Hot Docs winner Vivek Chaudhary’s ‘I, Poppy’ is a potent telling of farmers trapped in the opium paradox

Poppy farmers Vardibai Meghwal and her son Mangilal Meghwal in a still from Vivek Chaudhary's HotDocs top prize-winning documentary 'I, Poppy'.

Second year in a row, an Indian protest documentary film on farmers has brought home the top jury prize. After last year’s victory of Nishtha Jain’s Farming the Revolution, on the year-long farmers’ protest to repeal the farm laws, Vivek Chaudhary’s I, Poppy has won the Best International Feature Documentary at the prestigious Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto, winning a cash prize of $10,000. And, thus, qualifies for consideration in the documentary feature category at the Academy Awards.

More than a decade later, non-fiction filmmaker Vivek Chaudhary has returned to tell the story of another unsung underdog. In 2015, Goonga Pehelwan (mute wrestler) — on Virender Singh, two-time gold medal winner at Deaflympics — directed by him, along with Mit Jani and Prateek Gupta, bagged the National Award for the Best Debut Film of a Director in non-feature film category.

Fields of white Papaver somniferum greet us as the documentary unspools over 80 minutes. We meet an ageing but agile and active mother and her middle-aged son, a government school teacher who is rousing his farmer brethren for a “Dilli Chalo” — to seek licences/revoking of cancelled licences for opium cultivation for families that have been traditionally engaged in it. Farming families have been cultivating the “black gold” for more than 500 years. The cultivation of opium for medicinal purposes in India dates back to as early as 1,000 BC, mentioned in such ancient texts as Dhanwantari Nighantu.

And yet, six months of hard toil yields a mere Rs 9,000, rues his son as Mangilal says on the phone how the poppy farmers were paid Rs 1,500 for a kg of opium in 1998, and 20 years later, the rate remains the same. On the other hand, a kilo of opium sells for Rs 1 lakh/kg in the black market. And that exactly is Mangilal’s fight — to stay the right course and demand for their right.

Vivek Chaudhary (left) and the poster of his film.

Gorgeously shot by Mustaqeem Khan, the beautiful pink of the milking poppy heads becomes the pink of the mother’s dupatta (long scarf). And the blue of the skies becomes the son’s shirt. The woman, bent by age and hard toil, sits to de-husk grains and peel corn off cobs, and ensures that the birds get fed even as her own source of livelihood is at stake. Vardibai, a poppy farmer in Rajasthan, toils in the fields while her schoolteacher son Mangilal teaches the young about equality and justice while gathering supporters to fight corruption and exploitation of farmers. Vardibai’s cry through the film is for her son to do some real work in the farm instead of stoking the fire and bringing them into ruin. She bemoans his education that she worked so hard to provide for. The women here work while the men either hang about listlessly — Mangilal’s grown-up sons — or talk big and agitate. If Vardibai could sing she would, Kumar Gandharva-like: Utho gyani, khet sambhalo/Beh nisarega paani, but no one is coming to save her lot. Her son’s fight is for survival as well as identity.

When not in the fields, where the cameras go close to the characters’ faces, the tripoded camera at home sees the characters from a distance, their lives framed by the doors and verandah pillars. Much before we are told that our farmers are Dalit Meghwals, caste is writ large from the word go. From the Ambedkarite blue of Mangilal’s shirt, of the paint of doors, windows and plastic sitting stools at his school, to Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar’s photographs at his home and school, imparting his teachings embedded in our Constitution to young children: that even the last standing person should get rights and justice — a stool to sit on.

A still from the film 'I, Poppy'.

The non-narcotic tiny white poppy seeds (khus khus in Hindi and posto in Bengali), thrown away after the drug is extracted, holds a special place in Bengali cuisine — since the Great Bengal famine of 1770, East India Company’s enforced illegal opium (afeem) cultivation, and the Opium Wars in the 1800s. The main product of the poppy plant is opium, from which codeine and morphine are extracted — legally for medicinal purposes. But despite local production, India depends on imports.

Stories about farmers are tinged with a bleak reality but also with an undying resilience to push back, because they have been left on their own. The farmer is no longer visible — let alone celebrated — in our films. Gone are the days of Manoj Kumar singing Mere desh ki dharti sona ugle, ugle heere moti (Upkar, 1967) or Nargis singing Dukh bhare din beete re bhaiyya (Mother India, 1957) when an irrigation canal is inaugurated in her village bringing in water and gallons of hope.

A still from the film 'I, Poppy'.

Chaudhary’s I, Poppy is a worthy successor to Jain’s Farming the Revolution and is every bit as gripping, observational and as passionately filmed. By dint of its subject material, Chaudhary’s film finds a conspicuous and spiritual connect with Amitav Ghosh’s acclaimed novel Sea of Poppies (2008), on the impact of the British opium trade in India leading up to the Opium Wars. In the novel, a village woman from an opium-producing region in India has a vivid encounter with a poppy seed. “She looked at the seed as if she has never seen one before, and suddenly she knew that it was not the planet above that governed her life; it was this miniscule orb — at once beautiful and all-devouring, merciful and destructive, sustaining and vengeful.” Chaudhary’s film, however, keeps the focus tight on the present. The narrative of I, Poppy, to borrow from what William Dalrymple had to say about Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies — is “like the opium that forms its subject”, “becomes increasingly powerful and addictive as it takes hold, and most [viewers] will anxiously wait in the hope that there will be further instalments” of the story of the poppy/opium. In the last few pages of Ghosh’s Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories (2023), the author confesses almost giving up after spending years working on the book because he was overwhelmed by the “despicable means” of the subject matter — the exploitation, brutality and misery — and the challenge of telling the story of “a non-human protagonist, a plant”. The pièce de résistance of Chaudhary’s film, too, is the poppy pod. The conundrum of poppy’s existence — a necessity that is abhorred — becomes a metonym for its farmer and the paradox of their lives. The hands that sow and reap can be cut off at any point; these hands are tied to a cycle of debt, bribe, penury, and even jail terms.

A still from the film 'I, Poppy'.

One-man army Chaudhary, besides direction, is also the writer, part producer, sound recordist and music designer on the documentary. The mid-paced film that builds a momentum has smooth transitions and narrative continuity, at no point does the story slack or drag — its editing fell into the solid hands of Tanushree Das along with Camille Mouton. This year, Das’ co-directed debut feature, the Tillotama Shome-starrer Shadowbox (Baksho Bondi) premiered at the Berlinale.

Supported by Europe’s IDFA Bertha Fund, HAF Hong Kong Asia Film Financing Forum, and France’s Culture Ministry’s, I, Poppy is also an interesting study of generational conflict, a parent-child story, and a study of how gendered labour remains unseen, unpaid, unaccounted for. The matriarch Vardibai has no real power over her son Mangilal, much like how the farmers have no real power over their produce — the poppy.

A still from the film.

In one of the moving scenes, we see mother and son in the middle of the sea of green buds. The mother breaks down, tells her middle-aged son — who belabours about the “morphine rule” — that she can’t slap sense into him any longer, that “it’s impossible to change the system [of extortion]”. Both are slaves of two kinds, the mother of traditions and the son of the modern world’s devices.

The next shot freezes the loneliness of our man on a mission, sitting alone on a sofa on the verandah of his home — a recurring image through the film — as the lens frames him in a mid-long shot in between two pillars, symbolically trapped and framed, wiping his silent tears in solitude, with Babasaheb on the wall for company.

A still from the film.

Several post-independence Indian films, especially in the ’70s-’80s, explore the theme of an individual challenging the system and ultimately losing their way, often with a tragic outcome. Chaudhary’s film, in spirit, reminds of the tragedy, suffering and tyranny of fate of the protagonists in both Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966) and Satyajit Ray’s 1981 telefilm adaptation of Munshi Premchand’s 1931 short story Sadgati (Deliverance) — Doordarshan’s first colour outing. The donkey in the former and the Dalit protagonist Dukhi (Om Puri), an untouchable tanner, face a similar fate at the hands of powerful men and are left to die — what the likes of Mangilal face is a metaphorical death. A kind of Bressonian minimalism informs Chaudhary’s film as does a blend of Ray-Bressonian realism and humanism.

While I, Poppy remains observational, it is punctuated ever so slightly when the filmmaker (his face not shown) questions the protagonists in a journalistic pursuit, shadows them with his camera, and when the old woman confides in him things about her adamant son.

A still from the film.

The march of history has consumed many a peasant like our protagonist. And, yet, an unvanquished Mangilal, like the Hindi title of the film Hoon Amal (I will act/implement), asserts: “I didn’t succeed in my mission, and still I will not make a U-turn, because, perhaps, for the first time, farmers are marching towards their own freedom; the British might have left long back but we, farmers, are still slaves to politicians.” It takes courage of another kind, and like the cinema of Ritwik Ghatak, keeps hope alive against all odds, in the midst of your life being gripped by a stinging, unrelenting wretchedness and grave loss and yet not giving up. As documentary filmmaker Anupama Srinivasan, whose Sundance-winning Nocturnes (co-made with Anirban Datta) screened at HotDocs last year, says: “There are different ways to challenge the status quo of colonial and exploitative structures in the world. Making documentaries is one such way…” Chaudhary, like Mangilal, must keep wielding his lens to speak truth to power.