I didn't listen to Sidhu Moosewala much. But it was hard to miss his mercurial rise, his near ubiquity. Amrik-Sukhdev dhaba at Murthal, our favourite pit-stop on the way to the hills and my window into the Punjabi unconscious, played him on a loop. My very first introduction to his music was via the chartbuster ‘G Wagon’ and I remember a chill running down my spine as I gleaned the lyrics from distorted speakers and the general cacophony: ‘Jithe bandaa maarke kasoor puchhde, Jatt uss pind nu belong kardaa.’ (Where you kill a man and then ask what his fault was, Jatt belongs to that village). I, father to two teenagers and husband to a pretty wife, suddenly felt exposed, vulnerable. The song and others like it had shrunk my safe space. I suddenly felt the need for security, tribal bondings and winking at crude behaviour to feel safe. All those little liberties won for the common man, especially women, by progressive content and arts, my own oeuvre playing a small part, seemed lost. Punjab had lapsed, reclaimed by its own crude memory. Contradictions abounded. All progress seemed getting reduced to form — swanky interiors, cars, silent ACs, giant LED screens, well produced AV kitsch — hollowed out of any progressive aspiration/s, at the same time. And this phenomenon wasn’t confined to its geographical borders. It raged in our tranquil hill sanctuary and the Jat-Gujjar outskirts of NCR. ‘Punjab’ was expanding to the rhythm of a silent ominous beat.
Rabbi Shergill, ‘Rhythm of an ominous beat’, Tribune
