Part 1 of The Fourth Plate exclusive series: The Celluloid Fields
In the opening scenes of Kadvi Hawa (2017), a blind farmer in drought-stricken Bundelkhand faces a cruel irony: he cannot see the barren fields that torment him, yet feels every crack in the earth beneath his feet.
Hundreds of miles away, a young man from coastal Odisha flees his village as the sea swallows his ancestral home. These two climate refugees – one escaping drought, the other rising waters -meet in a story that would have been unimaginable in the golden age of Indian cinema.
Sixty years earlier, the farmer was a hero. In Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (1957), arguably the most iconic film in Indian cinema, a widowed peasant woman named Radha became the literal embodiment of the nation.
She ploughed her fields with her own hands, fought floods and moneylenders, and upheld her moral integrity even when it meant killing her own son. The film’s message was clear: the farmer was not just feeding the nation, but was the nation itself.
This transformation from heroic symbol to climate victim represents one of the most significant shifts in Indian popular culture, reflecting the country’s own journey from post-independence optimism to contemporary environmental crisis.
An analysis of 200 films spanning eight decades reveals how Indian cinema has evolved from celebrating the farmer as a national icon to confronting the brutal reality of what may be the world’s largest agrarian crisis.
The early decades of Indian cinema coincided with the nation’s socialist experiment. Films like Do Bigha Zamin(1953), which followed a farmer forced to become a Calcutta rickshaw-puller to save his land, established the template: the farmer as both victim and hero, struggling against feudal landlords while embodying the dignity of labor. The enemy was always the zamindar, the moneylender, the corrupt official, and thus, theoretically, defeatable.
Even when nature struck, it served a narrative purpose. The floods in Mother India tested Radha’s resolve but ultimately made her stronger. The drought in Lagaan(2001) provided the backdrop for an epic cricket match against colonial oppressors. Climate was challenge, not catastrophe.
Similarly, Malayalam cinema’s experimental approach to environmental themes has produced works like Aavasavyuham(2022), a genre-bending film that combines mockumentary and eco-fable elements. Set in the ecologically sensitive mangrove forests of Kerala, it chronicles the search for a mysterious man with deep connections to aquatic life, serving as a meditation on biodiversity loss and the conflict between development and conservation.
This romanticization of rural life reached its peak in films like Thevar Magan (1992), where a Western-educated son returns to his Tamil village and is drawn into his chieftain father’s world of honor and violence. The film celebrated feudal hierarchies as a form of authentic rural identity, even as it glossed over the exploitation these systems enabled.
The contrast with contemporary environmental cinema is stark: Where Thevar Magan presented tradition as static and noble, films like Aavasavyuham show tradition as dynamic and under threat, requiring active preservation against destructive development.
This streotypical tropes, that were characteristic of early cinema, began to slightly change much later in the 1990s as India’s economic liberalization coincided with growing environmental awareness. The villain gradually shifted from the feudal landlord to the faceless corporation. But it was only in the 2000s, as climate change became undeniable, that filmmakers began treating the environment as an active force rather than a passive backdrop.
The watershed moment came with Kadvi Hawa, widely regarded as India’s first feature film to directly confront climate change. Director Nila Madhab Panda connected dots that politicians and policymakers had long ignored: drought leads to crop failure, crop failure leads to debt, debt leads to suicide, and suicide leads to migration. The film’s title, in English “Dark Wind,” captures the new reality of nature, which in itself has become hostile.
This shift is quantifiable. Of the 200 films analyzed, those focusing on climate change and environmental disaster have emerged almost entirely in the past two decades.
Water scarcity, once a subplot, has become a central theme in 17 films. Climate change, virtually absent from earlier cinema, now drives 16 narratives. Even mainstream blockbusters like Kaththi (2014) and Kedarnath (2018) have embraced environmental themes, suggesting that climate consciousness has moved to multiplex. But then again, films like Kaththi merely replaced the traditional villain with the corporation and tried to milk ‘farmer sympathy’ playing strictly to the gallery.
The regional distribution tells its own story. Tamil cinema, traditionally focused on social issues, has produced several films dealing with industrialization and corporate farming, in fact, far more than any other regional industry. This reflects Tamil Nadu’s particular experience with drought and corporate agriculture, but also the state’s strong tradition of politically engaged cinema.
Hindi cinema, by contrast, has focused more on water scarcity and rural-urban migration, themes that resonate with its pan-Indian audience. The industry has produced films about water issues, reflecting the crisis facing cities like Delhi and Chennai, where water tankers have become as common as traffic jams.
The Northeast, despite its small film industry, has produced some of the most environmentally conscious cinema. Village Rockstars, while celebrating rural childhood, subtly documents how annual floods have become more destructive, claiming lives and destroying crops with increasing frequency. The film’s genius lies in showing how communities have normalized catastrophe, treating climate disasters as simply another aspect of rural life.
What’s remarkable is how quickly the cinematic farmer has traveled from symbol to victim. The transformation reflects India’s own agrarian crisis: since 1995, more than 270,000 farmers have committed suicide, making it one of the world’s largest occupational health disasters. Cinema, always India’s most democratic art form, has become the medium through which this crisis is processed and understood.
The environmental turn in Indian cinema also reflects a broader global shift. As climate change moves from scientific projection to lived reality, filmmakers worldwide are grappling with how to tell stories about slow-moving, complex environmental disasters. Indian cinema, with its tradition of melodrama and social messaging, has proven particularly adept at this challenge.
Yet this evolution raises uncomfortable questions. If the farmer has moved from hero to victim, what does that say about India’s development model?
If nature has become the enemy, what hope is there for the 600 million Indians who still depend on agriculture? As climate change accelerates and the agrarian crisis deepens, Indian cinema faces its greatest challenge yet: moving beyond documentation of disaster to imagine solutions.
The blind farmer in Kadvi Hawa may not be able to see his barren fields, but Indian cinema has given him a voice, which however was drowned in the cacophony of commercial cinema. Whether that voice, even if it be feeble, can help chart a path forward remains the great unfinished story of Indian cinema vis-à-vis its farmers.
Watch the story here
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