It broke my heart when Diljit Dosanjh, the self-made Punjabi prince of song and screen, someone whom I personally love and admire, recently revealed to media outlet, Film Companion, that he doesn’t “care about getting work in Bollywood” and that “(he’s) not crazy about anybody; no actor, no director, nobody. They can be superstars in their own homes.”
It’s obvious that Dosanjh experienced his fair share of obstacles in the Hindi film industry, an industry notorious for its discriminatory, elitist attitude towards commoners like Dosanjh, whose father was a truck driver and mother was a homemaker.
But truth be told, Bollywood should be so lucky to have such an incredible artist in its fraternity.
“Dosanjh, ever the Renaissance Man, has always been as successful with his film ventures as his musical ones. But Bollywood doesn’t care.”
Prior to his powerfully restrained Bollywood debut in Udta Punjab, where he played a police officer doing his part to cull Punjab’s rising drug addiction problem both on the streets and at home, Dosanjh was an icon in his home state of Punjab where his songs and films ruled the charts and box office respectively. In fact, three of his films (Sardaar Ji, Sardaar Ji 2 and Jatt & Juliet 2) are three of the highest grossing Punjabi films till date.
He subsequently starred in several other Bollywood films with varying success but his last big picture, Good Newwz, was one of the biggest Bollywood films of 2019, grossing over 300 crores both domestically and worldwide.
Yes, it can be argued that it’s the lead star, Akshay Kumar’s presence, that was the film’s biggest draw but that doesn’t explain the reported huge ticket sales in Punjab.
While Bollywood productions came to a screeching halt on account of the pandemic, Dosanjh kept busy, churning out record-breaking Punjabi albums and music videos. In fact, his 2020 LP, G.O.A.T, became the first Indian album, and one of the few non-English albums, to ever chart in the top twenty Canadian Albums Chart.
Dosanjh, ever the Renaissance Man, has always been as successful with his film ventures as his musical ones.
But Bollywood doesn’t care.
The seemingly open hostility towards him though shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Dosanjh is not the first, and surely not the last, outsider to voice his dismay at Bollywood turning its nose up at a rising star who comes from humble beginnings. Kangana Ranaut, Karthik Aaryan and a slew of others before him have already undergone the same maltreatment but, unlike them, Dosanjh was already an established superstar when he humbly stepped into the Hindi film industry and thus was deserving of his new peers’ respect and admiration right from the onset.
When he rightfully won the Filmfare Award for Best Newcomer in 2017 for the critically lauded, commercially successful Udta Punjab , Harshvardhan Kapoor, Anil Kapoor’s son whom one can easily claim is riding on the coattails of his family’s success, bitterly voiced his disapproval. He claimed that because Dosanjh has several films under his belt, he should have been exempted from the category of “Newcomer”.
I should point out that that same year, Kapoor’s dismal debut, Mirzya, epically tanked at the Box Office.
Quelle surprise.
While typing all this, I’ve got Luna, off of Dosanjh’s newly released album, MoonChild, on loop – a genre-bender of a pop song that brilliantly fuses 80s New Wave with Punjabi bhangra sensibilities – while simultaneously feeling disheartened that Bollywood, with its myopic vision, can’t acknowledge and celebrate his genius.
