Tired of watching big fat North Indian weddings on the big screen? Run for cover for there might be more on the way as Hindi cinema increasingly equates a shallow big-screen stereotyping of Punjabi life with the intrinsically diverse Indian ethos as a whole

Hindi cinema has gone Punjabi with a vengeance. Virtually no average Mumbai film is complete these days without the raucous and garish spectacle of a big fat north Indian wedding being sprung on the audience.

Take the case of the recently released Madhavan-Kangna Ranaut rom-com, Tanu Weds Manu. It isn’t set in Punjab at all – the drama plays out in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh. But the music of the film is dominated by bhangra pop beats.

The point is if the intention of Tanu Weds Manu is to highlight the social and cultural mores of an upcountry small town, how and why does Punjabi music get into the mix? This film certainly isn’t Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi or Dev D., which were set in a clearly defined Punjabi milieu. What, then, are numbers like O jugni, belted out by Punjabi pop crooner Mika, and Sadi gali, doing here?

If you happen to be somebody whose heart doesn’t go balle balle each time a Hindi movie hero breaks into a bhangra number and sways to its rhythms with his dolled-up glamour gal for company, you would have to skip a bulk of contemporary Bollywood films. Hindi cinema is now more Punjabi than Hindi – probably an indicator of what sells in the marketplace.

Hindi cinema, like much of present-day Indian life, has been Punjabified to such an extent that every second Bollywood flick is now peppered with Punjabi characters, dialogues and songs. Words like makhna, praah, tussi, puttar and mauja, to mention just a few, have become an integral part of the Bollywood dialogue writer and lyricist’s lexicon just as tandoori roti, sarson ka saag and butter chicken have entered homes and restaurants across the nation.

To take only three recent examples, Patiala House is set amid a rambunctious, well-to-do Sikh family settled in the UK, Band Baaja Baarat in the world of Delhi wedding planners and Manu Weds Tanu in an obstreperous Kanpur clan. Punjabi is the common bond between the three aforementioned films. Diversity be damned.

Popular Hindi cinema is notorious for its lack of cultural nuances – it tends to embrace anything that is saleable and broadly acceptable. Peppy and folksy Punjabi songs do push music albums, ending up as they inevitably do on dance floors in India’s metropolises. However, when such songs make their way into settings that have no direct link with the north Indian state of bubbly, boisterous and funloving people, they can only appear laboured and undermine a film’s overall impact. But who cares as long as the turnstiles keep turning and the cash counters keep jingling.

Punjabi music and musicians have always formed a sizeable part of Hindi cinema. So have influential actors and directors from the state. The Kapoors, Chopras, Sippys and Anands have held sway over the Mumbai movie industry for decades. But never before has Hindi cinema been so comprehensively overrun by things Punjabi.

It all began in the mid 1990s with the super success of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, a film that catapulted Yashraj Films into the stratosphere and triggered a wave of Punjabified NRI romances. The spectacularly facile and illogical storylines of these films drew their inspiration from the media stereotyping of Punjabis as a jovial, carefree community forever in the grip of a heightened sense of joy and vigour.

Punjabi-language cinema is as good as non-existent. The handful of Punjabi films that still get made by the likes of folk singer Gurdas Maan and cinematographer-turned-director Manmohan Singh (he has cranked the camera for filmmakers like Yash Chopra and Gulzar over the years) come out of Mumbai and not from the cultural hinterland.

njabi cinema space that a substantial part of the Hindi film industry has moved, peddling a shallow version of a culture and language that the entire nation might not be familiar with. In fact, it is the sheer superficiality of this rendition that works in favour of Punjabified Hindi cinema – you don’t need to be all that clued in to grasp what is unfolding on the screen.

The Punjab that we see in Hindi cinema today is, of course, not the Punjab of the mystic traditions of the Sufi poets, Bulleh Shah or Baba Farid. This cinematic reimagining of a state supposedly blessed with plenitude and panache stems from the mansions and apartments of Juhu, Mumbai, and its vicinity, where the Bollywood dream merchants are all concentrated. It celebrates superficiality with gay abandon and presupposes that India and Punjab are interchangeable terms. They are obviously not.

All things Punjabi are certainly Indian, but all things Indian are definitely not Punjabi. But you wouldn’t guess if you were to base your understanding of the country on films coming out of Mumbai today, be it Singh Is Kinng, Jab We Met, Love Aaj Kal, Yamla Paagal Deewana or Anurag Kashyap’s daring transportation of the Devdas tragedy to a north Indian setting in Dev D.

Most of these recent films have been commercially successful ventures. For every box office dud like Dil Bole Hadippa, which illadvisedly sought to serve up a cocktail of cricket and romance in rural Punjab, there are numerous money-spinners delivered by Bollywood ‘s Punjabi borough. So brace yourself for a continuance of the trend well into the foreseeable future.

As has been repeatedly proven by ‘Hindi’ film numbers like ‘Move your body, come on nach le ve’ (Band Baaja Baarat) and Laung da lashkara (Patiala House), the potent mix of Hinglish and Punglish is a sure-fire recipe for a chartbuster.

But even as the shaava shaava, mahi ve and chak de refrains ring in our ears, we can derive hope from the efforts of filmmakers like Prakash Jha, Sudhir Mishra and Vishal Bhardwaj, who set their cinematic tales in real terrains where characters speak a language that is rooted in the soil. Films like Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, Gangajal, Maqbool and Omkara provide glimpses of the amazing cultural diversity of the complex Indian reality. Unfortunately, there simply isn’t enough of that sneaking through in an atmosphere where playing safe is the name of the game.

by Saibal Chatterjee