Why Diljit Dosanjh’s Satluj is as much about Punjabi poetry as it is about Jaswant Singh Khalra

In the film, Kuljeet urges Khalra to abandon his fight, and that the police would let him return home if he just agreed. It is then that the battered Khalra responds with the sun-and-candle analogy in prose, drawing unmistakably from Surjit Singh Patar’s celebrated poem, Jaga de Mombattiyaan. Trehan acknowledges Patar in the film’s opening credits, linking Khalra’s refusal to abandon those killed in custody and dismissed as lawaaris laashaan (unclaimed corpses) with Patar’s poetic response to Punjab’s dark times, written years later.

Surjit Singh Patar

In fact, verses by some of Punjab’s significant, revolutionary poets are recurring motifs throughout the film. Satluj also draws on gurbani, one of the elements that Trehan was asked to remove by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC).

In the film, the director has used poetry as a narrative device right from the first scene, creating a disarming normalcy with a bunch of cops in a moving jeep, drinking and singing. One of them sings noted poet Shiv Kumar Batalvi’s Gamma di raat lammi ae, Ja mere geet lamme ne/ Na bhairi raat mukdi ae, Na mere geet mukde ne (Either this night of sorrow is long/ Or my songs are never-ending. This dreadful night does not end/ Nor do my songs finish). It is being sung by the policemen discussing a colleague’s upcoming wedding. Minutes later, they kill a few young men without an arrest warrant or a court trial and dump them in the flowing canal. The lines that were once a meditation on Batalvi’s personal grief become a reflection on Punjab’s long night, implying years of never-ending fear and violence. Batalvi, also known as Punjab’s Keats and Birha da Sultan (The Emperor of Longing), is also thanked in the film credits.

In Satluj, Trehan places his portrait along with that of Punjabi poet Avtar Singh Sandhu, better known as Pash, in the library where Khalra’s wife Pammi works. Pash, the revolutionary Punjabi poet, was assassinated by militants at the age of 37 for writing anti-establishment poetry. Poetry and poet references woven into the film are the filmmaker telling us that literature preserved what the State didn’t, how poets, through their writing, were witnesses and archivists of the time.

Shiv Kumar Batalvi

In fact, Pash, behind the famed poem Sab Ton Khatarnak (The Most Dangerous) was from Talwandi Salem in Punjab’s Doaba, where the Sutlej flows past the region’s western and southern edges. He often wrote of the river. Addhi raat vich/Meri kambni satt rajaiyan vich vi na ruki/ Sutlej mere bistar te utar aaya/ Satton rajaiyan gilliyan/ Bukhar ikk sau chhe, ikk sau satt/ Yug nu paltan vich lagge lok bukhar naal nahin marde (In the middle of the night, my shivering didn’t stop even with seven quilts/ The Sutlej came down onto my bed/All seven quilts are soaked/ Fever is one hundred six, one hundred seven/ People trying to overturn an era do not die of a simple fever). While not used as a direct verse, it is entwined in Khalra’s struggle as part of the longer journey of resistance. When a drenched Khalra appears before Kuljeet in the film’s only dream sequence, long after his death, shivering from the cold and speaking of his pain, the moment becomes a haunting echo of Pash’s poem.

Trehan also brings in Kabir’s Sir dije kaan na kije (Give me your head, and do not pay any attention to public opinion), included in Guru Granth Sahab. It plays in the background when Khalra is brutally beaten in police custody. The poignant shabad transforms the scene from one of physical torture into one of a man’s resolve.

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The film also shares a fascinating cross-reference space with Gulzar’s Maachis, one of Indian cinema’s defining explorations of militancy in Punjab. Jimmy, the dog, finds its way into both films, as do actors Kanwaljit Singh and SM Zaheer, who portrayed the morally compromised police officers Khurana and Vohra in Maachis (1996). A character was also called Jaswant Singh then.

While the poetry in Satluj does bring cultural gravitas to the film, what it really does is tell us how these verses in Punjab have been repositories of grief. Like documents of the time, this literature was what stood witness to Punjab’s darkest times. Trehan has tried to tie this literary conscience with that of Khalra’s in an attempt to never forget what happened to Punjab, in turn peeling off that cheerful facade of mustard fields, folk music, bhangra and prosperity.