‘I, Poppy’ Documentary Review: Vivek Choudhary’s Sharply Observed Film Is One of the Finest This Year

I, Poppy follows an old poppy farmer and her troubles with a ‘wayward’ adult son. Like several others in her Rajasthani village, Vardibai Meghwal owns a patch of land and a poppy-farming license. She is a grassroots supplier of opium, the precious Black Gold that contains morphine used in both medicinal and illegal drugs. The trade is far from profitable, but she perseveres; she cannot afford to worry about moral implications. Her grandsons help her toil in the field. But Vardibai considers her son, Mangilal, a liability for not entering the family business, slacking on his teaching job and barely contributing to household expenses. The situation is dire. Mangilal is an addict who, according to his mother, needs to be cured and controlled and rehabilitated. He is amused by her taunts; he’s never at home, always distracted by hallucinations of an alternate reality.

Because his drugs of choice are dissent and kranti (“revolution”). Mangilal is too busy organising protests, mobilising villagers and demanding a change of policy from an establishment that’s bleeding farmers dry. He can't fathom that everyone else around him is satisfied with any version of subsistence and slavery. The man is on a slippery slope. Corrupt narcotics officials are not pleased; the government is not pleased; the family is not pleased. Vardibai begs him to stay silent and not ruffle feathers. She is worried that their license will be suspended because he’s disrupting a culture of bribes, extortion and bottom-line exploitation. But Mangilal cannot help it — he has to inject the high of injustice into his veins every day. He needs his fix of hope. He shoots off to Delhi to chant outside Jantar Mantar, he sits by his cell-phone charger at home waiting for news and calls and inquiries from fellow farmers, he educates the kids at school about equality and Ambedkar and caste atrocities. He reasons with his mother from time to time; she regrets giving him an education and the agency to tell right from wrong.

Over the course of Vivek Chaudhary’s sharply observed documentary, the tragedy of modern-day rebellion emerges in a country where silence and suffering are the badges of patriotism; where deaf ears are derived from stifled voices. Freedom fighter stories used to be glorious tales of Indians who fought to be independent from external forces, but I, Poppy deftly reveals the revised and reduced identity of freedom. Liberation is now the lonely battle for visibility, legitimisation and basic rights against the very people elected to power. It is no longer wired to be remembered; it's more of an erased page of the future than a loaded chapter of history. It's also a ‘profession’ that's looked down upon in an age of state-sponsored rage, which is why someone as fundamentally aware as Mangilal is stigmatised for knowing too much. His curse is that he sees the strings and the delusions, so he in turn is seen as a pest that's eating away at the existing crop of subservience. Other farmers praise his courage to his mother in a consolatory tone. She can sense that everyone is wary of his valour like it's a madness, a disease whose vaccine every government produces in bulk.

The triumph of I, Poppy as a film is that it exists between the discriminatory gaze of society and the obsessive gaze of resistance. It refuses to paint Mangilal as the man who knows no wrong. The camera observes a protagonist who often looks like he's searching for purpose as a front for his dysfunctionality. There are times when Mangilal is clearly at odds with his identity as a son, father, husband and “patriarch”. He can't seem to belong, and is unprepared for the roles he is expected to fulfil. So like a drifter who creates his own conflict and myth, he aligns himself with a cause that supplies his status as a misfit. He's like that character who decides to turn feeling into his full-time job because he's afraid of confronting his own inadequacies.

It’s as if he uses revolution as a device to offset his evolution; he dignifies others to dignify himself. He’s a fascinating personality, full of contradictions and self-doubt and righteousness and performative angst. It’s almost like he wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he didn’t have anything to fight for — a ‘condition’ that tends to infect crusaders who get consumed by their activism. He is nobody if not a dissenter. He’s asking for all the right things, standing tall for the correct reasons, showing a spine despite the threats and harassment — and yet it feels like a deeply complicated journey that’s as selfish as it is selfless.

The documentary is perceptive enough to juxtapose Mangilal’s obstinate optimism against his mother’s hard labour and logic. She does her work quietly, making ends meet by refusing to ask for a new beginning. She is like a majority of the nation, sacrificing sanctimonious emotions at the altar of honest self-preservation. And she’s not wrong either. He commits too hard to back off, and he’s escaped too far to soften his ideology. It’s like he’s been pushed to an extreme that he has no choice but to embrace; the futility of this anti-establishment angle is laid bare. When one of his own neglected sons sits with him for a brief chat, a phone call interrupts them; he’d rather launch into playful banter with the friends and acquaintances he’s trying to inspire. He enjoys the attention he commands. College fees stay unpaid, loans are awaited; his own family flails while he chases big pictures. His desire becomes his image — the isolation of speaking up replaces the community of conforming.

He seems to be speaking to himself even when he’s informing his mother of the crisis: the sold-out media, the wealthy politicians, the constant shadow of debt and suicide. Most of us in our liberal and conservative echo chambers know those like Mangilal as labels (“marginalised India”) and headlines (“Indian Farmers’ protests”), but I, Poppy reclaims the individualism and ambiguity of last-ditch heroism. It exposes the toll of being human in an age where even breathing is political. Even my Bollywood-addled brain learned to dispel thoughts of how actor Annu Kapoor is a dead ringer for the ‘character’ of Mangilal in an adaptation that will never happen. The reality here is stranger and stringier than fiction. There is a price to pay for those who have nothing left to give, and there is an example to be made out of those who pull the chain.

At some point in the documentary, we hear of how many farmers resort to underground opium trade because they are sick of being lowballed by rigged policies. Even their arrests are turned into a business by the cops; they go dark to get the money they deserve, yet their families are blackmailed into paying more. It reflects the irony of crime in the community; they probably have more rights behind bars — three meals a day, a sheltered space, a regimented routine, the respect of like-minded inmates — than they do as citizens of the land. Being in jail sounds easier than avoiding the possibility of it. When Mangilal confesses that he’s confused about shielding his family from the consequences, you can tell that he’s reflecting on the legacy of his actions. He’s wondering about how to widen his impact, not quit the movement. He wants to be visible enough to be detained, not invisible enough to be subdued. After all, in the shackled universe of I, Poppy, captivity is the only language of freedom. Suppression is the only medium of survival.