Unable to stop Hindu fundamentalists from running amok in the country, Indian liberals sublimate their feelings of impotence by attacking the political leaders of other religions in the subcontinent, this time targeting ‘bad Sikhs’ in the guise of celebrating the life and music of ‘good Sikh’ Chamkila, writes Akshat Jain.
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IMTIAZ Ali’s Amar Singh Chamkila has been quite favourably reviewed in Indian media outlets. From Diljit Dosanjh’s acting to A.R. Rahman’s music, from Ali’s directing to the film’s presentation of the eponymous singer, both critics and audience members have found much to gush about.
The film has also been critiqued (here and here) from a caste perspective for failing to engage with the issue except in the most superficial terms. The film mentions once that Chamkila is a chamar and then proceeds to conveniently forget about his identity and its structural effects, choosing instead to keep recalling the poverty he comes from.
Sanitising the film of Chamkila’s caste decontextualises his identity but there is another decontextualisation the film is guilty of and that might be even more criminal. That happens in how the film presents Sikh religious leaders.
What happened in 1984?
The first time the film suggests that there might be something larger going on in Punjab is when the number ‘1984’ suddenly comes up on the screen, with no relation to the preceding narrative. It seems the filmmaker was forced to mention it only because Chamkila’s life is being told chronologically and the calendar year cannot be escaped.
Sanitising the film of Chamkila’s caste decontextualises his identity but there is another decontextualisation the film is guilty of and that might be even more criminal. That happens in how the film presents Sikh religious leaders.
What happened in 1984 according to the film? Operation Bluestar and the Indian army’s storming and destruction of the Golden Temple in Amritsar find no mention. Instead, we are shown visuals of people suffering and being killed. On top of those visuals are superimposed inflamed (literally engulfed in flames) dancers clad in black.
Given that a mainstream film such as Laal Singh Chaddha was able to invoke Indira Gandhi and show visuals of the Golden Temple, one assumes that this erasure was Ali’s aesthetic choice and not a political necessity of our times.
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Ali gives us numbers of people being killed but does not tell us why they are being killed. He shows us violence but it is so completely cut off from any context that we get no idea as to why the violence is happening. We cannot even tell who is killing whom and for what reasons.
Ali seems to be saying, “Since all violence is bad, it does not matter why it is happening and between whom, so we will not distract you with all that.”
Since the Indian State never finds any mention in the film, the best conclusion that can be reached is that one fine day in 1984, Punjab spontaneously burst into flames for no good reason.
A still from the film— what do these National School of Drama-generated dancers represent?Moreover, such large-scale violence could not have suddenly erupted in 1984. It must have been in the making for some time, as such things usually are. Yet, Chamkila’s life seems to have been completely unaffected by anything that led to the events of 1984.
Are we to believe that Chamkila was so removed from his social context that none of the events leading up to 1984 had any effect on him?
Are we also to believe that an event such as Operation Bluestar, that shook Sikhs worldwide and gave rise to one of the longest and bloodiest civil wars in post-British India, had no significance for Chamkila, apart from how it affected his musical career?
All this is hard to accept, given that the film is simultaneously at pains to show us that Chamkila’s music is indelibly informed by his rootedness in his community. Is he both a people’s musician and emotionally removed from what his people are going through?
The production of crazed fanatics
Right after 1984 and the flame-dancers, the film tells us that the most important change in Chamkila’s life is the influence of kharkus or Sikh fundamentalists. By demanding that Chamkila stop singing ‘vulgar’ songs, they form the central conflict of Chamkila’s life in the film.
Since the Indian State never finds any mention in the film, the best conclusion that can be reached is that one fine day in 1984, Punjab spontaneously burst into flames for no good reason.
What does the film tell us about the origin of these fundamentalists? Nothing. Where do they come from, why are they there, why do they have so much power in Punjabi society, why do they want Chamkila to stop singing vulgar songs? Nothing at all. These questions are not even raised in the film, let alone answered. Like 1984, the fundamentalists just happen to spontaneously materialise out of thin air one fine Punjabi morning. There is no context at all to why they exist.
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By decontextualising Sikh fundamentalists, the film effectively portrays them as crazed fanatics. If someone was to tell you about Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 and give you no context, what possible conclusion could you reach about Hamas but that they are crazy violent terrorists who enjoy killing innocent Israelis? But when placed in the context of the Israel–Palestine conflict, the crazy cat jumps on to the settler colonial States shoulders.
Similarly, if one is told of the youth of Kashmir engaging in stone pelting and given no context of Kashmir–India relations, can one reach any other conclusion than that the pelters are stone-worshipping brainwashed children with nothing better to do? Yet, with context, the stones shatter the falsehoods surrounding them. Sympathies shift, and one begins to see the historical rationality.
This discourse can be extended to many other resistance movements. What can one understand of the Algerians and the Vietnamese freedom struggles without the context of French and American occupations? Thich Quang Duc would be nothing better than a suicide case without context. Gandhi no better than a moralising sadhu. Bhagat Singh a megalomaniac 23-year-old.
The film presents us reaction without action, effects without causes and asks us to pronounce judgments. While to any unbiased observer, a social phenomenon like Sikh fundamentalism would only be understandable in terms of its causes.
Some illuminating questions the film could have explored: How did the same society which demanded Chamkila’s songs simultaneously make space for religious fundamentalism? Why did it need both Chamkila and the religious fundamentalists?
Why did religious Sikhs need to uphold morality in this manner at that particular time, especially given the fact that ‘vulgar’ rappers still sell in Punjab today? Why do tough times produce religiosity? Why does a society fighting a war become more religious or ‘fundamentalist’?
Good Sikhs do not protest and do not care about conflict, they only want entertainment. They do not care about religion, all they want to do is sing, dance and drink.
To answer these questions, Sikhism’s political history would have to be understood. Of central importance would be the religion’s relation to both the pre- and post-British Indian State. Yet, the Indian State is completely absent from the film. It is as if Punjab exists in a social and political vacuum and whatever happens there has nothing to do with the country south of it.
Good Sikh, bad Sikh
While the film itself fails to ask the most basic questions, its existence raises a few questions. Why is such a film being made and released now? After making romantic films for decades, why did Ali ‘reinvent’ himself with Chamkila? In what social context is Ali confident that the film will succeed?
Two recent events supply some much needed context. Khalistanis have again started appearing in the news again, from Sikhs For Justice demanding a referendum on Khalistan to Sant Amritpal Singh demanding justice in the name of Khalistan. Secondly, the farmers’ movement— which was one of the biggest and most successful protests staged in the subcontinent after 2014— was disparaged by some sections as being led by anti-national Sikh fundamentalists, coded as Khalistanis in mainstream media.
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Even though the word ‘Khalistani’ is never used in the film, the people sanitising Chamkila are interchangeably referred to as fundamentalists, militants and terrorists, and are without fail shown to be part of religious establishments. Sikhism is shown to be instrumentally used by its ostensible caretakers, in India and Canada, for violent and nefarious purposes.
After seeing the film, can a person unaware of the political history of Sikhism possibly see religious Sikhs in a good light? Does the film have one good thing to say about them? Since Ali chooses to ignore caste and cannot make Chamkila a chamar hero, he chooses to villainise religious Sikhs in order to make Chamkila a liberal hero.
When the film’s audience sees religious Sikhs in political movements inside and outside Punjab, what are they going to think? What does the film want them to think? That there is a divide in Punjabi society, between the ‘good’ (secular, modern) Sikhs and the ‘bad’ (religious, fanatical) Sikhs.
Good Sikhs do not protest and do not care about conflict, they only want entertainment. They do not care about religion, all they want to do is sing, dance and drink.
Bad Sikhs are those who do not value enjoyment of life as the supreme good. They believe too strongly in their religion and thus become villains.
The film does a disservice to Chamkila by portraying him as such a shallow character that he does not care about the war going on around him one whit.
How do we know they believe too strongly? What is too strong? Well, the film tells us, they use religion to create conflict for selfish reasons. They are either too dumb to understand Chamkila’s songs or so evil that they want to use Chamkila for their own infernal ends. Ali also takes a leaf out of anti-Naxalite propaganda and shows these religious Sikhs extorting Chamkila in an execrable scene.
The good Muslim–bad Muslim dichotomy has been operative in Indian society for some time. This film does much to perpetuate the good Sikh, bad Sikh dichotomy. That this divide also happens to be on caste and gender lines is just icing on the propagandist cake. The more the divide, the easier it is to rule.
The film engages in a common propaganda tactic that seeks to save women from their own community’s conservative nuts. Young and old women love listening to Chamkila, the film tells us. They own their sexuality through Chamkila’s songs. They use Chamkila’s discography for feminist progress.
But the bearded religious men want to control women, want to control their sexuality and hence they are against Chamkila. Given Ali is a Muslim, one can assume all parallels with similar propaganda against Muslims are intentional.
Chamkila and his co-religionists betrayed
The film does a disservice to Chamkila by portraying him as such a shallow character that he does not care about the war going on around him one whit. All he is shown to care about is cynically using the war to sell his own brand of entertainment.
One cannot escape the feeling that Ali has constructed this fictional version of Chamkila merely in order to justify his own political choices in today’s India. The film is a projection of Ali’s (a)politics onto the character of Chamkila.
Ali has not reinvented himself in this film, as some claim, he has merely appropriated a Dalit artist to make an apology for himself.
Was Chamkila a liberal? Probably not. He did not sing vulgar songs because he believed in freedom of speech. He sang them for the same reason he sang religious and anti-caste songs, he understood the world in those terms.
Is Ali a liberal. Most definitely. Is Ali’s fictional Chamkila a liberal? You know it. Ali has not reinvented himself in this film, as some claim, he has merely appropriated and misrepresented a Dalit artist to make an apology for himself.
One could posit, if one was so inclined, that by doing so he has proved one thing— in India, liberals indeed do not have a religion. They will behave the same way no matter what religion they identify as.
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The film also does a disservice to contemporary Sikhs by serving as propaganda against them. The film does not only show us that religious Sikhs were crazy then but it inevitably leaves us with the impression that they are still crazy now.
The film can be seen as another attack against the Sikhs, where their religious leaders are disparaged and ‘secular’ Sikhs lionised at their expense, making one crazy and the other shallow.
The film can be seen as another attack against the Sikhs, where their religious leaders are disparaged and ‘secular’ Sikhs lionised at their expense, making one crazy and the other shallow. It attempts to drive a wedge between them so those Sikhs who support Chamkila distance themselves from Sikhism and those Sikhs who are religious disavow Chamkila as a true Sikh.
For a person whose very name means ‘distinction’, one would think Imtiaz Ali would be more discerning.
