suggest that salvation must come from outside the system, implying that the system itself is irredeemably broken.
The most honest films resist this temptation. Kadaisi Vivasayi (2022) tells the story of an 80-year-old farmer who is literally the last person in his village still practicing traditional agriculture. When he’s falsely accused of killing a peacock, the legal system’s response reveals how modern India has no place for traditional knowledge or sustainable practices. The film’s title means “The Last Farmer,” and it reads like an obituary for an entire way of life.
Perhaps most disturbing is how these films document the transformation of farming from a dignified profession into a form of social death. The farmer in contemporary Indian cinema is not just poor; he’s practically irrelevant. His knowledge is dismissed as superstition, his methods as inefficient, his very existence as an obstacle to progress. The suicide epidemic is not just about economics; it’s about the systematic erasure of a way of life that sustained India for millennia.
As climate change accelerates and the agrarian crisis deepens, Indian cinema faces a choice: continue documenting disaster or begin imagining alternatives. The films of the past decade have performed a crucial service in exposing the scale and causes of India’s agricultural collapse. But exposure is not enough. The next phase of agrarian cinema must grapple with the most challenging question of all: what comes after the last farmer?
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