Imtiaz Ali gravitates towards tragic artistry like an adolescent glide towards pulpy erotic stories where what you read is what you want to see and experience. Text has its own pull, at times more powerful than free internet porn. In retrospect, his decision to make a biopic of Amar Singh Chamkila, the celebrated musician from Punjab known for his raunchy lyrics, makes total sense. In Chamkila’s art, text and imagination reign supreme. They make the womb that incubates his music richer, the same effect might not be as tantalizing or honest in any other form. Which is why the decision to plaster the frame with text and translation is both obvious and inspired, for it is at the heart of Chamkila’s expression.
The film opens with the shots that dominated conversation around Amar Singh Chamkila (Dilijit Dosanjh)—the bullets that rained on him and his vocalist partner/second wife Amarjot (Parineeti Chopra). It then seamlessly shifts to discovering the birth of the artist within Dhanni Ram aka Amar Singh Chamkila. An original Chamkila song blazes and we see the child in him observing the reality around, considering the adults’ not so silent enjoyment. AR Rahman’s Baaja then slides over the opening credits with all of Punjab singing about the man, a riveting microcosm of the film itself. Older people berate him, elders castigate him and his contemporaries and predecessors express derision and jealousy, all in song. “hum bhi gaane gaate, sharam na pee jaate. kuch zyada hi kapdon se baahar tha chamkila” to “oh ji haan saare sunte uske gaane, koi maane ya na maane” from the younger, measured folk. Sajid and Imtiaz Ali’s script is not only about shifting narratives from people on Chamkila but also a record of transformed regard for him since his death.
In Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950), Humphrey Bogart’s Dix Steele famously declares that his artistic temperament would never allow him to throw the dead body of a beautiful woman like Mildred out of a cab. Ali’s artistic temperament would never allow him to dig deep into anything to do with the death. He builds up a frame narrative around Chamkila and Amarjot’s decaying bodies lying on the floor overnight like discarded peels of fruits, with his comrades deconstructing the musician’s legend to a senior police officer. As good as the writing here is, Ali’s visual choices are better. There is deliberate use of soft focus in scenes where Chamkila is deeply observing the world around him and when he is mining himself for what those observations have grown into with his eyes closed. That is when those generation defining, culture reshaping words come out. Among the generous platter of visual styles—animation, split screen, grainy photographs in monochrome, color and sepia—the soft focus and the text on screen are the most effective. When he is biding his time on the streets, Ali makes the sun Chamkila’s spotlight—the brightest stars already shine and empower him at a time when the world hasn’t discovered the full scale of this artist.
The obsession with the genesis of artistry allows Ali to get into what makes Chamkila tick. It allows the film to adopt some of Chamkila’s own qualities and possibly the filmmaker’s too, unapologetic, flawed and brutally honest. He builds up a sweet enough love story between Amarjot and Chamkila only to pull the rug by showing how manipulative the singer can be with both his old and new family. It’s a sly trick to make us believe that none of Chamkila’s associates knew of his first wife and family, it requires some level of suspension of logic but Ali with his dreamy, mythical grammar and huge helping hands from Irshad Kamil and AR Rahman pulls it off.
A lot has already been said and written about Naram Kaalja and the way it is shot. But the magic isn’t in the song alone, it lies in the 10 minutes of build up towards it, probably the best portion of the film. It all starts with a hatchet job, a smear campaign seemingly done in earnest to “protect society”. Chamkila is interviewed by an urban journalist played by Sahiba Bali, fascinated by his art but quick to take offense because he expresses shock at a woman in jeans, a first time for him. She points out a certain hypocrisy when we get the strongest reaction from Chamkila. The earlier reference to Chamkila’s oppressed caste status and the resulting pushback doesn’t bring this effect. But here, he launches an invective towards her standing—she, dressed smart and confident sat on the couch and he, dithering on the steps. This might look distinguishing but Ali frames both the characters at the same level in a medium shot. His barbed harangue is about how he only writes what he sees and that what you see is what you get with him. Does that make it right? She adds, “is your tongue tied now?” He talks about the short leeway accorded to people like him, when everything is a means to survive, and all said and done, even if she can admit everyone still listens to his songs, she will never understand why. He believes she is here interviewing him only because he is an exoticized figure to her and nothing more, nothing less. This moment in the film creates a domino effect of ban of Chamkila’s songs on radio, the media launching a scathing attack on his lyrics and all of it reaching his door—Amarjot’s sisters, when she is with her family during her pregnancy, question her why she sings these songs and admonish her to stop and stay with them. But Ali plays none of this straight. After the interview, we get split screens of Amarjot leaving to be with her family and circumspect about their future as performers, other singers take pride in singing clean songs and a coterie of old women opine Amarjot shouldn’t be singing these ashleel lyrics while those lines float on either side of the frame like an old time desktop screensaver.
There is hardly any movement in Amarjot’s home when her sisters talk to her or when her father receives advice from a friend. But when Chamkila takes her back, there is an audience. The audience of women around the sisters, a crowd looking down from the short terraces of the boxy houses listen to their grandmother mention how there is nothing radical in Chamkila’s songs. These songs have always been part of their lives. That’s when Naram Kaalja takes over, a torch is passed from Chamkila imploring people to look within, the policeman looking within and the grandmother reminding people (there is text on screen again—raat ko kya kiya patli ladki ke saath, chadh jaa oopar baby, laga ke jhaangon ka zor saara) to look within and the young women dance away. It’s an enchanting piece of cinema, not just song and dance but dialogues, power balance, visual language and polemic, all coming together like a bewitching spell.
The film distils an extreme form of artistic self-awareness and identity. Dosanjh’s Chamkila remains a prisoner to his audience and is unfazed by the atmosphere of late 1980s Punjab because he is so consumed by his art and its provenance. He considers the world both the giver and the taker. He holds a plebiscitary notion of his music—it is ultimately for the people to decide what they like and what they want to hear and if they want to continue to hear. Such was his artistic temperament. So, if they consider his songs impure then so be it but if people show up, he will perform. He shows up, therefore, on that ill-fated day in Mehsampur. A film that began with Chamkila’s original “meri paak mohabbat – my love is pure” before any other music ends with AR Rahman’s Vida Karo—“tum sabhi paak magar paap ka dariya main – all of you are pure, I am ocean of sins”— like a deathly stare at the spectators as if to say that a day-old lifeless bodies of Chamkila and Amarjot are purer than the living, breathing souls around them.