Amar Singh Chamkila: Sensuality, Violence & Musical Creativity In Punjab

Imtiaz Ali’s film brings to the fore the curiously intertwined nature of music, morality, and politics in Punjab.

Imtiaz Ali's Amar Singh Chamkila is streaming on Netflix.

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

At an early point in Imtiaz Ali’s recent biopic on legendary Punjabi vocalist Amar Singh Chamkila (1960-1988), the protagonist (essayed by Diljit Dosanjh) exclaims: ‘People like such lyrics… (I write) what I have seen around me,’ in defence of the ‘vulgarity’ of his songs.

Ali’s film brings to the fore the curiously intertwined nature of music, morality, and politics in Punjab. Viewed from a longer-term historical lens, Chamkila’s lifestory and music are part of the distinctly gendered and caste-inflected nature of Punjabi music-making.

In Chamkila’s generation of Punjabi pop musicians, Gurdas Maan is most widely known, since he became the Punjabi folk music representative to the Indian nation through his ascent on the official TV broadcaster, Doordarshan.

Diljit Dosanjh and Parineeti Chopra play Amar Singh Chamkila and Amarjot Kaur in Imtiaz Ali's film.

(Photo Courtesy: YouTube)

Prior to this generation, the fame of musicians who migrated from west Punjab like Yamla Jatt, Surinder Kaur (who also sang playful duets with singers like Asa Singh Mastana), Narinder Biba, Didar Sandhu, and others was undeniable. However, the song lyrics for all these singers never exceeded the bounds of chastity.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, like Chamkila, others had forayed into the ribald, innuendo-laden ‘truckdriver’s songs’, notably, Kartar Ramla and Sukhwant Kaur.

None could match the energetic stage presence of Chamkila and his partner Amarjyot Kaur (who first recorded duets with popular mirasi singer Kuldeep Manak in the early 1980s) or parallel their popularity. 

A still from Chamkila.

(Photo Courtesy: Pinterest)

Beyond the cynical genre categorisation of ‘truckdriver songs’, Chamkila commanded a much wider audience. He was everyman’s singer: evident in a line delivered by an on-screen fan in Ali’s 2024 biopic, ‘Baaqi kalakar mahaan hain, lekin tu? Apna hai Chamkile!’ (The other artists are great, but you? You are our own, O Chamkila!). Perhaps this rootedness, or even humility (captured in the film by Dosanjh’s Chamkila repeatedly referring to himself as a ‘chhota insaan’ or ‘small person’) stemmed from his social origins within a rural Punjabi lower-caste Dalit family. 

Unlike the self-assured notes of today’s ChamarPop genre of music (popularised by singers such as Ginni Mahi who proudly endorses Ambedkarite messages), Chamkila was more ambivalent about his caste origins, like other Indian artists at the time from marginalised caste backgrounds.

As noted by Koonal Duggal, this reticence contrasts with the strident assertions of ‘Jatt’ identity (referring to Punjab’s dominant cultivator caste) by contemporary Punjabi male popstars, Diljit Dosanjh included. Despite this ambivalence however, Chamkila inspired many musicians from marginalised backgrounds after his untimely death, according to Gibb Schreffler.

Like all Punjabi dugaane or duets, Chamkila and Amarjyot’s songs feature the performance of gender roles through music: the ‘sawaal jawaab’ style of singing with its ‘back-and-forth’ banter is key to this style of performance.

Chamkila and Amarjyot’s songs harked back to the popularity of duet singing visible as early as the 1930s, especially the gramophone songs of Badrulnissa Begum and Budh Singh Tan, who sang famous duets like ‘Vagdi E Ravi’ (Lahore: 1935), or later those by singers Mohammad Rafi and Shamshad Begum in Punjabi films. In the 1970s and 80s Chamkila and Amarjyot were preceded by other well-known ‘jodi’s or musical duos like Mohammad Sidiq and Ranjit Kaur, and K. Deep and Jagmohan Kaur, but none came quite close to the searing intensity of their lyrics or the crackling quality to their performances. 

Diljit Dosanjh and Parineeti Chopra in a still from Chamkila.

(Photo Courtesy: YouTube)

Chamkila’s unique appeal came from a convergence of five key factors: vibrant compositions and sensually charged lyrics; duet style singing; accompaniment of the tumbi, a difficult, single-stringed instrument that he ‘famously mastered’ according to Anjali Gera-Roy; live performance; and the emergence of vast new listening markets with 1980s ‘cassette culture’. The fact that his songs were mostly written to be performed on the live stage can alone explain their unique energy and rhythmic flow.  

Far more than any other popular Punjabi male musician, Chamkila mostly performed duets (and only the rare solo number): the co-participation of a female singer was key to his success, despite the often ‘anti-woman’ tone of his lyrics. Apart from this, his popularity among female audiences is not explained by him inspiring female desire (in the way a Diljit Dosanjh today does).

Diljit Dosanjh in a still from Chamkila.

(Photo Courtesy: Pinterest)

Chamkila’s popularity lay more in the way his music arguably provided women with a portal through which they could privately enjoy the very public spectacle of songs brimming with themes otherwise forbidden for public consumption by a deeply patriarchal society.

The question of vulgarity

In contrast to the global popularity of Gurdas Maan, Malkit Singh, Bally Sagoo, or Diljit Dosanjh and AP Dhillon, whose lyrics are often geared towards dance-music, Chamkila’s songs were more oriented to verbal recitation, like Punjab’s folkloric traditions and women’s folksongs (howsoever ‘vulgar’, according to some).

Chamkila’s lyrics are the most controversial part of his music–Kurti Satrang Di, or Mitra Main Khand Ban Gayi, being some of the more notorious examples.

They combined the humour, playfulness, and a forbidden sensuality common to a much longer history of popular folksong of Punjab, whether those found in qissas or story-songs performed by rural mirasis (Punjab’s caste of genealogist-musician-bards), or women’s folklore and wedding songs (including the ‘joking’ genre of devar-bhabhi or jija-saali songs popular across north India) performed in women-only spaces, or during carnivalesque festivals like Holi. As with these songs, themes of sexual excess, innuendo, and desire dominate Chamkila’s lyrics. 

Some hundred years before Chamkila, Punjabi music reformers under the aegis of the Arya Samaj and Singh Sabha had begun a strident reform drive to ‘sanitise’ lusty, and innuendo-filled lyrics that typified wedding song genres like the popular sithniyan, and tappe.

In booklets like Abala Mati Vegarodhik Sangit (Songs To Prevent Impetuousness in Weak-Minded Women, Lahore: 1892), reformers like Mai Bhagwati of the Arya Samaj turned the beloved melodies of sithniyan into pious bhajans, matching their ideal of the newly educated middle-class and upper-caste Punjabi woman. 

At the same time, Chamkila was not unique in appropriating the female voice as a male poet, a common feature of South Asian but especially Punjabi poetry. Examples range from Baba Bulleh Shah’s kafis to new nationalist songs for women written by social reformers like Guranditta Khanna, like Changey Changey Punjabi Gīt (Good, Good Punjabi Songs, Amritsar: 1932). However, unlike the clear spiritual orientation of the mystic poets, or the reformist bent of nationalist ones, Chamkila utilised the female voice in his duets to sing about the forbidden everyday: from illicit sexual relations both within (‘Sikhar Dupehre Nahaundi Si’, ‘Chaska Pai Gaya Saali Da’) and outside (‘Bapu Sada Gum Ho Gaya’) the family, to premarital sex, drug, and alcohol abuse (‘Pehle Lalkaare Naal’, ‘Sharabi Banke’). 

Buoyed by the newly inexpensive cassette-industry of the 1980s, Chamkila was able to capitalise on these older pleasures of listening to verbal exchanges steeped in the bawdy and the transgressive.

In popularising lyrics that often-resembled song genres vilified by reformers a century earlier, he offered a fresh, bold perspective on what could comprise both ‘Punjabi’ and ‘popular’ music. And here lies the source of Chamkila’s unique allure.

Policing musicians

Given that his lyrics were reminiscent of the older, unreformed strain of Punjab folksongs, it is no wonder that Chamkila’s music angered hardline listeners, especially in the volatility of 1980s’ Punjab. Yet even in the late 19^th century, not all reformers were immune to the pleasures of the bawdy. A Gujranwala police constable, Muhammaduddin, wrote the Mirasinamah (1891), a rant against mirasi musicians, intended for their moral improvement. Written in the mirasis’ own folk story qissa format, the text includes ribald lyrics describing their so-called sexual licentiousness: aiming to equally shock and pleasure the listener. There is then a much longer history in Punjab of a moral ambiguity towards sexually suffused lyrics, an ambiguity that Chamkila and Amarjyot also faced during their short-lived careers as musicians.

Unlike the ‘friendly advice’ of the 1890s police constable Muhammadudin however, the fundamentalism of 1980s Punjab was of a higher order.

Policed for their songs by hardliners almost throughout their careers, and despite the fame of their Sikh devotional songs like ‘Talwar Main Kalgidhar Di Haan’, Chamkila and Amarjyot were gunned down in March 1988. Such threats to the lives of musicians and artists in both Punjabs are not new: several musicians were especially targeted during the 1947 Partition killings; in 2016 qawwal Amjad Sabri (whose ancestors hailed from east Punjab) was killed in Pakistan; and most recently, Sidhu Moosewala (a musician radically different from Chamkila) was assassinated in India. The case of Chamkila’s killing remains unsolved: the mystery of his death paralleling the mystery of us not quite knowing what made him so famous. In death, as in life, the ‘Elvis of Punjab’ maintained the shimmer and charisma, the ineffable ‘chamkila’ mystique of a star performer.

(The author thanks Naresh Kumar and Sonia Wigh for their inputs.)

(Radha Kapuria studied History at Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and King’s College London. She currently teaches History at Durham University in the UK. Her first book is titled Music in Colonial Punjab: Courtesans, Bards, & Connoisseurs (Oxford University Press: 2023)