The Indian popular cinema’s best-kept secret is that it’s actually several cinemas in one. The Hindi movies that dominate the box office obscure the Punjabi, Malayalam and Telugu productions emerging from separate regions of this vast country; though directors and stars have been known to switch between them, each cinema retains its own distinct tenors and textures( and, indeed, audience) . If Sardarji, the new vehicle for actor-singer Diljit Dosanjh, is in any way typical, Punjabi film-makers are happy to push beyond standardBollywood broadness towards full-on wackiness: here is a cinema where the sound of the pennywhistle still enjoys some comic currency.
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The tone of Rohit Jugraj’s film can be discerned from the early episode that finds Dosanjh’s Jaggi, the Punjab’s foremost ghost hunter, called upon to cleanse a classroom haunted by a stick-in-the-mud schoolmaster. Jaggi, whose MO is to engage with his spectral quarries on their own terms, quickly assumes the role of diligent student, and finds himself mired in a debate about milk’s effect on human digestion; the conversation concludes with the tutor’s admission that he’s been feeling terribly constipated since passing over – a revelation that cues a loud farting noise, as if to underscore the fact we are many, many miles from Kipling