Amar Singh Chamkila review

Parineeti Chopra with Diljit Dosanjh in Amar Singh Chamkila. (courtesy: diljitdosanjh)

Imtiaz Ali’s Amar Singh Chamkila, a lively, deftly crafted ode to the power of song and performance as tools of rebellion, opens with a violent death. The bullets end a music career and birth an undying legend.

The film embraces a range of contradictions. And why not? Amar Singh Chamkila is about a man whose art was dichotomous: entertaining and provocative, immensely popular and unapologetically profane.

The film is mournful and festive, animated and pensive, consciously crafted and seemingly spontaneous. It is an elegy to and a celebration of a songster who revelled in lyrics that frequently objectified women but was always delivered in the form of a male-female duet.

Amar Singh Chamkila mourns the loss of a young life but talks up the defiant spirit of a driven man whose music, no matter how lowbrow it was by orthodox and politically correct reckoning, broke the boundaries of mortality.

The film’s soundtrack is studded with Chamkila’s own songs (rendered by lead actors Diljit Dosanjh and Parineeti Chopra, among several others) and a complement of original compositions by A.R. Rahman ranging from the ballad-like and the romantic to the forcefully feminist.

Chamkila (played brilliantly by Dosanjh), his wife and co-singer Amarjot Kaur (Parineeti Chopra) and two troupe members were gunned down by unidentified assailants in Mehsampur, Jalandhar district, 36 years ago. That is where the Netflix film begins.

It then moves back and forth between the immediate aftermath of the singer’s daylight murder and the career signposts that see him and Amarjot blaze a trail in Punjab’s akhada (open-air folk music recital) landscape.

Scripted by the director with Sajid Ali, Amar Singh Chamkila captures a brief life and an eventful career that teetered on a razor’s edge and drew strength from the ruffling of feathers.

The high-spirited music he created and the strains of his tumbi contained his message of liberation from societal shackles, a statement of intent that seared itself permanently on people’s minds and kickstarted an exciting new phase of Punjabi pop.

The film tracks Chamkila’s life and explores his unprecedented stardom. Dhani Ram alias Amar Singh was born in the family of a poor alcoholic Dalit labourer. The two names that he bore turned out to be prophetic.

By the time he was 17, he earned both riches and immortality. In the next ten years, he toured the length and breadth of Punjab with his repertoire of songs. There wasn’t a day when the sought-after singer was not on the road.

The biopic spans from the point Chamkila acquires his nom de plume by accident and his initial struggles to find a suitable female singing partner to his quick and dramatic eclipsing of his mentor Jatinder Jinda (modelled on the real-life Surinder Shinda).

Chamkila’s runaway success riles his rivals and irks Punjab’s guardians of morality. His inter-caste marriage with Amarjot – she is a Jat, he a Ramdasia – puts him on a collision course with the village council.

Amid the peaking of militancy in the 1980s, his bawdy, no-holds-barred, double entendre-laden lyrics helped his fans escape the worries of a violence-ridden world. He sang of sexual desire, the female body, drugs, social taboos and illicit liaisons.

A journalist accuses him, and not unjustifiably, of being disrespectful to women. He defends himself. I am an ordinary man, he says, who does not have the option of weighing the pros and cons.

The film has a sequence that culminates in Chamkila mentioning his caste and asserting that no matter where he has emerged from, he is not going back there. I will not starve to death, he asserts. The film, however, shies away from making his social identity the principal narrative axis, opting to focus instead on his run-ins with the hypocrisies of polite society.

The Chamkila-Amarjot marriage crosses two lines – one denoted by the caste divide and the other by his marital status. The singer has a first wife, a fact that he hides from Tikki and Amarjot.

The tale is told principally by two of Chamkila’s surviving associates. His former dholak player and manager Kesar Singh Tikki (Anjum Batra) who, over cheap alcohol in a seedy bar after he receives news of Chamkila’s death, throws light on the singer’s early breakthroughs.

The latter half of the story is pieced together by group member and singer Kikar Dalewala (Robbie Johal). Kikar’s recollections are in response to questions from DSP Balbir Singh (Anuraag Arora). The latter scoffs at Kikar when asked if he has ever heard Chamkila’s songs. The police officer shoots back angrily: Am I a truck driver or a country bumpkin?

The film blends a vibrant palette, visual flourishes and playful tropes to transport the audience to the terrain where Chamkila appeared like a meteor in the sky and lit up the world around him with a sparkle so intense that it was never ever going to dim, let alone die.

The jaunty narrative rhythm serves as a counterpoint to the grim realities of 1980s Punjab. One admirer in an audience waiting to hear him sing shouts: Other artistes are great but you are our own man. He is a people’s singer as an introductory song, Baaja (lyrics by Irshad Kamil), early in the film underscores.

For a semblance of balance, the film stages a trippy number devoted entirely to female desire, Naram Kaalja, sung and performed with gusto by village women who are denied seats in front of the stage on which Chamkila performs. They stand on the terrace behind the arena and watch the performance.

The full-bodied and occasionally frolicsome style – it combines archival footage, family album images, freeze frames, animation, split screens, tinted frames and visual caesuras – seeks to approximate the wildness at the heart of Chamkila’s world even as it slows down occasionally to reflect upon the singer’s mild-mannered, non-confrontationist ways with people around him.

Diljit Dosanjh is at his very best as Chamkila. That, as his fans will vouch, should be enough to make the film a treat. But there is more to Amar Singh Chamkila, including Parineeti Chopra and Anuraag Arora’s modulated interpretations and Imtiaz Ali’s grasp on the material.

Amar Singh Chamkila is a transfixing viewing experience. Its music is the biggest draw but every little bit in the rest of the film is just as rewarding.

Cast:

Diljit Dosanjh, Parineeti Chopra, Apinderdeep Singh

Director:

Imtiaz Ali

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Amidst the ongoing debate on whether maestro A.R. Rahman and ace director Imtiaz Ali have justified the earthy flavour and emotional flux of Amar Singh Chamkila’s music in the upcoming biopic of the phenomenal Punjabi singer, the discussion about the role of Chamkila’s ethnic identity in shaping his art has resurfaced.

A section on social media has questioned Diljit Dosanjhfor removing the turban to play Chamkila, a Dalit Sikh. They remind the artist who normalised a turbaned hero in Hindi cinema for turning back on his statement where he promised not to lose his turban for a film role.

Those who believe in cinematic dharma, however, feel that the actor has done the right thing by keeping his look as close to the character as possible. The previous attempts to capture the artist’s journey, one of which featured Diljit in a turban (Jodi, 2023), were fictionalised accounts because the makers didn’t have the rights to film Chamkila’s biopic.

Actors adopting and removing the religious and social symbols of their characters are quite common in Hindi cinema. In the past, we have seen Aamir Khan sporting a vermillion tika and the sacred thread in Ketan Mehta’s Mangal Pandey: The Rising and Paresh Rawal performed namaz as a devout Muslim mechanic Hashmatullah in Amit Rai’s Road To Sangam. Way back in 1936, Devika Rani, the biggest star of the time, played an untouchable in Franz Osten’s Achhut Kanya. In Ali Abbas Zafar’s Jogi (2022), Diljit cuts his hair on-screen to depict the plight of Sikhs during the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi. Nobody objected. So, has it something to do with Diljit’s previous statement or is it about him playing a Ravidasia Sikh?

Like most absorbing narratives, Chamkila’s story allows for multiple endings. His assassination at the age of 27 along with his singer-wife Amarjot Kaur and his two associates evoked multiple conspiracy theories. Was he eliminated by the separatists who felt he was polluting the minds of the young generation with his obscene songs? Was he killed by his rivals, who felt threatened by his numero uno status in the Punjabi music industry? Or did he pay the price for marrying a Jatt Sikh girl who moved out of her first marriage to pursue her singing career?

Parineeti Chopra, Diljit Dosanjh in ‘Amar Singh Chamkila’

In all three possibilities, the role of his caste identity, a Dalit’s control over resources, can’t be denied. Were his songs seen as the other’s reflection on the ways of a socially influential class, going through a process of purification in the 1980s? In all three possibilities, the role of his caste identity, a Dalit’s control over resources, can’t be denied. Were his songs seen as the other’s reflection on the ways of a socially influential class, going through a process of purification in the 1980s? Not even an FIR was registered in the case. Around the same time, two Leftist poets, Jaimal Singh Padda and Arvinder Singh Sandhu Pash, were also killed for speaking for the rights of workers at a time when religious extremism was on a high. A decade ago, Anurag Kashyap was actively considering making a film on Pash with Irrfan but it could not materialise.

Recently, a noted filmmaker from the region told this journalist that though Guru Gobind Singh asked his followers to submerge their caste identities into neutral surnames like Singh and Kaur, flaunting caste surnames is an everyday reality in Punjab. “We know there are still gurudwaras with two entrances and in many villages, there is a clear demarcation between upper caste and Dalit households,” he said.

The State has seen Dalit Sikhs in both top political as well as temporal positions but political observers have, over the years, brought out the socio-economic fallout of the Green Revolution where landless Dalit workers faced exploitation at the hands of Jatt Sikh land owners.

The Jatt-dominated Punjabi film industry has not been able to map this heterogeneity of Punjab’s society where almost 32% of the population come from Scheduled Caste groups. Like in Hindi cinema, Dalits have remained on the margins. In recent times, we have stray examples like Gurvinder Singh’s Anhey Ghorey Da Daan (Alms for a Blind Horse, 2011) that depicted the plight of the rural working class finding widespread critical acclaim. Another art house attempt was Kabir Singh Chowdhry’s mockumentary Mehsampur which also drew inspiration from Chamkila’s life. The short film Chamm (skin) tells the story of a Dalit worker in a slaughterhouse.

A promo for ‘Mehsampur’ (2018)

History tells us entertainment can take strange shapes in times of repression. Chamkila reflected on the poor farm workers but seldom talked of the matters of his caste in his songs. He commented on Jatt pride and Jatt Ki Dushmani (hostility of Jatt), perhaps to stay afloat in the mainstream. A multi-faceted artist who wrote, composed, and sang his songs, Chamkila offered a commentary through music on illicit relationships, alcohol, dowry, domestic violence, and drug abuse in a feudal society. These themes were present under the ribaldry of his popular lyrics. In his popular song ‘Lalkara’, the girl accepts the substance addiction of her lover, something that is not permitted by religion. In the suggestive ‘Mar Le Hor Try Jjia’, the sister-in-law of an aging man is pushing him to have a son with her when he says her sister is no longer fertile. Both songs capture the dark reality of the feudal society albeit in a harmless, playful manner.

Prof. Krantipal, who teaches Punjabi at the Department of Modern Indian Languages at the Aligarh Muslim University, says that Chamkila, through his songs, also hinted at how the landlord maintains social distance from the worker but likes to spend time with his wife. Shyam Benegal’s debut feature Ankur (1974) also explores the same theme in a different setting with a serious gaze. Later, this interplay of exploitation and surrender was exposed in Govind Nihalani’s Aakrosh (1980) and Gautam Ghose’s Paar (1984).

Shabana Azmi and Anant Nag in a still from Shyam Benegal’s ‘Ankur’

In Punjab, culture is often a by-product of agriculture. An akhada is used to describe a dedicated space for a wrestling bout as well as a musical performance in an open-air concert where Chamkila found his stardom. “Athleticism and aesthetics are conjoined in the region,” says Prof. Pal.

There must be something in the music of Chamkila, he says, that has kept his songs relevant even three decades after his death. “The sadagi (simplicity) and ravangi (coherent flow) in his earthy music and his audience connect are unmatched,” he says. With a tumbi in hand backed by a harmonium and dholak and accompanied by alghoza, chimta and flute, he would create magic with a basic sound system in his live shows, and his albums kept the truck driver going with the freshness of their lilt and lyrics.

Many songs of the folk artist present a strong picture of a woman in control of her desire. She taunts her lover as impotent if he is unable to cross the physical barriers to unite with her. Old-timers say Chamikla’s songs created the image of a goodly woman, someone like Mumtaz who was in great demand when Chamkila was sharpening his skills. His lyrics evoke a strong woman who not only performed household chores but also contributed to farming. His concerts had a butch vibe to them. Still, his double-meaning songs broke the patriarchal barriers. They reached the kitchens and living rooms through tape recorders and found a loyal fan base among women seeking to find a new idiom to the naughty folk songs they grew up singing at weddings and childbirth ceremonies.

A file picture of Amarjot Kaur and Amar Singh Chamkila

Hoping that the buzz around the film spurs interest in the stories of Punjab and folk instruments, Prof. Pal says illicit relationships have been a common theme in Punjabi literature from medieval times and Chamkila only brought it out in the open. It reflects the social undercurrents of the border state where farmer, soldier, and driver have been principal occupations over centuries. When men are out for months, it provides opportunities and circumstances for both genders to indulge in making bonds that are considered forbidden.

“Many times it is the illicit relationship that is considered the real relationship because you share your deepest emotions with someone you truly bond with. In the epic Sohni Mahiwal story, Sohni is married to a man she despises and swims across the river to meet Mahiwal who has to disguise himself to meet her love. Illegitimate relations find space in Jnanpith awardee Gurdial Singh’s works; it is also there in Shiv Kumar Batalvi’s poetry.”

Chamkila’s imagery is not layered or polished. It is out there, which made him connect with the rural folk. They found in his songs their reflection. His symbolism is not shrouded in mystical allegory, but that doesn’t mean it is irrelevant. As Prof Pal says, Chamkila’s poetry may not be progressive in classical terms but it is not “lachchar” (base) either. Unfortunately, the current generation is trying to fit his glitter into one of the two boxes.