‘Bhangaar | Obsolete’ by Sumira Roy

In 2018, Indian octogenarian husband and wife Narayan and Iravati Lavate became the subject of widespread media attention for making a startling plea to the President of India: they wished to die by state-sanctioned euthanasia, even though they were in good mental, emotional, and physical health. Filmmaker Sumira Roy followed Narayan and Iravati for three years to make her documentary ‘Bhangaar,’ or ‘Obsolete’ in English (2024). Roy centers the couple by silently observing them cook, shave, stitch, walk, and medicate through her lens. Narayan and Iravati speak to their motivations for assisted death: they believe they have served their purpose to society, and wish to avoid the suffering of an ‘interminable disease’ and ‘die with dignity.’ The couple furthermore explain that they chose not to have children because Narayan did not wish to bring children into this world. He sees the world as a prison of suffering and death. The film also humanizes the couple by showing their bond through their banter and gallows humor. They reflect on their marriage and how their social lives changed over the decades because of their views on death, which starkly oppose the beliefs typically held in India. Friends, journalists, and the law all reject their choice. By the third act of Obsolete, Iravati is diagnosed with cancer, which cannot be treated due to her age. From this point, the documentary’s tone turns bleak; the morbid humor becomes resentment, the exercise becomes medication, and the silences grow longer. The Lavates petition the Supreme Court of India for their deaths, but they are denied. The final shot is a slide which states the day and date that “Iravati Lavate died of cancer.” The film thus shows that Iravati ultimately met with the exact fate she wished to avoid.

In 2018, the Indian media presented Narayan and Iravati’s story as the curious tale of a fatalistic former state transport department worker and a retired school principal, glossing over the couple’s reasonings, or formulating symptomatic readings of the couple’s past. Unlike the media, Roy sought in her film to represent the couple as they see themselves in their 300 sq. foot tenement in Mumbai. ‘Bhangaar’ thus depicts the couple’s material and daily life, which is refracted by their desire to die. So too does it display how, while everyone acknowledges their mental capacity and reasoning, the Lavates’ desires are ignored. Roy shows how, instead, they are told what they feel and what they must do. In a pivotal scene, famous Indian journalist Barkha Dutt tells the Lavates that their desire is about ‘the loneliness of getting old...[they] feel there is no value placed on [their lives].’ In another, Iravati’s former student tells them not to do anything ‘drastic’ because there is no provision for their fatalistic desire in Indian law. Article 21 of the Indian Constitution guarantees the right to life and personal liberty. In 2018, the Supreme Court expanded Article 21 to include the right to die with dignity, and legalized voluntary passive euthanasia through living wills; in other words, it became legal for an individual to stipulate when they should not be resuscitated. The Lavates, however, wanted physician assisted suicide. However, active euthanasia is illegal and societally unaccepted in India. Cases for the active euthanasia of terminally ill and vegetative cases have been rejected as recently as Harish Rana vs Union of India in 2024. By comparison, The Lavates’ desire for ‘rational suicide,’ which was motivated by an existential suffering derived from ‘reasoned arguments’ according to India’s Society for the Right to Die, was transgressive by India’s societal views on the subject. Moreover, the Lavates’ case does not qualify even by Dignitas’s standards, a permissive Swiss organization which offers assisted deaths for foreign nationals, including those who are emotionally distressed.. By focusing on Iravati and Narayan’s daily lives rather than the debate on euthanasia or their reasoning for death, ‘Obsolete’ argues that the autonomy of old people is often rejected. It does this by showing how the Lavate’s lives, wishes, and agency are discarded, as Narayan says, like “obsolete material.”