‘Yeh Duniya Pittal Di’

How Bollywood’s Punjabi inflection unifies India

As I step out of Karan Johar’s latest production Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania (#HSKD, since we must talk in hashtags), at no point does it occur to me that I had all along been watching a Punjabi film. HSKD, set in Ambala and Delhi, is a remake of another Punjabi blockbuster, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ).

Like most Hindi film watchers, I’ve never spent time at a sarson da khet in a pind in Punjab, or hung out in Punjabi neighbourhoods in Delhi among beeji, tauji, papaji and other typical folks. But something specifically Punjabi has equalled popular Hindi entertainment for so long that we automatically assume it to be universally ‘Bollywood’. We may not know what movie titles Total Siyappa or Dil Bole Hadippa exactly mean, but we get the drift. For the longest I thought the word ‘dolna’, quite popular in lyrics (‘Tere bin nahin lagda, nahin lagda, dolna’), referred to ‘shaking’ (as in the Hindi word ‘dolna’). It actually means ‘beautiful girl’ in Punjabi. This knowledge—or lack thereof— hardly interferes with our love for lyrics and lingos that may be Punjabi in letter but are decidedly national in spirit.

Director Ram Gopal Varma once told me that only after he had attended Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan’s wedding did he recognise that Karan Johar actually makes realistic Bollywood movies! This realisation may be true for most of India. While each unhappy Indian family is unhappy in its own way, all Indian families get made the same way: through a weekend-long marriage function that inevitably starts with the cocktail/sangeet and ideally ends with the bridegroom on a horseback heading towards his girl dressed in a ‘designer lehenga’. The wedding could take place in Kanpur or among NRIs in California. The rituals may owe their origins to Punjab. The cultural code comes from Bollywood, which is an influential Indian state of its own.

The spoken language of this state is Hindustani. The debate over which is the more ‘official’ Indian language— English or Hindi—crops up often in national politics. The Government sought to promote Hindi through mass media in the 80s. Most people were turned off.

Bollywood’s done the language the most service by simply morphing it into Hinglish and Pinglish, making it accessible to the whole country. English is still an aspiration. But how come the movies are so Punjabi-by-nature still?

There are firstly the ‘Dilliwallah movies’ that you see almost every weekend. They are organically set in the realistically Punjabi quarters of Delhi. This is not a surprise. There is enough audience for it. In the 90s, a large number of Delhi based/educated filmmakers—actors, writers, directors, technicians, musicians— migrated to Andheri in Mumbai. Maybe Shah Rukh Khan’s success was their inspiration. Locals liken the Bollywood neighbourhood Lokhandwala to a mini Delhi now. They naturally film their experiences.

Mumbai’s film industry is still hugely pluralistic, yet, producers of Punjabi origin, it could be argued, have traditionally dominated the production side. Up until the mid 40s, Bombay’s cinema business was run by large studios that controlled both distribution and content. Prominent studio owners would be Parsi (Ardeshir Irani), Gujarati (Chandulal Shah), Bengali (Himanshu Rai)… Hyperinflation during WWII made it impossible to import enough raw stock to sustain the production line of large-scale studios. Freelance producers and distributors took over the film business, betting their life savings on individual projects. The ‘star’ system replaced the ‘studio’ system. Several of these risk-takers were Punjabis (some of them Sindhis) who had migrated from Pakistan after Independence. A producer or a star’s son would often get a chance to become the next star. This explains the same surnames—Kapoor, Khanna, Chopra etcetera (besides the ‘pathan’ Khan of course)— headlining the majority of Bollywood films in later generations. But this can only partly explain why Bollywood equals Punjabi. The fact is that there is no other Indian culture more suitably robust for mass entertainment: money doesn’t sober its rich, drinking isn’t frowned upon, dancing is actively encouraged, dressing is happily bling, the music is loud, and the poetry is unpretentiously colloquial. Punjab, at least in its public image, naturally acquires a cultural currency far exceeding its tiny landmass.

Over the past few months, I have partied in Bangaon, a village in Bihar, and Pasha, a discotheque in Chennai. The crowds couldn’t have been more different. The music was the same. The lyrics: ‘Meri aahein gallaan. Jag sara karda, ni baar baar ve. Yeh dunia pittal di…’ Who cares if we understand what that means? We’ve danced the same way. That’s the way, Mahi ve!

About The Author

Mayank Shekhar

Mayank Shekhar runs the pop-culture website TheW14.com