The film focuses on the harsh realities faced by a farmer who fails to earn a fair price for his products.
A poster of the film 'Kshetrapathi'. (Supplied)
Kshetrapathi (Kannada)
Humans cannot survive without the basic necessities, and food produced by farmers stands on top equal to air and water.
When such is the case, especially in India, which is majorly an agrarian country, farmers should be rightly given the top preference to support their livelihood.
Sadly, it is still a distant dream, with everyday reports of farmers committing suicides and them protesting to seek fair prices for their products.
Director Srikant Katagi depicts one such burgeoning issue to good effect with Naveen Shankar putting up yet another impressive performance as the protagonist.
So, let’s look into the director’s take on farmers’ plight and a solution needed to ease the life of farmers when it comes to fair prices for their hard work.
A still from the film ‘Kshetrapathi’. (Supplied)
At times, cinema as a mass media is considered an effective tool to convey a broader message than just limiting it to entertainment.
On a similar line, Kshetrapathi (Farmer) dwells upon realities about Indian farmers through the main protagonist Basava (Naveen Shankar).
It opens with Basava pursuing his engineering degree with an ambition to settle in the USA.
In no time, the film picks up pace with the protagonist’s father, a farmer, committing suicide. Basava returns to his village and eventually decides to become a farmer while sacrificing his ambitions to be a successful man post his engineering studies.
He soon finds out that the landlord (Rahul Ainapur), through his nexus with supermarket officials and politicians, is the reason behind the farmers’ situation in his village, leading some to take extreme steps.
How Basava fights injustice and calls for a revolution against self-centred landlords and politicians is the crux of the film.
Naveen Shankar and Archana Jois in the film. (Supplied)
The focus of Kshetrapathi rests heavily upon presenting the harsh realities faced by a farmer who most of the time fails to even earn a fair price for his products.
In a scene, Basava says, “… farmers produce the most essential products for humans to survive, and they do it by sweating it out on a daily basis. But they end up crying with blood in their tears to even get a fair price for the same.”
The movie sums up how farmers are exploited at every level — right from availing loans for their agrarian needs and ending up in a precarious position to sell their products for cheap prices to incurring losses and eventually ending lives when failed to repay their debts.
Kshetrapathi, through its protagonist, also highlights how present-day farmers forgot the traditional methods of farming and are getting heavily used to modern techniques with excessive dependency on chemicals and modern techniques, which indeed is making them debt-ridden in the end.
Archana Jois in ‘Kshetrapathi’. (Supplied)
While the first half of Kshetrapathi moves at a brisk pace, the second half slows down a bit.
Once the protagonist comes up with the best solution to fight injustice and calls for a law to be passed for a “profitable” price and not any minimum support price, things fall apart.
While the soul of the film is to ignite awareness amongst farmers and the need for a new law to support farmers, things happen overnight in Kshetrapathi, which is impractical in real life.
The movie goes overboard with instances like foregoing lands, non-cooperation movements like refusing to pay for any government services until farmers’ demand is met, and a major law is passed in no time.
A good attempt by the Kshetrapathi team to highlight the issues of an important community — farmers who deserve every possible support and justice for their hard work.
The performances, the making, and even the music offer the best for a meaningful experience in theatres.
Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan!
(Views expressed here are personal.)
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