In the 2016 Bollywood hit Pink, a scene introducing Amitabh Bachchan’s character shows the actor walking out of his house on a winter morning into the smog-filled streets of Delhi wearing a mask.
The mask and the smoky air of Delhi appear in other scenes of the film, but are not relevant to its plot.
However, this is one of the rare examples of Indian films that pay attention to the deadly air that makes many parts of India it is dangerous to live every year.
Toxic air pollution and intermittent winter smog in India’s capital Delhi and other areas of northern India frequently hits the headlines, becoming the subject of public concern, political debate and legal condemnation. But unlike disasters like the devastating floods in Uttarakhand in 2013, Kerala in 2018 and Mumbai in 2005 – each of which inspired movies – air pollution is largely absent from Indian pop culture.
Siddharth Singh, author of the book on pollution India’s Big Smog, says it is a “huge failure” that air pollution is not the dominant narrative in Indian literature and filmmaking.
Much of the writing on pollution in India remains in the realm of academic and scientific knowledge, he points out.
“When you say PM2.5 or NOx or SO2 (all pollutants), what are those words? They mean nothing to (ordinary) people.”
In his 2016 book The Great Absurdity, author Amitav Ghosh, who has written extensively on climate change, noted that such stories are missing from contemporary fiction.
“People are surprisingly normal about climate change,” he said said, external in the 2022 interview.
The writer described being in India during the heat wave.
“What struck me was that everything seemed normal, and that was the most disturbing thing,” he said. “It’s like we’ve already learned to live with these changes.”
Ghosh called climate change a “slow violence” that was difficult to write about.
This is certainly true of pollution – it can have devastating long-term health effects, but doesn’t lend itself to dramatic visual effects.
