How Kohrra & Carry on Jatta 3 offer two fascinating and distinct portrayals of Punjab

In a scene from the recently released Carry on Jatta 3, an outspoken son tells his father “Kuddi ta bomb hai!” to which the overenthusiastic father asks, rather bluntly, “taa main ki Ukraine tey satni hai?” That punchline translates to a crude joke that lands because it is set in the world of Punjabi comedy’s innocence. Here characters don’t necessarily mean what they say, nor do they say, what they actually mean. The Punjabi comedy has always had this robust sense of feeling staged, which lends it a spoof like energy. Contrary to this elaborate but self-aware staginess, Kohrra on Netflix digs its nails into the emotional and generational toil of the wasteland. Together the two make for fascinating, if contradicting views of Punjab and its people.

While Kohrra is a damning indictment of the unseen and the understudied, Carry on Jatta is merely the sum of the culture’s many formulaic tropes. That Punjabis love to laugh is a hideous appropriation but through the unprecedented success of the industry’s biggest franchise, it kind of also rings true. The Punjabi comedy is a canon that proportionally at least, makes for the industry’s largest chunk. It’s a wildly successful genre that has given the country possibly its most famous turbaned hero in Diljit Dosanjh (Jatt & Juliet and Sardaar Ji). Below the surface-level economics and cultural whims, however, the Punjabi comedy also embodies this tendency to look away from the state’s many problems; a kernel of truth that Kohrra unearths by wiping clean the mist of ignorance.

Carry on Jatta 3 is likely to become the highest grossing film in Punjab’s long but chequered cinematic history. This is a film culture that has to deal with the partition, the loss of writers and actors to a bordering country, the decline of Urdu as a language and politically charged moments that made filmmaking, or the very joy of watching cinema, a spurious dream. Deprived of cinema, Punjabis have though held onto oral and musical traditions, every now and then birthing who have eventually become their mainstays. The churlish extravagance with which Punjabi music made the transition from soulful to sensational, underlines why comedy, emerged as the genre that allowed the industry to grow manifold. This after all is also a landscape that needs to heal.

Interestingly, both Carry on Jatta and Kohrra somewhat centre Punjab’s fascination with immigration. The third instalment of the wildly successful franchise is set in the UK, a radical departure from the previous two that suggests, besides enabling budgets, that the industry is provincially looking outward, at an audience set distributed across the globe. Curiously, and possibly counter-intuitively, a majority of the year’s releases, in Punjab, are still set in state’s rural heartlands. Almost as if with the proposition of escape there is this innate desire to also hold onto a bit of the homeland.

The same homeland that Kohrra’s characters are trying to escape, either by leaving or lying. In the film, however, there are well-to-do immigrants, who exhibit superficial but telling struggles at work. Most of them run businesses  – two separate restaurants – whereas the protagonist (played by Gippy Grewal), as is the franchise’s model, does nothing. It’s a bashful statement that the franchise has now exported to an expensive, foreign country.

Though Kohrra and Carry on Jatta 3 come from different schools of filmmaking they underline the impossibility of generalising a state either through its conflict or through its methods of escape. As much as Punjabis yearn to immigrate abroad, they leave in their trail, a mix of trauma, drugs and violence. But for every embattled narrative that is bloodily spit out of the hinterland, there is also the cheerful story of the Punjabis who have made it, pretty much everywhere they have gone. Carry on Jatta, casually just celebrates this adaptability, this persistence to find dignity in alien sub-cultures, albeit through humour that only those willing to suspend belief, would get. It’s a journey most Punjabis make every time a loud, unapologetic comedy hits the theatres. And the rest of us will make when a series lands on streaming.