If you’ve been watching Diljit Dosanjh’s trajectory over the last few months, you’ll know that he has had a landmark year. Fresh off his history-making appearance at Coachella in 2023, Dosanjh embarked on a sold-out concert tour in the West. In India, he has had a year of successful film releases, a multi-city tour, and a continued record of being a thorn in the side of the Hindu Right wing.
Dosanjh might have left concert audiences and Jimmy Fallon equally slack-jawed in admiration abroad, but closer home, he’s had to deal with political theatre at its most pedestrian.
In Dosanjh’s playful hands, Indori’s words were deployed with an almost taunting lightness, but with a precise target: the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and its attempts to disrupt his show over the most manufactured of controversies.
The Right-wing outfit only had to dip into its moral panic playbook. First, there were the protests over alcohol sales at the concert. These were followed quickly by dire warnings about “rampant drug consumption” and finally, the absence of segregated seating leading to “love jihad”, the VHP’s favourite project.
But it was VHP leader Avinash Kaushal who said the quiet part aloud: “Through the media we learned that Diljit Dosanjh was involved in funding the farmers’ movement and [was] a supporter of Khalistan.”
For the last four years, Dosanjh has been anathema to India’s Right wing ideologues. But the artist’s response perfectly encapsulated his approach to Right-wing intimidation: meeting it not with anger or fear, but with an impishness that leaves his opponents looking both petty and outdated.
This has been the pattern throughout his ten-city tour, which concludes in Ludhiana on 31 December. At every step, Dosanjh has demonstrated an almost prescient ability to anticipate and neutralise Right-wing pressure points. He started the tour in Delhi in late October, by draping the tricolour around him and spelt out his deep respect for India’s languages. This was probably a presentiment of the criticisms that would eventually be levelled at him in the following months.
When Telangana authorities demanded he avoid songs about alcohol, he acquiesced with diplomatic grace, only to later proclaim that he’d stop singing about alcohol the day liquor shops and thekas in India closed. At the show in Ahmedabad, he quipped: “I didn’t get any notice today.”
By the time he performed in Mumbai in late December, he posted a video on Instagram talking about the number of advisories and notices issued to his concerts. Still, he promised his fans, they’d experience “double the fun”.
The desperation of the fault-finding mission reached new depths when Dosanjh’s critics latched onto his spelling of “Panjab” in a social media post announcing his Chandigarh concert. The spelling, they parroted, was associated with the Pakistani side of Punjab and the lack of a tricolour emoji in the tweet was an indicator of his Khalistani inclinations. Never mind that this spelling has historical precedent, appears in academic texts, or reflects the Gurmukhi pronunciation more accurately than the anglicised “Punjab”.
Amandeep Sandhu wrote about the traveller Ibn Battuta and the origins of the word in his 2015 book Panjab: Journeys Through Fault Lines:
“When he arrived, Ibn Battuta had crossed the Kyzylkum Desert of modern Uzbekistan, the rocky mountains of Afghanistan and the snow-laden Hindu Kush range. He set eyes on the River Indus in 1393 and the abundance of water struck him — five rivers feeding into the mighty Indus. In his travel memoir, Rihla, written in Arabic, Ibn Battuta named the land ‘Panj Ab’ — the land of five waters. The words are Persian. The land was Panjab, which I spell with an ‘a’ from the original Persian.”
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A few years ago, writing about Dosanjh’s entry into Hindi cinema, I had called him an unlikely hero—the wide-eyed outsider who didn’t know who Tom Hanks was. As a Sikh man, his celebrity was an aberration in Bollywood. I’d written then:
“Dosanjh comes across as a man who is acutely aware that his Bollywood run might be a fleeting blip. No matter how famous he becomes in Punjab, on the shores of diasporic Canada, and maybe even the clubs of Mumbai, breaching the gates of Bollywood is tough work. If his surmise is correct, his Bollywood streak will likely be restricted to minority characters in mainstream films and he might remain the gauche, self-conscious – but very endearing – outlier.”
That assessment, coloured perhaps by the industry’s historical treatment of Sikh characters as either comic relief or nationalist symbols, couldn’t have been more wrong.
Seven years down the line, Dosanjh is no longer an outlier—he’s a proper transgressor. He has evolved into something that particularly rattles the Right wing’s blinkered imagination, a figure whose very existence challenges their neat categorisations of “Indian” versus “anti-national”.
Dosanjh’s aesthetic alone is a masterclass in cultural fusion: the carefully draped turban and kurta-tehmat paired with luxury sneakers and designer jackets is a statement about identity that refuses to choose between tradition and modernity. His resolve to speak Punjabi and Hindi, with the occasional English phrase, even in international contexts, creates a vocabulary of belonging that’s borderless.
As an artist who can sing about a “panj taara theka” in one breath and collaborate with Ed Sheeran in the next, Dosanjh refuses to be boxed into convenient categories—whether linguistic, cultural, or political. This makes him a persistent irritant to those who prefer their cultural icons safely categorised and controlled. His is not the milquetoast patriotism of celebrity tweets on Independence Day, but the spirited, angry defence of Indian farmers who protested at the gates of Delhi.
When Dosanjh brings a Pakistani fan on stage in Manchester to gift her his shoes, speaking about the artificial nature of borders, it might be a calculated political statement. It is also an organic expression of Punjabiyat that, until 70 years ago, didn’t have to worry about national boundaries. When he caps off his performances with the solemn “Main Hoon Punjab(I am Punjab)”, he’s letting the Right wing know that they cannot force him to choose between regional and national identity. He operates in a cultural space that’s much more expansive than their imagination can allow.
Earlier this year, Dosanjh starred in Imtiaz Ali’s biopic Amar Singh Chamkila, as the titular character. There’s a telling irony in how both the artists have had to face “advisories” about the moral panic over their music. Where Chamkila faced death threats, Dosanjh has to confront digital mobs and administrative hurdles. Four decades separate the two, but so little has changed.
What’s different, though, is the response. Painting an artist who made bhangra reverberate across the California desert, as anti-national, only makes the Right wing look provincial. Maybe that’s Dosanjh’s most significant contribution. He has shown us how joy can be more subversive than anger. And his G.O.A.T. act of patriotism is demonstrating that Indian identity is too vast, too complex, and too alive to fit in the Hindu Right’s narrow boxes.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)
