Why there's no song and dance around India's killer air

In the 2016 Bollywood hit Pink, a scene introducing Amitabh Bachchan’s character shows the actor emerging from his home on a winter morning into Delhi’s smog-filled streets, wearing a mask.

The mask and Delhi's smoggy air feature in other scenes of the film but are of little relevance to its plot.

Yet, it is one of the rare examples of mainstream Indian films taking notice of the deadly air that makes many parts of India dangerous to live in every year.

The toxic air pollution and recurrent winter smog in Indian capital Delhi and other parts of northern India frequently makes headlines, becoming a matter of public concern, political debate and legal censure. But unlike disasters such as the devastating floods in Uttarakhand in 2013, Kerala in 2018 and Mumbai city in 2005 - each of which have inspired films - air pollution is largely missing from Indian pop culture.

Siddharth Singh, author of The Great Smog of India, a book on pollution, says that it is a "big failure" that air pollution is not a prevailing narrative in India's literature and filmmaking.

Much of the writing on pollution in India remains in the realm of academia and scientific expertise, he points out.

“When you say PM2.5 or NOx or SO2 (all pollutants), what are these words? They mean nothing to [ordinary] people."

In his 2016 book, The Great Derangement, author Amitav Ghosh, who has written extensively about climate change, observed that such stories were missing from contemporary fiction.

"People are weirdly normal about climate change,” he said in a 2022 interview.

The writer described being in India during a heatwave.

“What struck me was the fact that everything seemed to be normal and that was the most unsettling thing,” he said. “It is like we have already learnt to live with these changes.”

Ghosh described climate change as “a slow violence” which made it difficult to write about.

That certainly holds for pollution - it can have devastating health impacts over a long time, but does not lend itself to dramatic visuals.

The subject has, however, been explored in documentaries like Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes, which was nominated for the Oscars in 2022.

In the film, Sen explored climate change, pollution and the interconnected nature of human-animal relationships in Delhi’s ecosystem through the story of two brothers who treated wounded black kites that fell from the city’s smoke-filled skies.

Sen says he was interested in exploring how “something as big as the Anthropocene" (a term used to describe the current moment in time when human beings are having a profound impact on the living and physical world) or climate change were connected to petty squabbles and everyday irritability.

A scene in the film shows the two brothers arguing. One of them then points to the sky and at themselves and says, “Yeh sab jo hamare beech mein ho raha hai, ye is sab ki galti hai (What’s happening between us is the fault of all of this).”

“[The effects of climate change] actually pervade through every aspect of our life,” Sen says. “And the job of representation, be it cinema or literature, is to give it that kind of robustness in its representation.”

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Environmental films that are pedantic, prescriptive, or hold audiences by the collar to make them feel bad do more disservice than good, he says.

“For me, the best films are those which are Trojan horses which are able to sneak in ideas without the audience fully knowing that they're engaging in that conversation.”

Filmmaker Nila Madhab Panda, whose work on climate change and environment spans more than 70 films, believes art can make a difference.

Panda, who began telling stories on climate change in 2005 with his documentary Climate's First Orphan, turned to more mainstream cinema for the message to reach wider audiences.

The filmmaker was born and raised in the Kalahandi Balangir Koraput region of the eastern state of Odisha which was prone to droughts and floods and moved to Delhi in 1995.

“It’s amazing to me that I was living in an ecosystem where you see four seasons, you drink water from the river directly. Natural wealth is free to us - air, water, fire, everything. And I come to Delhi where you buy everything. I buy water, I buy air. Every room has an air filter.”

In 2019, Panda made a short film for an anthology in which he explored the theme of Delhi’s pollution through a courtroom drama about a couple getting a divorce because they couldn't agree on whether to continue living in the capital.

“You can't just make anything which is not entertaining and show [it],” Panda says.

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Creators also deal with the challenge of humanising difficult stories.

Singh, whose 2018 book looked at India’s air pollution crisis, says he struggled to find the people behind the statistics while writing it.

“We always read these news headlines of a million or two million people dying because of pollution every single year. But where are these people? Where are their stories?”

While themes related to the environment have often found place in India's vast canon of regional literature, a lot of contemporary English writers, including Ghosh, have also highlighted the topic - Delhi’s Bhalswa rubbish dump features in Nilanjana S Roy’s crime novel Black River. In Gigi Ganguly’s Biopeculiar and Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches, the writers explore our relationship with the natural environment.

But there is still a long way to go.

Singh says one of the reasons for the relative shortage of such stories could be that the people creating them are "insulated" due to their privilege.

“They are not the people who are by the bank of the [polluted] Yamuna river, who see the poem in it or write about the stories along its banks.”

These days it's memes and photos on social media that have been most effective in capturing the gravity of air pollution, he says.

“One meme that was popular a few days ago said something like, 'Sheikh Hasina [exiled Bangladesh PM who is now in Delhi] spotted on her daily morning walk'. But the accompanying image was completely grey because the joke was not being able to see her because of air pollution!”

The writer hopes such creative outlets find enough momentum to eventually "trigger a response by those who can actually make a difference".

“I think that's what we lack at the moment,” he says.

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