Gurvinder Singh: Punjabi Pastoral

The rules of the game are changing. Where Bollywood usually dictated—through its song-and-dance—what our cultural praxis ought to be, a handful of filmmakers are bringing about an overdue shift in cinema’s Indian perspective. In the north of India, one may credit Gurvinder Singh with the effort. The Punjabi language Chauthi Koot (‘The fourth direction’), his second feature, premiered at the Cannes festival in May where it received rave reviews and standing ovations, all of which has led to his being showered with the kind of praise that had eluded his first film, the otherwise acclaimed Anhe Ghorey Da Daan (‘Alms for a blind horse’).

Unlike most filmmakers close to the Mumbai film industry, Singh had no background to step into the film world. The closest he came to cinema, or anything related, was during his years growing up in Delhi, where he had access to the books of art and design that his father used as reference while working as an art designer for advertising firms. “I had no knowledge about films at the time,” Singh tells Open over the phone. “The little I came to gather about imagery and visual design was through the books and catalogues of my father. And it was enough to make me believe I was going to be a photographer. And I wanted to be [one] so badly that I never had the idea to move to motion picture straightaway. All of that changed when I moved to Pune for my mass communication course at the University of Pune.”

While in Pune, Singh started frequenting the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), where the archival section was his first encounter with parallel cinema from the world over—remember, there were no Torrent downloads back in the late 90s. He made friends and acquaintances at the Institute and eventually decided to take its entrance examination. He spent most of his time at FTII in its dark room, immersing himself in images and the works—in particular—of Robert Frank, an American photographer and documentary filmmaker.

Singh’s first foray into Punjab wasn’t through the visual medium. Having started listening to popular Punjabi folk singers of his time, like Surinder Kaur and Gurdas Mann, he delved deeper into the world of folk and unearthed the region’s understated art-form: Qissas. Fascinated by the discovery, Singh undertook what was his most ambitious project till then: to document those stories over the course of four years. “Qissas are still active, but are more prominent on the Pakistani side of Punjab. They were passed on orally from generation to generation. And all of it has to be memorised. A Qissa [literally, ‘story’] can take as long as 12 hours to narrate,” he says, “Today, the form is close to extinction. While I was documenting it, I stayed with these groups, and in those years, Punjab was erected in my conscience in a way I had never thought existed. And the force of that impression remains to this day.”

By the time he was at FTII, he had already read Gurdial Singh’s novel Anhe Ghorey Da Daan, which he would later adapt for his first film. However, it was only during his years of documentation that he saw for himself the segregation that caste so vividly implied (elemental to Gurdial Singh’s book) in the undiscovered image of rural India, Punjab in particular. So started the chain of events that led him to the feature film, his first, which would land him a National Award. During the time Singh was working on ideas of how to adapt the novel, he continued to work on the side to sustain himself financially. “I worked with Rajeev Sethi for a couple of years: documenting for him. I even worked with a couple of hotels like the Leela Palace for documenting some art projects so I could support myself.”

Singh sees himself as more of a visual artist than a writer. “I’m not a writer,” he says, “My tool is the visual. That is what I’ve always wanted to stick to.” Also, he says, he has much that he owes his late friend and one of Indian cinema’s greatest auteurs, Mani Kaul. “Apart from being the great visionary that he was, his greatest quality was his modesty,” Singh says of Kaul, “I studied under him, but he was more of a friend. We watched films together, and I even assisted him on a short lecturing assignment in 2005. You didn’t have to touch his feet to tell him how much you respected him— something that is very common in the guru-shishya hierarchies of B-town. To him, all were equal.”

With Chauthi Koot, Gurvinder Singh has become one of the leading story tellers of the Punjab scene; a kind of cinema that still manages to deliver despite its many subversions of the clenched-fist spirit of Punjab, so common in the popular patriarchal cinema that usually comes out of the region. The film is based on Waryam Singh Sandhu’s Sahitya Akademi award-winning collection of short stories of the same name. While the work of Sandhu was already familiar to him at the time he made Anhe Ghorey, the first meeting between Singh and Waryam Sandhu had all the elements of an amusing anecdote.

Singh chuckles as he narrates it. “So we had the premiere of Anhe Ghorey in Canada. And the theatre was full of Punjabis—so much so that it would have been hard to differentiate between a theatre in Punjab and the one where we were. The film ended, and a lot of people wanted to ask questions. Most of them claimed they had not understood the film. ‘What are you trying to say through this film?’ they asked. And right in the middle of it, Waryam Sandhu stands up,” Singh says as he holds back a giggle, “and gives a lecture for about five minutes. And the eloquence with which he did so in Punjabi was admirable. The entire hall went silent for a moment… and then there was applause. So that was the first time we actually met.”

Sandhu’s short stories are set in the times of the Khalistan movement, written while he was a teacher at a school in Sur Singh, a village in Amritsar district. It was a period when poets like Paash and singers like Amar Singh Chamkila were being killed by Khalistani militants, and Sandhu was writing against militancy in local newspapers. He himself had received threats aplenty in response to his writings, and he had to eventually relocate to Jalandhar, where he now resides. Singh believes that writers like Sandhu ought to be the real chroniclers of the time, because they’re rooted in the events, unlike those who write tangentially from vantage points of privilege.

“It is really disappointing that people like Waryam never get the recognition they deserve,” says Singh. “We read about these history-shaping events through popular writers who haven’t really experienced these events up close. And Waryam Singh Sandhu, on the other hand, has remained a school teacher all his life. Even the translations of his work were really bad. I don’t know how all of this will improve. It has to, because these are the people who have insight, the kind you don’t get by reading newspaper coverage or hearing relayed stories.” What is the insight that he refers to? “Well, the one example that comes to mind is this incident when my producer, Kartikeya Singh, was talking to a gentleman when we were scouting for locations to shoot. They were discussing how militants in those years would threaten people not to keep dogs, because they barked. And this gentleman, with the kind of indifferent élan that could only belong to rural Punjab, said, ‘Yes, yes, we used to put grease in the dog’s ass so they wouldn’t bark’.” At this point, we both break into mutual laughter.

Singh’s own experiences of the militancy years—he was much younger then—are rather few. As a result, a fair amount of research has gone into the film, apart from readings of the works of Sandhu and other literature of the region. The director referenced thousands of images and articles—from Ajit, Punjabi Tribune and The Indian Express—of the period to develop in his mind a portrait of the times. As part of painting this portrait, Singh also spoke to several militants. “I spoke to a number of men who had been involved in the movement at the time,” he says, “Some had even been to jail, although they sound very casual about it now and some even admit it was the hot-headedness of youth that got to their heads.”

Chauthi Koot has been shot in Punjabi, which is how Singh says he always wanted it to be; he never had any stimulus to try taking it mainstream with Hindi. There is, however, a commercial concern that will always hover over such attempts. Even serious films need wider audiences to justify their budgets. But in the past couple of years, and most recently with the Marathi film Court—which ran and garnered praise across the country— language constraints seem to be easing. “There is always the commercial risk,” admits Singh, “But yes, I think in the coming years, things are likely to change. Social media has also helped. And because of Chauthi Koot, people are now discovering Anhe Ghorey. I’m getting more messages about my previous film, and I finally have something to save in my inbox for that.” His latest film will premiere in India at the Mumbai Film Festival scheduled later this year.

As we finish our conversation, Singh talks about what he desires the most: that his films are watched by the people of Punjab. He believes it is the youth that his films will mostly appeal to. “Watch it not for the fact that it is set in the years of militancy,” he says, “watch it for how I have tried to present it.”

As a director channelling his roots and rediscovering what rustic Punjab has to offer in a language that enriches its earthy stories, in the frames of Gurvinder Singh, Indian cinema appears to be coming home.

About The Author

Manik Sharma

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