Director Imtiaz Ali dissected the complex relationship shared by Amar Singh Chamkila with his first wife, Gurmail, and his second wife, Amarjot. Chamkila, a popular folk musician from Punjab, was killed alongside Amarjot by masked gunmen in the year 1988. The murders remain unsolved, and were recently dramatised by Imtiaz in the Netflix film Amar Singh Chamkila, starring Diljit Dosanjh and Parineeti Chopra.
In an interview, the filmmaker said that Diljit would always become uncomfortable whenever the topic of Chamkila’s first wife would come up in their discussions, because he couldn’t wrap his head around how the singer would’ve felt when he told her that he’d found someone else. In Imtiaz’s view, Chamkila was embarrassed when he confessed to Gurmail that he was with Amarjot, and tried to ‘buy’ his freedom from her with money, because that’s all he could offer.
Also read – Amar Singh Chamkila’s first wife recalls their final meeting just two days before his murder, says she struggled financially after his death: ‘Made Rs 5 per day’
Asked about the scene in which he confesses to Gurmail that he has married Amarjot in an interview with Fever FM, Imtiaz said that both actors – Diljit and Kul Sidhu – played the scene very ‘sensitively’. It also helped that the child actor was actually crying, and that they were shooting in Ludhiana, in the kind of mud house that Chamkila actually lived in. “Diljit is very sensitive as an actor. Whenever the point of Gurmail used to come when I would tell him the story, he would become very sensitive. I would tell him about all the time they’d spent together before Chamkila became famous. The scene had dialogue earlier, but I cut them out, because I thought that Chamkila would have nothing to say to her,” he said.
Imtiaz said that Chamkila was very wary of his fame, and knew that he had more than he’d ever imagined. “Society affords celebrities certain liberties, and Chamkila exploited these liberties, but this made him unhappy. He knew that it was all superficial. This man’s ambition was to become an electrician. He dropped out after the fifth grade. Every success that he had was more than he’d ever imagined, and he felt that he couldn’t lose this opportunity. He knew that he had no option when it came to marrying Amarjot. They decided to be together because they were desperate people, and there was no reason to pretend any longer,” he said.
The real Gurmail lives in Punjab, as do her two daughters with Chamkila. In several interviews, she said that Chamkila never stopped being a husband to her, and that he would take care of the family for as long as he was alive, although after his passing, Amarjot’s family allegedly took everything from her. Chamkila and Amarjot had a child of their own, Jaiman.
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