In a village on the Haryana-Rajasthan border, water is rationed to a family of bonded agricultural labourers which is enough to drink, never enough to wash. As the summer thickens and their wages stay withheld, the shame of their own bodies curdles into something that cannot be contained.
SNAAN watches this unfold through the eyes of Tanta, an eight-year-old who keeps looking toward the highway in the distance, waiting to leave. The title comes from shuddhi snaan, the cleansing bath one takes after contact with the impure. But purity only exists because someone has been marked impure. This is a film about that arithmetic: caste, water, labour, and the humiliation carried in the skin.
