An impossibility lurks over Vivek Chaudhary’s documentary I, Poppy. A sense of having one’s hands tied, whichever direction one takes—how do individuals carve their way out of such situations? Through the perspectives of the elderly poppy farmer Vardibai and her middle-aged son Mangilal, the struggle for a better life is illuminated in all its conflicts and hard decisions.
Vardibai is terrified and pained at her son’s defiant path. She knows his choice to resist will have major ramifications. She insists he fall in with tradition, do what’s always been asked of them. In all her years of hard work, the family never ran into debt. Poppy has given them everything, she says. It’s helped fund her son’s education, erect their house. However, with Mangilal’s protests, they have landed in a soup. She holds an intimate, sacred relationship with the land, wary of wanting too much lest the little she scrambled together might be taken away. But her son takes on the machinery itself. Mangilal is rarely on the field, burying himself in protest work.
The toughened stability of Vardibai’s life threatens to come wholly undone. As he rallies for the farmer community to come together and put up an organized front, consequences spiral. Vardibai’s farming license is pushed into precarity of non-renewal.
Mangilal reckons with an ultimate loneliness in his struggle. Even as he sporadically gets people to join his cause, “farmers are cowards”. There’s too much at stake. Livelihoods might be permanently endangered. Mangilal is constantly advised to get off his chosen path. Can’t he see the dangers? His mother pleads. The dilemma is many-pronged, odds too skewed. Poppy farmers haven’t had a spike in payments despite decades passing. But the morphine goes into the most staggeringly priced medicines. Narcotics officers get rich off the farmers’ misfortunes. Terms of engagement between the two are historically unfair. While one builds the most lavish life off extortion, the other’s dumped in the trenches. Farmers have to tackle complaints of low morphine in poppies. However, if they pay up, the same bunch of poppies get passed.
What Chaudhary establishes in clear-cut, bracing terms is how farmers are cut off from institutional aid in every form. If there’s no official license, business gets branded illegal. Narcotics fling them in jails. So far as hefty bribes are paid, farmers clutch onto an illusion of safety. How do they even afford with such a recurring, measly pay? It’s a Sisyphean cycle of misery. Vardibai has resigned herself to it but her son keeps raging for change. Rights should be lent till the very last person standing, he tells his students in class.
Caught in his activism and canvassing support, he grows increasingly oblivious of his own son’s needs—college fees that need filling. Mangilal is determined despite all signs urging him to call off his plans. His sons question him on such an alienating course, but Mangilal is certain. There’s a staunch idealism in him that powers through every defeating setback. He believes in his pursuit of rights in spite of attacks. As others come and go, he stays undeterred. Chaudhary takes a matter-of-fact approach, delineating the everyday tussle to protect crops. Be it birds or smugglers, poppies need constant supervision till they are cashed.
I, Poppy swings between the mother’s growing despair and the son’s resolute faith scratching through the dark. There might be occasional payoffs, arrests of few officials, but punishment to Mangilal’s family rushes in immediate. That they are Dalits further ensures any socio-economic rise or hope for power remains out of sight. Is it justice at all if saddled with such dire consequence?
Chaudhary drops us in absolute bleakness. Each resistance is met with only greater clampdown, a deepened non-recognition. Those like Mangilal make only small dents, uncreased eventually. The film draws quiet tragedy from a simmering lack of true, positive choice. Chaudhary displays maturity and emotionally honed instincts in accelerating no drama. Heartbreak, defeat that gnaws through one’s whole—these pluck at I, Poppy. This is an intimate film, concentrated on a single family’s vicissitudes. Nevertheless, its unshowy triumph is it encapsulates entire communities on mere survival’s anvil.
I, Poppy had its world premiere at Hot Docs 2025.
