10 April,2019 05:42 AM IST | Mumbai | Mayank Shekhar
A still from the 2018 hit Punjabi song 'Lamberghini', by The Doorbeen featuring Ragini
One Malkit Singh, MBE (apparently first Punjabi artiste to be honoured by the Queen) had released a globish Bhangra album/track that year, with a title that was plain gibberish - Tutak Tutak Tuthian (TTK) - sounding more like gaalis, than a gaana. Before this, Doordarshan would probably play Gurdas Mann's Dil Da Mamla type Punjabi stuff on a cardboard-set as national-integration entertainment on New Year's Eve.
TTK stormed into the scene in North India, in particular Delhi, where you simply couldn't escape it - whether with the band-baaja at a wedding, that otherwise played Bollywood tracks. Or at a posh-school, house-party, where you essentially went in for western rock/pop, gradually descending into slow-dance over gentle ballads, with traffic lights on the side of the dance-floor, and lightly-vile rum-punch flowing through the night.
The young, urbane lot in these happy halls usually considered Bollywood as intrinsically 'infra-dig'; apart from a stray, 10-year-old RD Burman song like Jahan Teri Yeh Nazar Hai. Can't blame them; that new decade had only just emerged from the uniformly ridiculous assault of the '80s.
Either way, even if TTK sounded far too desi-folksy to seamlessly merge with Vogue (Madonna), Hold On (Wilson Philips), It Must Have Been Love (Roxette), Nothing Compares To You (Sinead O'Connor) or Another Day In Paradise (Phil Collins), another Malkit Singh number from the following year was certain to segue into the phenomenally phirangi play-list.
That was Gud Naal Ishq Mitha. The video of which made model Malaika Arora a drawing-room sensation. But it wasn't exactly a Malkit song. It was a robust remix of an old Punjabi number. Who was the producer/DJ behind it? Another boy from Birmingham!
One, Balwinder ('Bally) Singh Sagoo. What's Bally Sagoo's strongest contribution to Hindi pop? I reckon he almost single-handedly made Bollywood retro a thing of metropolitan cool, remixing relatively 'bhule-bisre' tracks to stunning effect, within the western-fusion space. His album Bollywood Flashback, with the H of the Hollywood sign turned into B on the cover, would make it to practically every card-deck/stereo-system.
And this would be as true for North India as the desi Diaspora in the US/UK - a sizeable number of whom (both Indians and Pakistanis) are also Punjabi by origin. The latter also became a huge 'overseas' market for Hindi films, ever since the biggest blockbuster of 'em all, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995), decidedly a Punjabi film, albeit with Hindi dialogues!
DDLJ spawned a genre of sorts, not just to appeal to NRIs as the new audience, but also to offer the rest of India the current template to celebrate - right from the starting of a family - the wedding, horse, sangeet, loud music, night-club, dance performances....
And, inevitably, the Punjabi song - at present in every other Hindi movie, and practically at every party in town, between Kashmir and Kerala - with words like 'Dil Diya Gallan', 'Dil Shagna Da', 'Dolna', 'Patola', that absolutely no one has any clue what they mean, but can hum nonetheless!
But, why such Punjabi influence in Bollywood? Besides that the community itself has dominated the Mumbai film industry and its star-system, post-Partition, in the same way that Maharashtrians, Gujaratis, Parsees and Bengalis controlled the studio-system before Independence?
Frankly, there is also no community as deeply extroverted, fun-loving (good drinkers, dancers), and unabashedly boisterous/colourful/glitzy in their orientation to be more naturally suited to embrace, and pass on mass/pop/group entertainment, across!
That said, I'm not sure one acknowledges enough the contribution of Punjabi songs to global music itself, whether through Nusrat or Abida in Pakistan, down to, just to give you one instance, three performers as diverse as Mohamed Rafi, Wadali Brothers, and Sukhvinder Singh, who hail from the same district (Amritsar), having grown up at best a few miles from each other.
There's something in the air, although Punjabis often joke about how they have no culture, only agriculture. This is in reference to popular entertainment being seen as loud, and low-brow. What that harvesting inevitably produces though are perfect ear-worms.
Like the song Lambaedgini, by The Doorbeem, featuring Ragini. Google its original - sung by Jagjit and Chitra Singh. Takes something to disco-Punjabify an altogether sober Punjabi ghazal! The auto play-list thereafter takes you through an all-night long discography of the best Punjabi tracks from latest Mumbai films, if not popular remixes of old Hindi film songs.
Which, like any other mainstream banyan tree, is how Bollywood began to lean towards stuff gaining public traction in the organic, alternative space, making Punjabi tracks, and Hindi retro remixes, the continuing, ever-lasting trend. Yup, think it started with Malkit, and Bally. Okay, I can't think. Anymore. That Lamborghini still racing through my frickin' head!
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
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