'A Boy Who Dreamt Of Electricity' Peels Back The Systemic Rot Wreaked By The Caste System

Nothing lift ups our spirits like the the return of electricity after a day of a power cut. As the fans whirl back to life along with a hundred other appliances we depend on, children cheer in celebration. Adults pick up the threads of work or evening plans that had been suspended in the limbo. It's a collective sigh of relief; a return to normalcy. But for millions, that state doesn't exist. They spend their entire lives never reaching the baseline that others have marked as comfortable.

'Batti: A Boy Who Dreamt of Electricity', the debut feature by filmmaker Jigar Nagda is a story about a similar household. The film follows Bheru, a young adult from a remote tribal village, who lives in a house on the hill that has no electricity with his mother and father. When a marriage proposal falls through because of this lack, it isn’t just a personal loss for the family, it’s a signal that the outside world has written them off.

But Bheru refuses to remain on the margins. He travels to the city in search of work and discovers solar energy. With a compelling need to change things for the better, he returns to his village with a newfound purpose: to bring light to his home.

But out of the many obstacles in this mission like accessibility and cost, is one that is rather insidious. For Bheru’s family, and many like them, life has been lived a certain way for so long that even imagining change feels alien, almost improper. The idea that they might deserve more is so distant that it borders on transgression, especially for Bheru's father who resists his son’s attempts to change things.

This is the result of a system that has kept them on the lower end of humanity for a long time. The film highlights how deep systemic oppression like casteism seeps, not just into institutions, but into the psyche of those it crushes. In one scene, the village head sits on a chair, sipping tea from a glass, while Bheru and his father squat on the floor, drinking from disposable paper cups. This hierarchy that defines their world is something that Bheru has to grapple with and overcome.

Batti also indicts the state’s failure to extend basic infrastructure to communities that are deemed too remote, too peripheral, or too inconsequential to matter. The film makes it evident that Bheru’s struggle exists not just because of generational inertia, but because the institutions meant to support him have long looked the other way. His journey is extraordinary because he has to take the onus upon himself to do something that should've been provided for him.

Jigar, who co-wrote the film with Shubham Ameta, brings to this story the emotional clarity of someone who has seen these realities up close. A postgraduate in mass communication, Jigar began his filmmaking career under the mentorship of directors like Anurag Kashyap, Onir, and Manish Gupta.

Raised in Udaipur and informed by years of filmmaking that explores both the environment and socio-political themes, his direction is restrained yet potent. His documentary work, especially 'Aravali: The Lost Mountains', already signalled an eye for nuance and a heart for the underrepresented. With Batti, he steps fully into fiction, turning his lens toward questions of economic growth, access, and conservation, without losing the authenticity of lived experience.

The film won the award for Best Film at the Jaipur International Film Festival 2024 and has previously been screened at the Indian Film Festival Stuttgart and the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, among other film festivals.

Batti will inevitably be placed in conversation with 'Swades', a film that, two decades ago, etched itself into the cultural imagination with the image of a NASA scientist returning to India to bring electricity to a remote village. But despite the similarities, it's the pivotal shift in the lens of this film, moving away from external change-makers and giving agency those who must first battle the psychological inheritance of marginalisation that makes all the difference.

In Swades, Mohan carries the privileges of education, affluence, and exposure to a developed world. He returns with solutions already in hand, driven by a sense of moral duty. Bheru, on the other hand, is born into the structures that have long denied him light, both literally and metaphorically. And because of that, his desire for change feels riskier, more defiant, and more painful.

His quest to get electricity is a reclamation of the right to hope, to demand, to dream beyond what has always been. And in that, the film holds up a mirror to a society that still arbitrarily and insidiously decides who gets to live with dignity, and who must learn to live without.

Batti: A Boy Who Dreamt of Electricity will be screened at the Habitat Film Festival 2025 in Delhi on May 22. Follow Jigar Nagda here.

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