The portrayal of the rural in Indian cinema has been a consistently evolving trope. The 50s and 60s represented the Indian village as an “authentic site” that reflected Indianness as opposed to Western ideas. The liberalization of the Indian economy saw the discourse around the rural shrink, with urban aspirations taking over mainstream cinema. As discourses around the agrarian crisis gained prominence in academic circles, mainstream media started withdrawing from the discussion of the rural.
Rima Das’s Village Rockstars franchise, hence, is an important depiction of the rural in contemporary times. So important and uncomfortable the depiction was at times that a member of the audience, during the Q&A session of Village Rockstar 2’s screening in Delhi, asked why the “film was made to be so sad” and if the “director would think of giving a happier ending in the next film.”
The first part of the film, set in a rural village of Assam, displays the story of a child, Dhunu (played by Bhanita Das), who dreams of buying a guitar and forming a band with her friends. Dhunu lost her father in a flood, and her mother is the sole breadwinner to provide for her and her older brother.
They could hardly manage two square meals a day, and thus, buying a guitar was a distant dream for Dhunu. But seeing Dhunu’s determination, her mother promises her to buy a guitar by selling one of their goats. The first part ends with her mother buying a used guitar for Dhunu.
In Village Rockstars 2, director Rima Das revisits Dhunu’s story seven years later. Dhunu, now a teenager attending high school, grapples with the turbulent transformations of adolescence. Her dream of forming a village band has faded as her childhood friends have either grown distant from that dream or become weighed down by familial obligations.
However, Dhunu occasionally plays the guitar and performs with her high school friends at local events. As she fondly remembers her carefree childhood days, the film portrays a 17-year-old girl balancing her enduring musical passion with the responsibilities of caring for her ailing mother and drunkard brother.
Portrayal of Rural Distress in Village Rockstars 2
Rima Das uses Dhunu’s journey to comment on the socio-economic realities of contemporary rural life in India. Das’s portrayal of the rural is deeply intimate and nuanced, depicting the detailed and layered truths of agrarian crises in the country. Dhunu’s family owns a small piece of land, where her mother tirelessly cultivates paddy, only to see the crops repeatedly ravaged by annual floods.
Despite this perpetual cycle of hope and devastation, her mother perseveres, planting season after season with diminishing expectations. These agricultural setbacks force Dhunu’s mother into precarious non-farm occupations such as daily wage work.
Witnessing her mother’s struggle, Dhunu takes on multiple small jobs—plucking betel nuts (areca nut), working for wedding caterers, and labouring in a rice mill. This is the story of most small-scale farmers in Assam.
Every year, lakhs of people in the state get displaced by floods. Further, rice is the primary crop grown in the state but is also marked by low penetration of irrigation (only 26.5% of the net cropped area of the state is irrigated), making it harder for small cultivators to produce other crops. Come monsoon, the crops in low-lying areas get destroyed by the floods, pushing the farmers and their families into despair.
Rural households, hence, undertake numerous non-farm activities like petty commodity production, casual wage work, handloom production, and seasonal migration. Meanwhile, Dhunu’s older brother, employed as a wage labourer under a contractor, contributes little to the family’s subsistence as he succumbs to alcoholism, squandering his meagre earnings rather than supporting the household.
The vicious cycle of crop devastation from annual floods generates a cascade of social consequences, particularly school drop-outs.
Throughout the film, we see Dhunu and her brother initially balancing their studies with small tasks to support their mother. However, when she falls gravely ill and becomes bedridden, both children are thrust into full-time work out of financial necessity. It seems the filmmaker deliberately leaves their fate unresolved, inviting the audience to contemplate their uncertain future.
Yet the implicit message is clear—their chances of returning to school are bleak. This narrative arc reflects the reality faced by countless marginalized families across the state, where education becomes one of the first ‘luxuries’ sacrificed to immediate survival needs.
While the government has implemented initiatives to promote higher education among girls, countless children like Dhunu never advance far enough in their academic journey to access these benefits—their education is curtailed by economic hardship long before such opportunities become available.
Data shows that school dropout rates in Assam are alarmingly higher than the national average — the average annual dropout rate in lower primary schools in the state is 6.02% against 1.45% at the national level. The dropout rates in the upper primary state are 8.8% and 3.02% in Assam and India, respectively, and the same for secondary levels are 20.25% and 12.6%.
Issues of Land Ownership, Landlessness, and Women’s Access to Land
Another important plot in the film revolves around the question of agrarian land. The advent of the neoliberal era has ensued from the massive expropriation of land and natural resources by the local rich and big domestic and foreign companies.
In India, such attempts of land grabs took the form of minerals mined in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Orissa leaving the Indigenous people’s homeland and without a livelihood, companies like Coca-Cola taking out groundwater from rural areas while leading to unbalanced water allocation and displacement of local people to make way for the construction of dams.
In the name of “fair compensation”, as termed by the media and the politicians, the rural poor lose out on their most valuable asset. As Dhunu’s mother reiterates in the film, “Money gets spent away, land stays forever.”
Village Rockstars 2 powerfully explores the question of who owns the land. It poignantly reveals the ingrained inequalities in its answer. After the death of Dhunu’s father, her mother should have been the de facto owner of their land.
But her ownership of the land was superseded by her son’s signature. Women’s land ownership in India has always worked in patchy ways. A 2021 study by Bina Agarwal across nine states in India found that women landowners in India constitute only 14% of all landowners, with the Southern states doing better than the rest of the country.
Rima Das has been praised and appreciated for her portrayal of gender relations in her previous films. Village Rockstars 2 goes beyond that. At a time when popular representation of the rural has been declining, Das’s work brings out a portrayal reminiscent of the present-day rural economy and society.
Madhurjya Deka is a Development Professional who works at IDinsight, a global advisory and research organisation.
Ritwika Patgiri is a PhD Research Scholar in the Faculty of Economics, South Asian University, New Delhi.
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