The way the water works

Shoma A. Chatterji

Do you know that only 1 per cent of the world’s water supply is potable? Are you aware that with 82 per cent of our villages overdrawing groundwater to meet their needs and cities ferrying water from semi-urban areas, India is close to exhausting its groundwater reserves? Yet, few films have drawn on this very topical and human rights issue to reach out to the masses and create awareness about the growing scarcity of water among the mass audience. Why? We find just a few gems among Indian cinema that have kept water as their central theme such as Do Boond Pani and Kaun Kitney Paani Mein. 

In this cinematic desert, Paani, a feature film in Marathi, promises to bring in a whiff of fresh air through its simple storyline, sweet little love story, both centered on the scarcity of water. The film, Paani, has been produced by Priyanka Chopra’s Purple Pictures and directed by Adinath Kothare who also portrays the character of the hero in the film. Paani won the National Award at the 66th Film Awards for the Best Feature Film on Environment Conservation.

Paani does not touch upon the religio-cultural associations of water at all. It reads the acute scarcity of water as a human rights issue that needs immediate intervention by different levels of administration. Kothare was working on the script over the past four years. He visited many drought-affected areas of Maharashtra to study the situation. Kothare explains, “The film is based on the true story of a social activist, but, of course, we have added some romance to draw the mainstream audience.” This is borne out of the story placed around 1999 in a village in Maharashtra — notorious for farmer suicides — in Nagderwadi, where the women have to walk 3 km every day to fetch water from far off wells. Most of the men waste away their lives in liquor, which has steeped the villagers deeper and deeper into poverty.

Others in the cast apart from Kothare are Subodh Bhave, Rucha Vaidya, Kishore Kadam, Girish Joshi and Rajit Kapoor. When Hanumant, nicknamed Babu, the hero, goes to “see” Suvarna, a pretty girl as part of his forthcoming marriage, he falls in love at first sight with the girl who studies in a college. When the parents of the girl are hesitant to finalise the marriage, he makes a strange promise — he will marry the girl only when he succeeds in bringing water to every door at Nagderwadi and he sets about working on this single focus of his life. “We wanted to throw up a unique perspective on love. I think we have been able to achieve it,” says Kothare. 

The film tries to draw a fine balance between Babu’s commitment to bring water and his ‘spare time’ hidden meetings with Suvarna, who is distressed as her father is not ready to wait any longer. This makes him speed up the digging of wells and removal of stones so that water can flow in. The village elders, however, want to keep the water shortage alive for their own interests bring in water tankers to block the work. Paani is by no means a brilliant film. What strikes the most is the honesty and simplicity with which Kothare has approached the story. There is no romanticising of either the romance or the poverty. The film offers a lesson in how water scarcity is man-made by the powerful to sustain control over the weak and the poor.