Diljit Dosanjh: Bridging cultures, blurring boundaries, and conquering hearts

Next on the line is filmmaker Imtiaz Ali wondering if Dosanjh could promote Ishq Mitaye, the pulsating anthem from Amar Singh Chamkila. It doesn’t matter that he hasn’t sung the song, but he is after all, the lead of the film. So he does what he has to: promote. Two more calls come in and Dosanjh happily gets on to telling his followers to also listen to the Choli Ke Peeche remix that he crooned and Khutti, his collaboration with American rapper Saweetie.

Even if the point of the video was to perhaps poke fun at the thin line between artistry and the branding of artistry, in the vocabulary of the internet, this video is best described as a casual flex; an approximation of Dosanjh’s inextricable hold on pop-culture. At this point, Diljit Dosanjh is both an artist and a brand but more importantly, an artist who needs no branding. He is everywhere — a trend as well as on trending charts. He is a charmer and a good luck charm.

Crooning his way to stardom

The fact that all of these songs from each of his projects — proper bangers in their own right — are already chartbusters, often within minutes of being released into the world, is proof of the tremendous stardom that engulfs Diljit Dosanjh. He is somehow always creating and always on the promotional trail for a new creation. Right now, Dosanjh has just headlined the electric Amar Singh Chamkila, the Imtiaz Ali biopic and the AR Rahman musical that stars him as the slain Punjabi singer, arguably his biggest role yet. The day after the film’s release, the singer took over from the actor, performing an energetic live show in Mumbai, attended both by a coterie of crazed fans and celebrities who count themselves as ultimate Diljit fans. At the same time, he is also gearing up for his ‘Dil-lumanti Tour’ across North America, primed to be a spectacle like no other.

For a pop-star who sings in Punjabi and a turbaned Sikh actor who acts in Hindi films, Diljit Dosanjh always finds a way to penetrate a wider consciousness. Last year, he became the first Punjabi artist to play at Coachella (“Punjabi aa gaye Coachella oye” is how he greeted the packed crowd) and followed it up by dropping, Hass Hass with Australian singer-songwriter Sia, who even sang a Punjabi verse in the song. Indeed, Dosanjh has this infectious way of making barriers of language and borders vanish, something that we witnessed last month when Ed Sheeran performed in India as part of his tour. Midway through his act, he not only brought on Dosanjh as a surprise guest to perform Lover but also sang along with him in Punjabi.

There was another thing that Dosanjh said onstage before his debut Coachella set. Addressing the white crowd, he told them not to worry if they didn’t quite understand the songs, they should just enjoy the “vibes.” Perhaps, that is the closest one-word encapsulation of the Diljit Dosanjh effect — a collective experience that is immune to no one and within reach for everyone. If anything, that was on full display at the Ambani pre-wedding festivities held in Jamnagar last month. When Dosanjh took the stage, it was as if every Bollywood celebrity worth their several crores and palatial mansions, had been stripped off their sheen and reduced to wide-eyed fans having the best night of their lives, hanging onto his every word and dance move like moths to a flame.

Turning convention, assumptions on the head

Indeed, Dosanjh’s residency in our collective hearts has been a long time in the making. Born in a Jalandhar village in 1984, he started singing kirtans at local gurdwaras when he was in school. If anything, it prepared him for a glittering career in the spotlight. The singer made his debut in the Punjabi music industry in 2003 with Ishq Da Uda Uda although it took years for his popularity to soar. In 2005, Dosanjh released his third album — Smile — that established him as Punjab’s newest voice, a cachet that he cemented with frequent collaborations with Yo Yo Honey Singh and quick album releases. By the time the singer released Chocolate in 2008, there was no looking back for Dosanjh. Since then, every Dosanjh song is part of pop-culture lexicon, right from Proper Patola, Lover, to Do You Know and G.O.A.T.

Unlike singing, which Dosanjh has always claimed as his calling, acting happened to him by chance. Punjabi pop stars have a history of headlining films once their fame skyrocketed, employing the celluloid as a form of advertisement for their singing careers. Dosanjh’s trajectory as an actor followed a similar direction: Once he turned into a household name, producers worked overtime in convincing the singer to solidify his stardom by plunging into acting. In 2011, Dosanjh did exactly that when he made his acting debut with Guddu Dhanoa’s actioner, The Lion of Punjab, the Punjabi remake of a Tamil film. Except, the film flopped at the box-office, finding no takers. Maybe the problem was the fact that Dosanjh was a turbaned actor, which was an anomaly even for Punjabi cinema. Especially considering that Lak 28 Kudi Da, a track from the film that Dosanjh had sung with Honey Singh, was topping charts.

But instead of letting the failure interrupt his acting career, the singer kept at it. Similar to his singing career, it was his third film that set him on the way to superstardom. In 2012, Dosanjh played the lead role in Jatt & Juliet, a romantic comedy that broke records at the box-office, ending up as the highest-grossing Punjabi film; it spawned even a Bengali remake. A successful sequel followed the next year and the writing was on the wall: no one can turn convention and assumptions on the head quite like Diljit Dosanjh. In the decade since, he has acted in over 10 Punjabi films and has even turned producer, bankrolling films starring him. In fact, Jodi (2023), the actor’s last Punjabi outing, a film that he also produced, took direct inspiration from the legend of Amar Singh Chamkila.

An instinctive actor, with great comic timing

That is also the effect that Dosanjh has had on Hindi cinema since debuting with Abhishek Chaubey’s Udta Punjab eight years ago. The image of a turbaned Sikh actor being a regular fixture in Bollywood is no less a radical act in an increasingly homogenized industry, one where Sikh characters have routinely served as a comic relief and Sikh actors have rarely become superstars. Even though Dosanjh has gone on record multiple times to claim that he doesn’t think of himself as an actor, there is something to be said about the intensity of his craft. Take, for instance, his riveting lead turn in Ali Abbas Zafar’s Jogi (2022), a period drama about the organized pogroms against Sikhs in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984.

Even in an imperfect film, Dosanjh manages to fill in a lifetime of pain and injustice in his eyes alone. By now, it is quite obvious that he is an instinctive actor, someone with a keen eye for comic timing. It was evident in both Phillauri (2018), a romantic ghost story, and Good Newwz (2019), an ensemble comedy. The genres of both projects might be wildly different from each other but the quiet intensity of Dosanjh’s turn remains the connective tissue.

Then there’s Crew — one of the surprise hits of the year — in which Dosanjh plays a small role as an upstanding customs officer but pulls off one of the film’s best scenes that involve a date and the playful pluck of his eyes straying somewhere. As an actor, Dosanjh infuses his version of confident masculinity onscreen that hinges on treating women as equals, something that feels like an antidote to the hyper-aggression of Bollywood heroism. Look no further than his proposal to Divya Rana (Kriti Sanon) for a rematch in Crew for proof.

Singular and unstoppable

Still, it’s not as if Hindi cinema isn’t populated by performers who grasp the meaning between lines with an effortless agility. What then makes Dosanjh stand out? I suppose it’s the sheer magnetism of an artist who sees acting as a performance, instead of a calling. In several interviews, Dosanjh has spoken freely about his fear of acting workshops, his disdain for script-readings and rehearsals, as if it is incorrect to bottle up explosions, a crime even to calibrate the nature of it. It’s rare to see an actor not make acting all about themselves, studying every little detail of their process so intently in the hope that it would reveal something meaningful about themselves.

But not Dosanjh. With him, there is always a distance between the characters he plays and him. In interviews, he is always the first to claim that he knows very little about acting and nothing about the performances that directors manage to evoke out of him in the Hindi films that he has acted in. But that’s not to say, his skill is a fluke. When Dosanjh is in front of the camera, he tends to forget; he tends to involve himself as little as possible; he tends to see it for what it is: a performance that has the life-span between the few seconds and minutes it takes between action and cut.

In that sense, his towering lead performance as actor and singer in Ali’s Amar Singh Chamkila is the culmination of his two-decade long artistry. It is the voice of his struggle and the face of his salvation. It is simply impossible to take your eyes off the actor-singer in the film; Dosanjh turns in a performance so tender, so calibrated, and so rousing that it simultaneously feels like a wholehearted tribute from one singer to another as well as a celebration of filmmaking in the first place.

His son-of-the soil roots is its own beast in the film. And yet, it’s hard to decode exactly what went into this complete transformation that Donsajh endured to bring Amar Singh alive on screen. Perhaps, that is what makes Diljit Dosanjh so singular and unstoppable: there is no known way to replicate his craft, it is a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon that he himself doesn’t appear to fully understand yet but one he embraces with everything he has got. If anything, Hindi cinema and the world is better off for it.