Whispers Of The Mountains Review | A Lament For The Aravallis

Written, directed and produced by Jigar Nagda, Whispers of the Mountains (2025) begins and ends with the solitary figure of Raghu (Rajveer Rao). The film, selected for the Indian Language Competition at the Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF) and screened at the Panorama section at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), begins with him sitting alone in his empty classroom facing the camera, as he is called by the principal of his school. He is informed that he has won a scholarship and the school wants to send him to the city to get a better education. This is a chance at mobility and a life beyond the dust.

Twelve-year-old Raghu is mute by birth and rooted in the rugged Aravalli region of Rajasthan. His father Tilak (Harshant Sharma) is a 40- year-old widower. He runs a tea stall near the local mine but struggles to make ends meet. The mining industry that promises “local prosperity” cannot even sustain the man selling tea to its labourers, who are just as cash-strapped as he is, coughing their way through dust that has coated their lives and lungs.

Nagda builds the film around still, lingering, long shots—a meditative cinematic language reminiscent of the likes of Yasujirō Ozu and Akira Kurosawa. Through Burhan Habsee’s cinematography and Suraj Gunjal’s editing, the film makes you watch, then makes you uncomfortable for having watched so passively.

Raghu is the kind of kid who spends the last drops of the limited bit of clean water he gets from the village tubewell to water seeds he has sown in the arid soil. This is his bid to restore the Aravallis to its former glory. It is a small act of stubborn defiance and kindness that is injected with an innocent, wild hope. This is an act of rebellion against both the climate of despair and the adults who have made their peace with the catastrophe. These are traits that define Raghu, played with quiet strength by a young Rao, who doesn’t need to speak a word to convey his resolution, resignation, or anger.

Tilak shoots down Raghu’s idea of pursuing academia, convincing himself and his child that his odds of earning a living are higher at the tea stall rather than ever finding a job that would hire a disabled person. This is not an act borne out of cruelty but shortsighted resignation that calcifies into pragmatism.

As Raghu continues watching the destruction of his beloved Aravallis, they get to know that another company is setting up a mining project in a nearby hill. This is prospect of more business and economic growth for Tilak, but to Raghu this news is nothing short of devastating.

While an angry and heartbroken Raghu watches the mountains being reduced to rubble for profit, Tilak’s friend Rakesh (Kunal Mehta, who puts in a pivotal performance in a scene where he breaks down, mourning for a friend he is about to lose) plays matchmaker for his lonely friend. But this is not a story that depicts any unrealistic happy ending for its palpably real characters.

While Tilak struggles with the idea of sending Raghu away to his uncle’s house after marriage for a fresh start with a new family, he ends up getting diagnosed with silicosis, a deadly lung disease. Coming to terms with his fate, Tilak finally relents and decides to spend his precious few savings to send Raghu to school instead of marriage. But life has other plans for these residents of the hills being demolished in front of our eyes in real time, while we watch on in silence.

Nagda’s film, selected for the Indian Language Competition at the Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF) and screened at the Panorama section at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), arrives at a moment of acute relevance as India faces an environmental crisis with rising pollution levels and rapid depletion of natural reserves fanned on by government apathy and greed.

Our government recently issued a new definition of what qualifies as the Aravallis—only hills above 100 metres in height. Using altitude as a metric conveniently clears the way for more “legal” mining, because much of the range’s low-lying ridges, and therefore much of its ecological function, can now be written off on paper. The loophole is staggering.

The Economic Times reported criticism from the opposition as well as from environmental experts, who warn that the 100-metre rule risks dismantling the landscape, biodiversity, and groundwater systems of a mountain range that has long shielded North India from excessive sand and dust blowing in from the Thar Desert. Harjeet Singh of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation noted that by redefining the Aravallis, the state is effectively erasing “the landscape that keeps North India breathing and feeds the wells.” What is positioned as “sustainable mining” is, in reality, “dynamite, roads and pits cutting through leopard corridors, village commons and Delhi-NCR’s last green shield.”

This redefinition arrives as the Adani Group expands its industrial footprint in Rajasthan—a state containing significant stretches of the Aravalli range, where many Raghus stand to lose their future. The Adani Group has ongoing court cases and environmental concerns around mining and development in ecologically sensitive areas.

So when Whispers of the Mountains shows hilltops blasted into gravel and plains choked with dust, it is not a fictional tale. The conflict between survival today and sustainability tomorrow is not abstract. Nagda is retelling what he has witnessed with his own eyes. The film’s final act folds these realities back into the personal, where the mountains’ slow deletion coincides with Raghu’s shrinking childhood.

The film ends with Raghu sitting with his back towards us and to his days of innocence lost. And then Whispers of the Mountains completes its journey to become a requiem and a mourning song, for a landscape being dismantled in real time and for a people who live on the fault lines between economic desperation and nature’s total annihilation.