Punjab in a fix

Udta Punjab is not the most appropriate movie to have a Shiv Kumar Batalvi poem. Ikk kudi jihda naam muhabbat, gumm hai, gumm hai, gumm hai (a girl named love has gone missing), a requiem for the loss of innocent love, is purportedly a comment on the youth of Punjab lost to drugs. But Batalvi can hardly be the role model for the drugged youth of the State. Known as the Keats of Punjab for his romantic melancholia, he was drunk with love — and, often, liquor. He brought romance and glamour to drinking.

Psychiatrist JPS Bhatia, who runs a neuro-psychiatric hospital and de-addiction centre in Amritsar, gathers his patients and their families everyday and explains in painstaking detail the physiology and psychology of addiction, as he draws various parts of the human brain on a board. But he begins with Batalvi. Not because Batalvi draws youth to drugs but because Dr Bhatia wants to de-aestheticise addiction. “Don’t think addiction can turn you into a poet,” he warns.

‘Chitta Ve’, the hit song of Udta Punjab, narrates the lure and the danger of addiction to heroin (chitta, literally white), but many think it can end up glamourising addiction.

A Punjabi screenplay writer recently posted on Facebook that he was scared to talk of chitta. His young son asked him what it was and he had explained in detail, but it occurred to him his son might think of trying it just once. The thought made him uncomfortable. ‘Chitta Ve’ is not the first song that speaks of addiction to drugs. In the last few years, drugs songs have become a sub-genre of sorts. The most famous has been ‘Dope-Shope’ by Honey Singh. Another hit drugs song plays in the background in Udta Punjab — Tere layee main chittiye ne chitta chhadta/ Dekhin pher na chitte te laajin put jatt da (I have given up chitta for you, O white one/ don’t make the son of the jatt hooked to it again).

A culture of addiction

Punjabis have always been partial to nasha (intoxication), as is evident from their folk songs, poetry and the number of liquor vends, probably the highest for its share of population. ‘Chitta Ve’ might seem a new phenomenon to others but Punjabis have always sung about their fix, and the most celebrated has been opium, which is called shaahi nasha, a royal intoxicant. The youth call it kaali naagni (black female snake), a fatal attraction connoting power, romance and risk. The man in a recent song brags to his lover that his morning fix of naagni is worth her entire college fee. These contemporary songs may sound silly, but traditionally there has been a wide acceptability for intoxicants in Punjab. Opium has found favourable mention in the poetry of revolutionary poet Paash as well as in the infamous songs of Amar Singh Chamkila.

Paash compares a passive comrade on the retreat, who has gone back on his ideological commitment, to an addict who has given up opium. When the addict gives up opium, he writes in his poem, he dips into the pond in the middle of night, gets frequent urges to relieve himself, and descends into the well. “He smells the stink of the lion that died inside him,” he writes. The addict tries to revive the lion with a few puffs of his beedi, but “how can a dead lion come back to life?”

Chamkila, shot down by terrorists for singing vulgar songs, pays a more plebeian tribute to opium when he sings, “Goli andar yaar Jalandhar,” implying how quickly a trucker on opium gets to his destination. The wide acceptability for opium — from comrades to truck drivers — in Punjab was not as alarming as the songs on heroin. Since opium, marijuana and liquor were not as harmful as the synthetic and refined drugs of today such as chitta, nasha was a matter of pride, courage and even jokes.

The village addict, amli, was the usual butt of Punjabi jokes because his addiction was not considered dangerous. Even today many Punjabi satirists style themselves as amlis, who were known for their wit and humour. Opium was an organic drug with a wide use. Taken in small quantities, it was considered good for health. It gave courage and dignity. Only when taken by addicts in large quantities it got them in unenviable situations.

Opium and other organic intoxicants were celebrated in popular culture because they rarely disrupted society, ruined families or led to death or murder. Sometimes they had important socio-economic functions. During the Green Revolution, bhukki (poppy husk) consumption shot up because there was a pressure on land as well as men to produce more. It was normal for farmers to distribute bhukki to farmhands during crucial times such as harvesting. Nasha in those times became a factor of economic production.

But as the Green Revolution brought prosperity, nasha morphed into a factor of leisure. Once bhukki aided in work. Later, it was a pursuit of people who did not need to work or the poor who got addicted and lost their livelihood. And when addicts shifted to cheaper synthetic options, nasha lost the glory and romance it signified in traditional Punjabi culture. The village amli, who was all wit and humour, gave way to the ‘smackia’ — the neighbourhood drug junkie who evoked fear and pity. Unlike the amli, who would sit in the village square and regale people with his witty commentary on everything under the sun, the smackia could be a chain snatcher or even a murderer. The smackia is not organically related to society; he is a disruption, an anomaly. The cop Sartaj Singh in Udta Punjab is told by his grandmother that his younger brother Balli remains hidden in his room all day long, wearing dark glasses. When Sartaj knocks on the door, Balli sticks out his surreal face. A dysfunctional Sikh teenager in dark glasses, with a poster of a rockstar in the background. Balli, an innocent school kid, ends up a murderer.

Hangover of a crackdown

There is a view gaining ground in Punjab that a crackdown on traditional, organic drugs such as opium and marijuana has made people turn to harmful synthetic alternatives. The draconian Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act has been enforced so strongly in the State in the last three decades that it has shifted the business of intoxicants from individuals to organised mafia, on a far bigger scale. This is what the Patiala Member of Parliament from the Aam Aadmi Party, Dr Dharamvira Gandhi believes. He says the government’s elitist bias has led it to suppress the poor man’s intoxicants such as marijuana and opium. He says this has created a monopoly market for drug mafias, which started dealing in synthetic drugs. He blames the industrial-scale drugs business in Punjab to the conditions created by the enforcement of the NDPS Act. Gandhi and many others think making marijuana and opium freely available to people would reduce the use of synthetic drugs such as chitta.

The nasha depicted in Udta Punjab, both natural and synthetic drugs, is removed from the old Punjabi culture. A synthetic nasha needs a synthetic medium. That’s why Tommy Singh has a synthetic identity of Da Gabru — a Punjabi youth with a western prefix. Da Gabru also symbolises the western inflection in Punjabi popular culture. He has returned from London and brought western pop culture to Punjab. In the last few years, there has been a flood of bands and albums with hybrid names such as International Villager, Mafia Mundeer and Urban Pendu. Chitta has spread so much fear in Punjab that people are wary of all kinds of nashas. There is a widely watched YouTube video that shows a girl on a scooter trying to steady another girl riding pillion, who keeps falling. Finally she falls down by the wayside. The girl is heavily drunk. You hear voices in the background, “Chitta hai ji, chitta (it is chitta).”

Nihangs, the warrior Sikh sect, are known for their ostentatious use of marijuana called Sukhnidhan (the giver of comfort). They grind marijuana in large pots with long, heavy pestles, sometimes with small bells fixed to them, which make sweet music as they work the pestle. Hola Mohalla, the biggest annual congregation of Nihangs, is a colourful affair where they gather in their blue-and-yellow attire. For Nihang sects, Sukhnidhan has religious sanction. A Sikh activist group has claimed that now smack is making way into Hola Mohalla. Opium and marijuana, the old nashas, it seems, are making way for chitta just as gabrus have made way for Da Gabrus.

Dharminder Kumaris a Delhi-based journalist

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