![]() GS: Pala was about a man who sang qissas. All this, in fact, became the foundation for Anhe Ghore Da Daan, because if I didn't know this class, that film wouldn't be possible.ĪA: You also made a feature called Pala based on your travels? I was living with these people, eating and drinking with them, trying to understand their angst and their alienation within mainstream religion and politics. You could see up close things like the agrarian crisis and its actual impact, how so many of the moneyed Jat boys were aimless and ending up doing drugs. All those myths were shattered because you could see the reality was something else. GS: Well, one has all these ideals in mind of a caste-less religion for Sikhism. How the Jat Sikhs dominate land and, in fact, the villages had two gurudwaras - one for the Jat Sikhs and the other for Mazhabi Sikhs. I was travelling mostly with performers from the so-called lower classes - dalits, mazhabis, valmikis, low caste Muslims and saw the social dynamics. I saw a lot of folk religion and intermingling of faith, which can be a bit of a revelation. At the dargah, you would have Sikhs and Hindus coming in. The most shocking thing for me was the syncretic tradition. You're in a mela one day, a dargah the next - observing people. GS: Yes, for four years I was travelling rural Punjab documenting ballads on a grant from India Foundation for the Arts. How has that experience informed your aesthetic? Later, of course, I realised that the community I was immediately from had very different concerns from rural Punjab communities where the priorities were very different.ĪA: You travelled through Punjab between 20 with a lot of folk artists. Plus, living in Delhi is almost like living in a mini Punjab, where religion and language were both omnipresent. Besides, even though I wasn't born there, I was from a proper Sikh household. ![]() ![]() Ahead of its India release (5 Aug), in an interview to Catch, Singh talks about the memories of militancy as a 10-yr-old child, travelling across rural Punjab with folk balladeers and why he's left the city for the hills, for good.ĪA: Since you weren't born in Punjab, how'd you manage to tap into the pulse of the state so vividly? It's also the first Punjabi-language film to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.Īdapted from two short stories by author Waryam Singh Sandhu, Singh's latest feature uses the Sikh separatist movement as a taut backdrop to his visually evocative human narrative. Now, Gurvinder Singh's back with Chauthi Koot, which has already won a National award. ![]() His first full length feature Anhe Ghore Da Daan (2011) bagged 3 national awards and a lot of international acclaim. ![]()
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