Chhath songs to cinema screen: Pollution is a blind spot in Indian pop culture

Now that Diwali has passed and Chhath is here, we’ve entered that familiar season when breathing becomes a conscious act. The water is frothing. The sky is covered in smog so thick it looks like somebody has edited away the contrast, the colour and sharpness. Only the AQI charts are crimson, and probably your itchy, inflamed respiratory tract. 

A lot of analysis about the how and why behind this deadly pollution has probably already crossed your timeline. We drown in such analysis and statistics every winter. But where are the movies and songs which reflect this tragedy? 

Why isn’t this horror of our everyday lives on screen? Why isn’t it in our playlists? 

A blind spot

Indian cinema has never been shy of crisis. It has dissected poverty, land, corruption, caste, gender, sexuality and even water scarcity among other issues. It has thrived on catastrophe. 

Deewar became the movie of its time because of what happened to its protagonist Vijay, a minor crime of a father fuelled the discrimination and victimisation of his child. In Devdas, the naivete and arrogance of young love became a catalyst for disaster amid rigid societal norms. 

Films like Kadvi Hawa, Jal, Swades addressed droughts and water politics. Sherni, Sherdil: The Pilibhit Saga, and Lakadbaggha tried to tackle the fragile relationship between human beings and animals.

But when it comes to air, the silence is deafening.

The 1982 Tamil film Ethavathu Manithan, which is based on a real-life incident in Tirunelveli district, is among the few Indian films to focus on industrial air pollution. The 2017 Hindi film Irada focused on water contamination and the politics of thermal power, and the 2017 short film Carbon: The Story of Tomorrow imagined a dystopian Delhi where oxygen is supplied by big business.

But beyond these, perhaps the closest any film has come to capturing the unease of breathing in a dying city is All That Breathes – Shaunak Sen’s haunting 2022 documentary about brothers caring for injured kites in Delhi’s toxic skies. But that sits in the indie or documentary corner, not the mainstream.

It’s not just cinema. Folk music, the bastion of raw social and emotional honesty, also averts its gaze from this reality.

Chhath songs

Today is Chhath, celebrated a week after Diwali. It is Bihar’s biggest festival. Millions stand waist-deep in rivers and ponds to offer prayers to the Sun God – a celebration rooted in gratitude to nature, light, and water. For centuries, its songs have mirrored the rhythms of agrarian life, the joys and sorrows of everyday reality.

I reached out to six of my friends who have either gone home for Chhath or are celebrating it in Delhi. I asked them to share the most popular Chhath songs they could find, the ones loved by them and their families.

I got a hefty list. But none of them featured a word about the froth that floats on the Yamuna, or the stench of the water devotees stand in. 

The same could be said about the biggest Chhath songs. For example, Jode Jode Falwa by Pawan Singh which has 142 million views on YouTube, or Kelwa Ke Paat Par by Sharda Sinha with 97 million views, or Sawa Lakh Ke Saadi Bheeje by Anu Dubey which has 60 million views.

This isn’t just India’s blind spot. 

In 2022, a study by USC Annenberg’s Norman Lear Center found that out of 37,453 Hollywood film and TV scripts, only 2.8 percent contained any climate-related keywords. 

Even the world's most influential storytelling machine, most powerful storytellers seem reluctant to script their own extinction. And this is an industry obsessed with dystopian, end of the world scenarios. Perhaps it is easier to imagine the apocalypse than to acknowledge its slow arrival. 

Pollution is not a purple giant from a comic multiverse who vows to end half of all living beings in the universe. It is banal. It lingers in the air, seeps into our water supply, and kills quietly.

The convenient silence

So, why this silence? I think part of it is fear.

Air and water pollution point fingers at power – coal, oil, automobiles, construction, industrial giants. Talking about them risks ruffling the wrong feathers. In a world where politics, cinema, and business are entwined, no producer wants to alienate advertisers or sponsors. 

The silence is self-preservation. Apathy is part of it too. For example, the apathy of the elite who can afford air purifiers and mountain getaways. For them, pollution is an inconvenience. For the rest of us, it’s a death sentence delivered in slow motion.

To be fair, the omission might not always be cowardice. It could be fatigue. Maybe some of these creators believe audiences are already overwhelmed. For years, I’ve heard people say that they come to screens for escape, not confrontation. 

But still, art is supposed to disturb. When it refuses to even acknowledge the collective suffocation of people, it becomes complicit in the forgetting.

The breath we all seek

The irony is that we do talk about India’s slow-motion disaster endlessly, in editorials, on social media, in drawing rooms. But this awareness vanishes when it’s time to create.

The air we breathe grows thicker each year. The rivers get dirtier. But the songs stay the same. The screens stay spotless. And maybe that’s the truest reflection of us – a society that celebrates rituals in poisonous water, lights crackers in smog, and still calls it joy. A people who’d rather cough through life than confront the system that makes them choke.

After all, cinema merely reflects what a society chooses to see, and ignores. That’s what makes this omission more than artistic laziness.

Violence, romance, patriotism, corruption, politics, caste – they’re all fair game. But the slow, invisible violence of air and water pollution? That doesn’t fit the narrative arc. Maybe that’s because this story has no hero, no villain, no tidy resolution. Only us, gasping quietly, as the smog thickens and the screens stay clear.

Here’s how you can join the Fight To Breathe. Click here to power this campaign.