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Diljit Dosanjh

Nobody knows anything, Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman famously declared of the movie business. A fine example of this truism is the career of Punjabi sensation Diljit Dosanjh.

Conventional wisdom dictates that Diljit should, at best, be a local singing star. When his first Punjabi film, The Lion of Punjab (2011), flopped, he was categorically told that even the Punjab audience wasn’t willing to accept a turbaned hero. But through sheer grit and industrial-strength charm, the man has fashioned a blazing acting career in both Punjabi and Hindi cinema, done concerts in sold-out stadiums around the world and become a social media sensation, with millions following his funny, self-deprecating posts, which record his globe-trotting life (Diljit in the kitchen, experimenting with new recipes, has its own fan base). He’s the closest I’ve come to witnessing a showbiz Cinderella story.

We first met in April 2016, before the release of his first Hindi film, Udta Punjab. I had recently seen his 2014 film, Punjab 1984, the story of a mother searching for her son who has gone missing during the violence of the anti-Sikh riots. Diljit’s performance made a big impression. I reached out to the film’s director, Anurag Singh, and asked if he could make an introduction. We set up an interview.

Diljit and I didn’t speak the same language; he is most comfortable in Punjabi and I in English. And yet we managed to communicate, chatting for almost an hour about his incredible journey, his excitement at working with Kareena Kapoor in Udta Punjab, and his desperate desire to own a pair of Adidas Yeezy 350s. At one point, he made a direct-to-camera plea to rapper-designer Kanye West, saying, ‘Kim Kardashian ke husband, jab shoes banaate ho, don’t make them out of stock, do logon ko.’ I had never heard of the coveted Yeezys and it took me a few minutes to figure out that this impassioned speech was about sneakers.

What was immediately apparent was Diljit’s candour and authenticity. He wasn’t reticent about his background (he comes from a village near Jalandhar) or his inability to speak English. He didn’t seem intimidated by the Hindi film industry, which can be an alienating place for outsiders. Diljit confidently owned his persona of the ‘urban pendu’. The word ‘pendu’ comes from ‘pind’, meaning village. In the video for his song, ‘Proper Patola’, Diljit wears a sweatshirt that says ‘Urban Pendu’. When I asked him how close he was to being this, he smiled and said, ‘Pendu toh main hoon, urban thoda wannabe hai.’

That seamless mix of earthy and edgy has defined Diljit’s persona, his brand and his sense of style. At our first interview, he wore unflashy grey tracks and a white shirt—the only standout statement was a pink pagdi. But by the time we did our second interview, in July 2018, the fashion maven in him had blossomed. His sartorial choices were making news: he was featured on the pages of the Indian edition of GQ magazine. The evening of our second meeting, Diljit wore a strikingly colourful Gucci shirt. When I asked him about this evolving sense of style, he said he’d always had it, he just hadn’t had the money to indulge it. A year later, Diljit made the cover of Vogue India wearing a baggy pink blazer and red track pants, standing next to Kareena Kapoor Khan, Natasha Poonawalla and Karan Johar, with a headline that read ‘Forces of Fashion’. Inside, however, the magazine only carried three interviews—Diljit left because the reporter was asking questions in rapid-fire English.

Diljit redefined the Bollywood hero. And it wasn’t just the turban. It was also his disarming, wide-eyed, son-of-the-soil appeal, a sharp contrast to the urbane, gym-chiselled leading men that crowd the Hindi film industry. In 2017, he played the lead opposite Anushka Sharma in Phillauri, a comedy about a ghost. At one point, we see him shirtless, bathing at a tube well. As Karanjeet Kaur, writing in Arre, put it, ‘When has a Sikh man in mainstream Hindi cinema been considered an object of desire? When has his body been sexualised?’ Diljit turned ‘urban pendu’ into a legitimate brand.

In 2019, Diljit became the first turbaned Sikh to have a wax statue at Madame Tussauds. He’s been brand ambassador for Coca-Cola and Tissot. Through the years and successes, the externals—clothes, cars, videos—got swankier, but the man seemed to stay the same. In posts on social media, he was still as excited about luxurious hotel rooms and private planes; he still struggled with English; and he still, somehow, seamlessly combined Punjabi popstar swag with the humility of an ingenu. In 2020, he released an album called G.O.A.T (the acronym for Greatest of All Time) but insisted, in an interview, that he was far from being that. Only the legend Gurdas Maan deserves that epithet, he added.

In one of our many interviews, Diljit said, ‘Saaf niyat se jo banda mehnat karta hai toh kudrat usko deti hi hai, yeh toh niyam hai.’ In the hyper-competitive, brutally Darwinian world of showbiz, ‘saaf niyat’ sounds like a feeble weapon. And yet it seems to have worked for Diljit. He is an outlier but his career is proof that sincerity, talent and rigour can trump gargantuan odds. For me, his journey has been a continual source of joy and inspiration.

Among Diljit’s many ambitions is doing a film in Hollywood. Which of course seems impossible. But watching him soar has taught me to never say never. With Diljit, there is always hope that yet another mountain will be conquered.