Expresso Entertainment Feature on Mehsampur: An Edgy Alternative to Amar Singh Chamkila

If Imtiaz Ali’s film is an act of exaltation, Kabir Singh Chowdhry’s Mehsampur — the OG movie about Amar Singh Chamkila — is an exercise in extreme despair. No two movies about the same subject have ever been more different. Born out of the same stories, told by the same men, Amar Singh Chamkila and Mehsampur make for an odd double bill, but one that accurately captures the essence of the enigmatic singer, who was gunned down at the age of 27 alongside his wife Amarjot. He’d ruffled feathers for his suggestive lyrics and bawdy disregard for threats against his life. His murder remains unsolved.

Like Ali’s film, which, after a broadly enjoyable two hours, turns into a rather self-reflective piece, Mehsampur doesn’t appear to be concerned about why Chamkila was killed, or under what circumstances. Halfway Herzogian, Mehsampur is a meta-commentary on the art of exploitation and the exploitation of art; on the commodification of death, and the malleable nature of storytelling. It appears to be more obsessed with the odd hold that Chamkila still has over culture; in many ways, he’s a ghost that continues to haunt the people who once rubbed shoulders with him. Several of them appear in the movie as themselves, desperate for someone to exorcise Chamkila’s spirit from their souls.

That someone is a young filmmaker named Devrath, who journeys to the town of Mehsampur to make a movie about the singer, with all the meticulousness of a dog chasing a car. Dev proves to be quite an annoying presence, the type that prompts eye rolls and a discreet departure. Throughout his expedition into Punjab's depths, you can't help but question whether he truly embodies the essence of a filmmaker or if he's merely a peculiar individual armed with a camcorder. However, one fact remains indisputable: he serves as a proxy for Chowdhry. Devrath's initial encounters with the locals are far from welcoming; they regard him with hostility and suspicion. In Mehsampur, Chamkila's image diverges drastically from the folk hero depicted in Ali's film; instead, he embodies a spectral figure, a sad relic of the past akin to the forbidding presence of Gabbar Singh, a subject too taboo to broach.

What unfolds is a formally ambitious but altogether frustrating character study with more in common with Taxi Driver than anything else. With delusions of grandeur — in one scene, he declares that he is in the ‘middle of a cinematic breakthrough’ — Devrath tracks down many of Chamkila’s old associates; men who appear to be stuck in time, much like the titular town itself. Dozens of filmed interviews of these characters are littered across YouTube; they don’t need much of a nudge to launch into stories about their claim to fame. Watching these men parrot the same details to inquisitive YouTubers is enough to make you wonder if you’ve slipped into a seedy corner of the internet, a purgatory of sorts where the nature of reality is reshaped in real time.

Like Ali’s film, Mehsampur mimics the feeling of reliving a story based on second-hand accounts. But while Amar Singh Chamkila takes the rather conventional biopic route of having characters narrate an epic tale, equipped with hindsight, reverence, and the liberty to ignore facts, Mehsampur exposes the inherent hypocrisies involved in making a movie about a dead person. And it does this in a manner most unsettling. Chamkila’s first manager, Kesar Singh Tikki, agrees to participate in Dev’s film in exchange for Rs 5,100 and a ‘khamba’ of Bagpiper. Dev brings it down to Rs 3,100. Chamkila charged more for an ‘akhada’ back in the day. That’s what his legend is worth, the movie appears to be saying, while morbidly going along with the exercise itself.

Devrath, eager to maximise his investment, goes beyond a mere interview with Tikki. Instead, he insists on a tour of the town. They end up outside Chamkila's former office, where Devrath repeatedly directs Tikki to reenact a drunken incident of hurling a brick at Chamkila's window. Despite the stares of passersby, Tikki, having shed his inhibitions, obediently complies with each instruction until he falls and injures his knee.

Devrath also shows up to interview Surinder Sonia, the singer that Chamkila used to perform with before he met Amarjot. She comes across like Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard, perpetually ready for her close-up. The ‘dholak’ player Lal Chand, who narrowly escaped death the day Chamkila and Amarjot were killed, pulls his pants down and shows Devrath a spot on his groin where he claims to have been struck by a bullet during the shootout. Could there be a more in-your-face metaphor for this film’s masochistic energy? In a separate interview online, Lal Chand said that he was hit in the arm. Is nothing sacred? Curiously, he’s wearing the same shirt in both his first meeting with Devrath and in the random YouTube chat; perhaps it’s his ‘let’s talk about Chamkila on camera’ outfit. People like Tikki and Sonia, Swaran Sivia and Lal Chand have made a cottage industry of sorts out of Chamkila’s death, peddling stories about him like drugs on the streets. This is how Mehsampur views them; filtered through Ali’s sensibilities, however, these people are indistinguishable from travelling storytellers.

All of this unfolds in a Punjab that couldn’t be more different from the colourful, musical, fantasy land that was shown in, and was appropriate for Ali’s film. Mehsampur, Punjab is a post-apocalyptic wasteland populated by lonely singers belting out Britney Spears and morose drunkards whose livelihoods depend on reliving their trauma. To understand the difference in both films’ sensibilities, one needn’t look further than how they view the state. “Main hoon Punjab,” Chamkila sings in Ali’s film; in Mehsampur, a character gestures at the sadness around them, and rues, “Punjab ka yehi haal hai bhaisaab.”