Maze around Chamkila: Musician-scholar Madan Gopal Singh dwells on the unsettling questions that emerge from the biopic

Towards the end of the 1970s, an unprecedented political tumult begins to sweep Punjab. It jolts the cohesive structures of day-to-day life into varying states of uncertainty. Paradoxically, however, there is a small but significant phenomenon unfolding in the backwaters of Malwa. One witnesses across the ‘akharas’ of this region a near-ironic ascendance of a little-known performer named Chamkila, who comes from nowhere and occupies the popular imagination almost instantly, and stays put thereafter.

In retrospect, these ‘akharas’, with Chamkila in non-stop focus, seem to open up as unwitting cultural traps and unwilling sites of contest.

In his most recent work ‘Amar Singh Chamkila’, Imtiaz Ali takes recourse to a rather simplified format of a biopic to tell a story which is far too complex in reality. The film has been enthusiastically received and attracted informed comments across the globe.

How does one enter this destabilising maze that leaves many questions unopened under the compulsions of narrative economy? ‘Chamkila’ is a film about an artist who lives unawares in a nearly callous transgression of his time. Or, who knows, his might be a wilful and strategic amnesia. But can the questions of cultural history and creativity be held in abeyance because of the culture industry’s unwritten codes of storytelling?

Even if reluctantly, one has to enter this maze, especially as one has lived through this troubled history. It keeps rumbling now and then, refusing to go away. It has, over time, become a lot more intractable.

Chamkila rose from the oppressed peripheries to be the reigning bard of ‘akharas’ in ’80s. A Dhani Ram or an Amar Singh, the question of who he was refuses to die down

The woman remains an appendage, in death as much as she was in life. Like a calendar image, she endures a world of male domination and sexual fantasy with a reticent smile

Chamkila, as is widely known, rose from the oppressed peripheries of his land to emerge as the reigning bard of the ‘akharas’ in the ’80s. He moved with the mock-epic air of a newly foisted spectacle of selfhood. It is a selfhood caught midway between being a specific Dalit and a non-specific male. Thus, the question of who he was refuses to die down even if the biopic cannot take it up even through a side glance. A Dhani Ram or an Amar Singh? What is this step across social fluidity — so easily executed and naturalised in silence? And this is not the only faux move within the narrative strategy of the film.

Let us then begin with a Dhani Ram who is not yet an Amar Singh. He has seen a bit but there is a lot more to follow. He moves about in self-obsessed confusion. Awkwardly, he steps into an imagined arena of desire — his and that of the larger community of consumers he is soon to address and seduce.

The world of Punjabi ‘akharas’ is about to be re-defined.

‘Akharas’, traditionally, began as spaces of contest. These were spaces of competing physical or dialogic face-offs. In varying degrees of expressivity, these spectacles emerged as arenas of participation and community bonding. Partially tented, these ‘akharas’ were installed mostly in the open grounds in the vicinity of cultivated or freshly harvested fields. In a restricted gendered sense, these were ‘people’s’ spaces caught between the binaries of nature and culture; the sacred and profane addressing a community of mostly men.

Woven around a performance, these spaces emerged as arenas of cultural aspirations, often comprising the lightly worn deep holes of the ‘collective repressed’. Here were the playfields of simulated aggression and of all that was unsayable.

How the women were installed in these cultural masquerades remained glaringly evident. On stage, they were more often than not obvious appendages, warding off a losing cultural bout to the great poetic delight of the audience and the performers. We were relentlessly within an open architecture of sexuality. There were no feudal enclosures here, no sophisticated baithak or mehfil etiquettes and none of the so-called ‘urbanity’ of the modern concert city spaces. They reached out primarily to the rural and semi-urban audiences.

In a sense, they could be clubbed along with Jor mela and dargahi gatherings in which the far better trained folk singers, dhadis, mirasis and, occasionally, ragis participated. However, it will be injudicious to conflate all these spaces of performance into a single category.

The ‘akharas’ had lost some of their proverbial sheen with the advent of radio icons, where especially women stars such as Surinder Kaur enjoyed unprecedented popularity and adulation that lasted well into the 1970s. The decline of the radio also coincided with the end of the first phase of settlers’ migration out of Punjab to countries such as UK and Canada. One must also point out that it was to be soon followed by the transitory migration of labour from Punjab to the Middle East, leading on the one hand to a depletion of agrarian labour and on the other to the initial arrival of non-Punjabi labour from eastern India.

There is also the emergence of the deras belonging to the oppressed margins and, though weak, the first visible signs of an economic shift. All this coinciding with the assertion of religious identity was beginning to put the monolith of a Punjabi cultural articulation under cracking pressure.

The very grain of ‘akharas’ was, thus, beginning to shift.

Dhani Ram, not yet a Chamkila, not even an Amar Singh, moves about in self-obsessed confusion. All by himself, he beholds this wider arena of individual and collective desire from a narrowing distance.

In anticipation of a happy encounter with his first ‘akhara ustad’, Surinder Shinda, he is seen to recline over a well earlier in the film. He begins to sing to the unseen water. One wonders if he is addressing some sleeping archetype and challenging its life that is losing its claim to cultural domination — its canonical status, as it were. His song invokes a drug-induced flight of creativity into an uncertain future. The well, together with the pubertal dare, unfolds as an ominous trope of where we might be culturally heading.

The question remains unlocked — can a biopic afford to disregard invisible inflections of time? The clothes, the settings, the props and all the material simulations of the period abound to imbue the film with a feel of authenticity. The mod-retro feel that took off so poorly with Anurag Kashyap’s ‘Bombay Velvet’ seems to hold its ground here a little more confidently. One wonders regardless, where the rustle of time is getting lost in all this. There may be once in a rare while a general reference to social disparity, but that sounds as no more than a commonplace utterance.

Diljit (Dosanjh) has indeed given a fine performance and has brought in trajectories of fear, mistrust and an open and devil-may-care defiance. It is perhaps no one’s argument that non-Dalits should not attempt to play Dalit characters on screen. In fact, the finest Punjabi film on the Dalit question till date, ‘Anhe Ghode Da Daan’, has been made by a non-Dalit. However, one still needs to engage with basic social anxieties that run in silence parallel to the overall narrative schema, and extend to the very act of creative production. Diljit, the star-actor, is but one indicator of this anxiety. Barring one actor, the film stands overwhelmed by a range of high-caste performers. Is it at all necessary to imagine a grain of visceral energy vis-à-vis a character such as Chamkila? How does a performance address the very core of ‘othering’? What is the organic self-belief in such performances? Is it needed at all in the first place?

Does one hear footfalls of Dalit anxiety in a space fraught with all kinds of dangers? For a while, everything seems resolvable through transactions of money. Marriage, love, contracts, threats, tours — is that all there is to the life of Chamkila? Is there a going back to the archetypal well of loneliness?

And how does the narrative-deprived woman configure her place in this cosmology? The entire ‘akhara’ culture seems to have penned a ‘smriti’ of erasure for her. Within the film’s narrative design, she remains an appendage — in death as much as she was in life. Like a two-dimensional calendar image, she endures a world of male domination and sexual fantasy with a reticent faint smile. Hers is an on-stage sawaal-jawaab existence in which she is destined to lose to the libidinal glee of an outside gaze.

One wonders what happened to her world of books. For, didn’t she seem to travel more with her books than with Chamkila? And didn’t she die holding a partially read book in her hand?

In the end, one is left with an elegy wallowing in self-pity bemoaning yet again the singularity of the departed male. Amarjot lies next to him — forgotten and nearly erased.