Exclusive! Tabbar director Ajitpal Singh on Punjab, the exercise of rewriting and making stories on conflict

Filmmaker Ajitpal Singh writes over six drafts before he proceeds to pitch his story to financiers. In the least, this is what the filmmaker did for his award-winning Fire in the Mountains, which had its world premiere in Sundance Film Festival.

”Writing or filmmaking isn’t quite like making bread, where you follow a set formula and measure your ingredients to make a successful project. So I don’t put much thought into writing before fleshing out my ideas. I start writing, only to realise that I don’t quite like what I am producing. It is at this point that I begin my research and start asking questions. Often, I don't even save my first four drafts and start from scratch. Only when I delete these drafts is when I realise I have better ideas. Writing is essentially rewriting for me.”

Although, for Tabbar, the SonyLIV crime drama collecting reviews from critics and viewers, the screenplay draft was re-written only thrice.

“I was not the first director to be associated with Tabbar. I came aboard the project in December 2020. We were planning to shoot the series in February. As a director, you want to shape a story slightly differently than the original writing,” Singh says, before explaining the painstaking process that goes behind writing a script.

“Whether you are the sole writer or working with a team, the first stage of any production is to remodel and reshape the material from the original story. Then you get the opportunity to rewrite once more with your actors and cinematographer to figure out the rhythm. Since actors are living and breathing their characters, they usually have constructive inputs that you then thread into the narrative. A third time, you get to rewrite at the editing stage. With every stage, you get deeper into the story and discover new nuances.”

However, things didn't pan out as planned for Singh. He was diagnosed with thyroid cancer on February 1, and in two weeks, he was scheduled for a surgery. “I was unsure about what was going to happen to Tabbar. I could only whisper at that point.” But after a reassuring conversation with his doctor, the self-admittedly workaholic returned to the sets three days after his surgery to resume filming.

“In some ways, it was Tabbar that helped me recover faster because I was enjoying the process so much”.

Not just his medical condition, Singh was also having to navigate shooting in the thick of the pandemic, with many restrictions in place. “We are used to having hundreds of people to shoot a web series. But because of the restrictions, crews were significantly smaller, and we used to work in shifts. Line producers and first assistant directors were not used to running the set this way. Hence, many a-times, a problem that could be otherwise solved in 10 minutes, took us an hour to fix.”

Be it as it may, Singh wasn’t very perturbed by his circumstances. The second lockdown was imposed some 30 days into the show’s 55-day schedule. There was, expectedly, a two-month break between the two schedules. During this time, Singh reassessed the material, addressed the problems in the narrative, and embarked on a rewriting journey. “We realised there are a lot of things that may have worked on paper, but we need to change a few things around to convey what we want more effectively. Hence, I started rewriting many of the bits of the show along with the team.”

Beyond Tabbar, Singh says the lockdown was also beneficial for him during his first feature Fire in the Mountains. “We had locked the edit in March 2020, but in April, the first lockdown was announced. Suddenly, there was so much free time that I started re-editing the film. This made Fire in the Mountains much better than it probably originally was.”

Singh reveals the initial story of Tabbar was much more layered and complex with many subplots. “By this point, after helming four shorts and one feature film, I knew what my strengths and limitations are as a director. I need a certain amount of space to be an effective director. I can only create this space by making the plot simpler and the characters complex. If the plot is too vast, there is no room to flesh out characters, their emotions and relationships,” Singh says about shaving off the many twists and turns of the original script.

The curious addition of Baba Farid couplets in the beginning of each episode wasn’t just a stylistic device. It was to contextualise “suffering” in the story. “None of us wanted Tabbar to be just a crime thriller. Parikshhit Jha (series editor) and I kept discussing how to elevate the show during the editing process. I had written in my notebook that how most suffering is our own creation, and the flux between what should be done and how we end up doing things creates suffering,” he says.

“Moreover, Punjab is a deeply spiritual land that our so-called mainstream Bollywood does not talk about. Punjab is not just a land of Bhangra and tandoori chicken. It is also a land with a deeply spiritual tradition, where Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus have lived in harmony for years. How many people are aware that the Guru Grantha, the holy book of the Sikhs, also contains Gurbani written by Muslim fakirs? Keeping this in mind, and my own connection with Punjab, we went with Baba Farid’s verses to preface each episode of the show,“ he adds.

For lovers of Shakespearean tragedies, there are too many easter eggs and direct references to Macbeth. Specifically, Lady Macbeth’s eventual insanity. Singh was struck by the Shakespearean scope of the script. Many have also pointed out the show’s structural similarity to Mohanlal’s Drishyam. But the director hadn’t seen the film, nor did he intend to. “Had I watched Drishyam, I would have solely focused on how to not make the show similar to it,” he says, adding that he trusted his own instincts about the show.

What he did draw references from, was Turkish filmmaker’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s 2008 film Three Monkeys. “I found Three Monkeys to also be very Shakespearean. But what I found most striking was how rooted it was to the land of which it was telling the story. That was also what I was trying to achieve with Tabbar.”

With every passing year, content seems to be becoming increasingly glocalised. So, a Tabbar, while marketed as a Hindi-language show, has over 40 percent of its dialogues in Punjabi. “Interestingly enough, it was not mine or the writer’s decision to incorporate Punjabi dialogues into the script. Sony told us to include more Punjabi, citing that they want the show to be authentic as possible. This is also a marker of how the audience is also changing,” the director revealed.

Despite revolving around the drug menace in Punjab, Tabbar never seems to be a show squarely about the same. Singh credits writer Harman Wadala and Sandeep Jain for balancing the show’s core story with the drug problem, without the latter overshadowing the screenplay. “Even I prefer this kind of a treatment, where the underlying issue ties the characters together, but does not take over them. In the end, you are not making a documentary about the drug problem in Punjab. You are making a story about people getting impacted by the drug problem in Punjab. The job of a director is to incite the discussion, not lead it to a conclusion.”

While he vehemently steered away from being a documentarian on the Punjab drug crisis for Tabbar, Singh’s experience of working in over 15 international documentaries before starting to direct his own shorts came in handy while making Tabbar.

“When you direct a film, it needs a lot of visual research. Once you have researched real people and situations, it aids in differentiating between authentic emotions and fake ones when you are shooting with actors. So whether it is Tabbar or Rammat-Gammat, I always go into a film armed with visual research.”

Recounting his early years, Singh discloses how he became a filmmaker. “I was always a storyteller. I enjoyed recounting real-life stories or made up ones and telling them to people. But I did not consider it to be a viable career choice. I wanted to be an engineer, like everyone belonging to a middle-class family,” Singh recounts. It was only in college, where he was studying chemistry, where he had his first brush with literature. He went on to dabble in 3D animation, special effects, translation and theatre for several years until watching French New Wave director François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. It was the film that inspired Singh to finally foster the dream of making his own film one day.”

But relocating from Punjab to Gujarat as a young back adversely impacted his own perception of his abilities.

“I was never in a position to attend film school, since I did not really have the financial backing. Further, when we shifted from Punjab to Gujarat, from being the son of a farmer who had a cinema hall in Bathinda, I had overnight become the son of a security guard. In school, I was called a terrorist, because your peers and teachers refuse to look beyond your pagdi (turban). Somewhere, this really made a dent in my confidence, where I stopped trusting the world outside.”

With the 19-minute-long Rammat-Gammat, Singh tasted the sweet success for the first time in 2018. The film won six awards and toured over 55 International and Indian film festivals, suddenly putting Singh on the map. But Rammat-Gammat is not Singh’s first short. He helmed three films Hummingbird, Loop and Mr and Mrs Singh before.

“My parents did not quite know what I used to do.”

Mr and Mrs Singh was a result of Singh trying to convey what he was doing for a living. “My parents were honestly quite clueless about my profession. Whenever they were asked what their son did, they used to say that he sits on the computer. I made Mr and Mrs Singh, my first fictional short, to explain my job to my parents and others.

For Singh, the journey to films wasn’t particularly smooth. “I made three short films before Rammat Gammat to send them into festivals but none of them got selected. Only when I discarded the idea of getting my film showcased in festivals is when Rammat-Gammat got selected not just for one, but different festivals.”

Breaking into the festival scene proved to be valuable for Singh. “When there is a stamp of Oberhausen (where Rammat-Gammat won the Special Mention trophy) or Sundance (where Fire in the Mountains had its world premiere) festivals, the way people look at your work and you change significantly. These kinds of validation allow you to take creative liberties that are risky. I did not really know many people from the industry, or had the kind of network that filmmakers should. Thus, I got to do Fire in the Mountains because of the success of Ramman-Gamman, and similarly, Tabbar, because of the success of Fire in the Mountains. For a filmmaker like me, it is important to keep making short films after short films, so that when they are noticed in the festivals, the producers feel more confident pumping their money into your feature projects.”

Future projects

Singh’s area of interest has always been ideological conflicts, be it Fire in the Mountains, where the central conflict is between tradition and modernity; or Tabbar, where religion and atheism are pitted against each other.” But for his next project, Singh is happy to delve into the musical genre. “Our country has a lot of song-and-dance films, but not many where the story unfolds through music. I have already written the first draft of a musical, and will pitch it soon,” Singh signs off.