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

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.