The tragedy of Piku is that in the effort to raise a feminist daughter, Bhashkor inadvertently created a woman who cannot separate agency from obligation. She has the freedom to walk away, but no inner permission to exercise it.
Even after a decade, Piku’s wound still refuses closure. Earlier this month, it saw a celebratory return to the Indian theatres. Set against the backdrop of urban dislocation, the film reveals how care, entwined with modern anxieties around health and autonomy, becomes both a struggle and an act of love. Here, endurance takes centre stage and heroism lies not in transcendence but in the raw, repetitive acts of showing up.
Piku isn’t a film that presents itself with stillness or ease, within moments we’re dropped steadfast into its central conflict, the three Cs of Piku: chaos, conflict, and constipation. In the Banerji household, the hullabaloo is ambient and relentless. It’s not just about food or medicine, it’s about the rituals around them, the way every small bodily need is magnified into an existential crisis. Everything is always urgent and bodily, never philosophical or resolved. And yet, it is through this visceral lens that the film dissects something much softer: a daughter’s slow, exhausted unravelling.
Intimacy As A Chore
For a film named after its protagonist, Piku (Deepika Padukone) rarely occupies the foreground of her own life. Her personhood is tethered to her father’s every whim, she is as entangled with Bhashkor (Amitabh Bachchan) as much as she is estranged from herself. There is something devastating in how she moves through the world: a woman raised to be entirely self-sufficient, trained to mother herself, to anticipate her needs as efficiently as she meets others’. She yearns for intimacy yet treats it like a function to be met, a chore to be checked off: necessary, transactional, solvable. The tragedy of Piku is that in the effort to raise a feminist daughter, Bhashkor inadvertently created a woman who cannot separate agency from obligation. She has the freedom to walk away, but no inner permission to exercise it.
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