As Punjabi newspapers and social media churn out details of the life and struggles of Sidhu Moosewala, one of the images that stand out is of his father, who standing on his son’s favourite 5911 Tractor with Moosewala’s dead body on it, mourning by performing pit-siapa, a ritual generally performed by women.
Sidhu Moose Wala’s last rites in Moosa in Punjab’s Mansa. Photo: PTI
With fans across the globe mourning Sidhu’s death, his murder has been attributed to the mindless gun culture pervading contemporary Punjab, where the gangsters – like their Mumbai counterparts – seem to have some stake in the global fortunes of a thriving music industry that has consumers in the night clubs of New York and Canada to the taxis of Dubai.
Sidhu Moosewala was an icon of this borderless, fluid, digitally driven world of Punjabis and their music. The mourning and grief at Sidhu’s death are reminiscent of South Indian film stars who are almost demi-gods in their life and in their death. Is it possible to mourn the murder of a popular youth icon and yet claim to distance ourselves from the politics of musical imageries and imaginations which were laced with extreme violence?
Why is it that Moosewala – despite all the aggression and violence his music and life espoused – commands our empathy? Was he the poster child of a particular genre of Punjabi music and also the poster child of the ills of Punjab today? Is Moosewala now no longer just a singer but represents the everyday, ordinary Punjabi youth that is raw, violent, innocent, aggressive, vulnerable, rustic, global, deprived, privileged, soft and rugged at the same time? Has this murder touched something deep within us, something similar to what Moosewala represented?
A tale of two killings?
Many parallels are being drawn between the death of Moosewala and the killing of Amar Singh ‘Chamkila’-Amarjot Kaur in the 1980s, during the time of militancy in Punjab. However, the similarities end in the merciless manner in which these icons were murdered by armed assailants.
Sidhu Moosewala and Amar Singh ‘Chamkila’ represented two starkly different lifeworlds – in terms of their musical imageries and imaginations and also their social and political contexts.
The murder of Chamkila represented the contours and contexts in which ideas of masculinity, femininity, purity and chastity, moral and immoral were formulated and executed within the frameworks of militant nationalism espoused in the Punjab of the 1980s.
However, the death of Moosewala has to be looked at via the rugged terrains of Punjabi masculinity, masochism and raw power of guns that get framed in the context of the fluid borders of the digital era and made Moosewala a legend churned out of the global Punjabi musical industry.
Patriarchy, caste and a tale of ‘dangerous’ transgressions
Amar Singh Chamkila was born in a Dalit community. His real name was Dunni Ram. ‘Chamkila’ literally means glitter. Along with his talented and beautiful partner Amarjot Kaur, he ruled the Punjabi music scene in the 1980s. Amarjot-Chamkila were singer-performers in akharas – a very old tradition of live, open-air musical concerts in Punjab where the singers would sing songs of love, valour and at times also about contemporary issues. The setting of an akhara could range from the stage of a huge rural fair to the open space within a village.
More importantly, Chamkila was accompanied by a female singer – and his pairing with the equally talented Amarjot Kaur worked like magic. But it is noteworthy that Chamkila’s murder is much discussed, but the hyper-masculine patriarchal narratives within Punjabi music and the intellectual world refuse to even shed a tear for Amarjot Kaur, who was murdered on the same stage as Chamkila.
Amarjot-Chamkila were killed on March 8, 1988 in Punjab by the militants for singing ashleel (lecherous) songs. Amarjot-Chamkila’s songs had references to trucks and truck drivers – not surprising given that they were popular among the working classes of Punjab. Chamkila never found a respectable space within the elite connoisseurs of Punjabi music – a space eternally reserved for Nusrat Fateh Ali or the Wadali Brothers.
What must have infuriated the assailants of Amarjot-Chamkila most was perhaps the fact that their music transgressed the settled norms of sexuality and intimacy within Punjabi society. Their songs were abundant with erotic references to the female body and hinted at erotic attractions between jija-saali (brother-in-law and sister-in law) or between sahura-noonh (father-in-law and daughter-in-law). These were dangerous transgressions, completely unacceptable within the patriarchal and feudal set-up of society, but at the same time were also part of the lived social realities.
Moreover, these transgressions of various kinds didn’t fit into the narrative of the sacred idea of the imagined Punjabi nation-state, comprising of ‘pure’ and ‘chaste’ men and women.
Amarjot Kaur epitomised many transgressions. She was from the Jatt community – the dominant caste which controls land and politics in the state. The hypermasculine Jatt patriarchal norms debar women of the community from marrying members of other castes and incidents of “honour killings” still make the news regularly.
By choosing to be the partner of Chamkila – a Dalit and a singer, Amarjot Kaur courted danger. To top it all off, she sang ashleel songs on the stages of akharas to a mostly male audience, with oomph that society expects an upper-caste woman to reserve only for a husband.
Hyper-masculine, helpless and the neo-liberal state
In stark contrast to Amarjot-Chamkila’s world of transgressions stands Sidhu Moosewala, whose real name was Shubhdeep Singh. The ‘Sidhu’ is actually a Jatt surname, whereas Moosewala is the name of his native village in the Mansa district of Punjab. Hence, ‘Sidhu Moosewala’ literally means one from the Sidhu clan and the Moosa village. The fact that he preferred his caste name as his primary identity reveals a lot about the slain icon and his music.
In the past two decades, young men from small land owning and upper-caste families were affected by the agricultural sector crumbling and government recruitment being made almost solely on contractual basis. Their earlier generations were able to find ‘respectable’ and secure employment as teachers, doctors or other such professionals. But the current generations found Toronto and New York more ‘respectable’ places to drive a taxi, to work at a gas station or a grocery store than to stay back in Punjab.
Also Read: What Contemporary Punjabi Music Tells Us About the Construction of Jatt Masculinity
The state enabled the privatisation of education in the 1990s, leading to the mushrooming of sub-standard educational institutions – whose shiny, tall buildings dot the state’s landscape. However, these institutions, running with the sole motive of profit, produced a generation of youth that was aware that the system had not trained them well for any meaningful employment in the fast emerging private sectors of the Indian economy. But the youth was not capable – or willing – to go back to the land and till it.
Caste pride and the associated degrading of menial work had ensured that this upper-caste youth found meaning in picking exotic harvests in fields in far off Europe or North America rather than in the mustard-yellow fields of Punjab. They made trips of passport offices in Delhi and Chandigarh and navigated the treacherous world of travel agents, who promised a smooth sail to the West but left many in the lurch by duping them of lakhs.
Perhaps, these developments shattered and broke the youth, which was helpless to engage and channel its energy into any meaningful social and political enterprise or movement. This was unlike the 1970s, when the Naxal movement not only raised the issue of economic injustice but also gave Punjab literary gems like Avtar Singh ‘Pash’ or the legendry Lal Singh Dil.
Rather, this youth of the post-liberalised Punjab found catharsis through violent expressions of masculinity and caste pride in a music genre that celebrated and worshipped violence. Moosewala emerged as the demi-god of this musical fantasy of Punjabi youth that appealed not only to the local audience but also to the homesick Punjabi diaspora scattered across the globe.
The image of the kurta-pyjama clad Sidhu Moosewala, holding a modern weapon, churning out fast-paced Punjabi rap numbers while sitting on his tractor in his native village provided much-needed assurance to the ordinary and helpless Punjabi youth that all was not lost. That they still could wield some power and that life could still be controlled. The power of the gun gave a much-needed sense of control to a helpless youth that had tolerated too much from a state that had nothing but water cannons and lathis as a response to protests against the loss of jobs and lands in the past two decades.
But the sense of power and control that this youth sought was not rooted in any ideological terrain. Sidhu Moosewala was the poster child for this helpless but hyper-masculine and violent youth. This was a masculinity that was deeply injured and yet tragically remained confined in its own prison of violence. It never had the wisdom to clearly see the real enemy against which it sought the shelter in guns and gun culture in the first place: the behemoth of liberalisation and globalisation.
The gangs and gangsters of Punjab, now accused of Moosewala’s killing, also emerged out of the crisis unleashed by liberalisation and privatisation. This youth, coming out of the dwindling higher education system of the state too misfired the shot that day when they killed Moosewala. The raised fist in that poster of Bhagat Singh would perhaps have provided a better answer to the Punjabi youth in these dark and helpless times.
Navprit Kaur works as an academic reviewer with the Translations Project of Azim Premji University. She wrote her PhD on ‘Dalits and the Politics of Exclusions: Caste, Class and Gender in Chandigarh’. Views are personal.
