Four weddings and a protest

Illustration/Uday Mohite

Watching other people's wedding videos is a severe punishment, but not so this wedding season, when several Punjabi wedding videos have been going viral. The real fun of Punjabi weddings lies in the rousing bolis and tappas at sangeets, often made up on the spot, to rhyme with family members' names, to tease them with precision. Songs are replete with irrepressible insults, acerbic repartee and raunchy implications-a famous example would be, "sasadiye tere panj puttar, do aibi, do sharabi" (Mother-in-law you have five sons, two are degenerates, two are drunks). But, the apparently affectionate ribbing points to a larger truth, which will prevail following the festivities-the power structures in the domestic world, and the oppressions and authority figures to whom the woman must submit in her marital home.

Therefore, the cast of villains in these wedding songs are familiar-the bride's saas-sasur, jeth, nanand. But this year, they stand replaced. Here's one wedding video song doing the rounds: "Modi ne kanoon banaya, assi kanoon toh nayi darna/Hai Jamalo, jaake Modi no gher liye? Hai jama lo!" (Modi has made a law, but we aren't scared of it/ Let's do this/Let's go besiege Modi/ Let's do this). The farmers' protest is an honoured guest at many weddings.

Sumit Sangwan, boxer from Haryana, rode to his wedding in a tractor rather than a car. His family opted for a simple wedding, donating their money to the farmer's protest. In a video from a wedding in Mukhtasar district, Punjab, the DJ announced that shagan (auspicious money) should be put in a donation box near the dance floor, instead of in the couple's hands. At an Amritsar wedding, the baraatis held placards, the doli car, cello taped pink with rosebuds said "We Support Farmers", not Just Married. Elsewhere, the groom took a detour to join the protest en route to his nuptials.

The song Hai jama-lo, re-popularised by Malkit Singh, is a common Punjabi celebratory song with an interesting history. Some say it is appropriated from the traditional Sindhi song Ho Jamalo, composed by a woman whose warrior-husband Jamalo returned victorious from a difficult battle with invaders. It seems to have circled from battle to party to battle again, mirroring the power struggles of the times.

As one wedding entertainer said in an interview, "Songs are a representation of our lives. If we are passing through difficult times, it is also depicted in the songs. We have prepared few boliyaan and tappe on the struggle of the farmers and sang them during a sangeet night recently." These videos emerge online intertwined with videos from the farmers' protests, featuring more political songs, and also clear-eyed political articulations from student leaders and farmers' unions.

Together, they represent a complex and sophisticated universe of experiential as well as organised politics. The confluence of weddings and protests mirrors the feminist formulation that the personal is political and the political is personal.

The term "folk" used by colonialists and other elites to imply something simple, is often used to infantilise people, the better to serve declarations like "the farmers are being misled" as if they have no minds of their own, or service moist-eyed liberal pieties about people of the soil in order to borrow political authenticity. These songs and protests puncture such tales, revealing embattled histories, complex political presents and presaging unexpected futures.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com

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