Vidarbha Saga-Telling suppressed stories
Nandan Saxena and Kavita Bahl
Nandan Saxena and Kavita Bahl's Cotton For My Shroud is an honest and
heart-wrenching account of the hapless condition of Vidarbha's farmers
The husband-wife duo Nandan Saxena and Kavita Bahl, armed with a camera
and “an iron soul”, set forth to Vidarbha to film the stories of farmer
families who had lost their sons, brothers and husbands to suicides due
to mounting debts, to render visible the issues of the marginalised
small farmer and bring back into focus the forgotten stories of
Vidarbha's farmer suicides. Their film “Cotton for my shroud” was
screened last week at Suchitra Film Society. “Since 1995, a quarter of a
million Indian farmers have committed suicide, most of whom were cotton
farmers from Vidarbha in Maharashtra,” inform the filmmakers.
The couple began filming “Cotton For My Shroud” in 2006 when Vidarbha
had recorded the highest number of suicides. They were supported in
their endeavour by Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti, an NGO actively involved
in advocacy on farmers' issues.
The suicide of a farmer wasn't just another statistic for them, but a
precious life lost due to faulty government paradigms. It took them
almost five-and-a-half years to put the film together. “It was difficult
to bury the ghosts and sweep the film under the carpet, as if nothing
had ever goaded us to visit Vidarbha. We owed a lot to the people who
had opened their hearts and hearths to two outsiders in their moment of
grief. We could not betray their trust. As we previewed and digitised
the footage, we re-lived the horror that had unfolded before our eyes in
2006,” write the former journalists in an email interview.
In “Cotton…”, the line “If one farmer kills himself, we can call it a
suicide. But when a quarter of a million kill themselves, how can the
government call it suicide? It is genocide,” reveals that justice
delayed is no less a crime. “Torn between aggressive marketing of
supposedly ‘better varieties' of transgenic crops by the State and his
traditional wisdom of low-cost and eco-friendly agriculture, the farmer
is forced to buy BT cotton, which results in an unending cycle of debt.”
The couple hold the government, multinational corporations and even
certain sections of the media responsible for the condition of the
cotton farmers in Vidarbha. “The farmers felt betrayed by the government
extension agencies that are supposed to guide the farmers, they feel
violated by the multinational corporations that are poisoning their land
with chemicals, and genetically modified cotton seeds that do not live
up to the tall claims made by Monsanto. They have lost respect for the
media too for they feel that most of the media has been bought over by
powerful politicians and multinationals.”
“Cotton…” won the Rajat Kamal for the Best Investigative Film at the
59th National Film Awards. But the government-funded Mumbai
International Film Festival (MIFF), the couple inform, chose not to show
it. They had even organised a special screening for parliamentarians at
the Constitution Club, for which they had invited the parliamentary
standing committees on agriculture and rural development.
“Only Basudev Acharya had attended the screening; the other MPs were too
busy to watch it.” Nandan and Kavita faced many daunting challenges
while filming “Cotton…”. “The shopkeepers and agents of Monsanto-Mahyco
were hostile but could not do much to stop us. The police and the
Guardian Minister of Yavatmaal district did their best to stop us from
going to film the funeral of Dinesh Gugul at Village Mendoli. He was
killed when the police opened fire at the farmers at the Cotton Mandi at
Wani, on 6 December 2006. We argued with the police officers, but the
seasoned, shrewd police-wallahs sent us to the Mandi where an angry mob
of farmers charged at us and almost smashed our camera. We were asked to
meet the Guardian Minister at the Circuit House. As soon as we entered
the Circuit House, a curfew was clamped at Wani. We finally reached
Mendoli, defying the curfew.”
The couple has contacted schools and colleges to screen the film and
attempts are being made at translating “Cotton…” into other regional
languages. “We are trying to raise some contributions for making the
Marathi and Hindi versions of the film to take it to the villages where
we filmed. There is a demand for Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Odiya
versions as well.”
Keywords: Cotton For My Shroud, Vidarbha farmers suicide
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