Movies and Punjab: the Bollywood connection of Sarai Lashkari Khan

Date: 2^nd June, 2012, Saturday

Location: Sarai Lashkari Khan, Settlement Kot Panech, District: Kapurthala, Punjab

Most of my generation wouldn’t know or care two hoots about Doraha Sarai, Sarai Lashkari Khan or the GT or any of the Mughal precincts. What we do care about are our movies, our actors, our celebrities and their lives. When we were en route the GT, headed to the Sarai Lashkari Khan, I was told that this was That Fort-like structure which was filmed in Rand de Basanti- the blockbuster hit movie of 2006, which fetched accolades and critical acclaim for its realism and inspirational value. The scene in the song Roobaroo, where the four renegades – Aamir, Sharman, Karan and Kunal all chase an Indian Army jet fighter flying overhead and jump up in the air attempting to catch it- all shirtless, waving their shirts in the air through a dense and tall growth of weeds running across the courtyard of the fort. It was youth in its full glory. Finding places away from the eyes of the people to be liberated, like free birds. I still get the same feeling everytime I watch the movie and the song with the fort in the backdrop. I call it a fort because that’s what we all used to call it- how most moviegoers- or common man/ men- still call it.

Movie promos of Rang De Basanti, song Roobaroo shot at Sarai Lashkari Khan

No one knew this is a Sarai. We didn’t know what a Sarai was in the first place, least of all that it was on the Grand Trunk road and had a name- Sarai Lashkari Khan. On my way to the sarai I could visualise the whole scene from the movie over and over again, it was one of my favorites. Second only to the scene from Dil Chahta Hai where Aamir, Akshay and Saif are sitting on the parapet of another old fort in Goa planning to come to that spot every year ritualistically as a mark of undiluted friendship. And with each turn, my excitement grew higher.

When we reached Sarai Lashkari Khan, I felt a little bubble inside me go pop, however vane it may sound. I had thought that once RDB was a blockbuster, probably the authorities might have realised the value of such picturesque ruins and might have capitalised on it to open up the monument for the public. I had visualised a-la Bekal Fort – the fort in Kasargode, Kerala which rose to fame upon the release of Mani Ratnam’s Bombay for featuring in the song “Kannanale... (Kehna hi kya)”. While one had become a well kept tourist spot, the other was still in ruins.

  

Scenes from the song kannale/kehna hee kya from Bombay, shot in Bekal Fort.

Sarai Lashkari Khan has an interesting history. To quote from Jaya Basera’s story of Sarai Lashkari Khan : “Information about the sarai in sources is very little. Lashkar Khan was not a name of a person but a title that had been awarded to him. The title suggests that the person was a military commander in Aurangzeb’s army. The sarai is said to have been constructed sometime between 1669-70 A.D as trading activities were on an all time high in Kashmir while Aurangzeb was in Shahajhanabad and to accommodate the traders and travelers to and fro Kashmir new sarai were to be build on the Delhi – Lahore stretch of the road, Sarai Lashkari Khan having been constructed with that understanding.”

But my take on the subject is not architectural. It is social. When we visited the sarai, its courtyard had the same black ‘charred’ soil that many fields en route had. It is an agricultural practice in Punjab(most of agrarian India) that once the crop has been harvested the last crop is burnt for the good health of the soil, to rid it of residues, crop wastes, weeds, insects etc and prolong its fertility before the next crop is sown. Seeing the same charred spots on the soil meant people had used this sarai for cultivation. When I asked around I was told Ajay Devgan was to come here to shoot some scene in which he wanted the sarai’s courtyard to be cultivated with yellow flower-bearing crop (maybe sarson I think) and the crop had to be a certain height- about 4 feet or so. They had prepped the court for that. Once that was done, they burnt the crop when they heard the word from the State Archaeological Deptt. that a few people from CRCI were going for a site visit there soon – that meant us.

To these farmers and the villagers these movies were bringing in revenue. It was much more useful to cultivate crops to the whims of actors and directors than follow conservation guidelines or help us architects preserve the structure the way we foresaw it to happen.

But is it necessarily a bad thing? What do we have against change and adaptation? Okay, agriculture inside a historic structure can seem horrifying, but these people live in the present, not the past. They associate this monument to Ajay Devgans and Aamir Khans and the movies that have been shot here. If this Sarai has a cinematographic value, why can we not accept it and work around it? Isn’t a structure as important as it is in the present? I mean what use is a structure if its sits dissociated with society and dilapidated as well. Aren’t our methods to emphasize its significance all null and void if a decade after we move out of the place having restored it, it just falls right back to pieces because of neglect or lack of ownership? Isn’t dilapidated yet connected to the people a better treatment than restored yet unwanted? And can we actually just lecture people to stop shooting films here?

Son of Sardar scene shot in Sarai Lashkari Khan

I enjoyed watching the scene in Son of Sardar where Sonakshi Sinha drives into the sarai from the west gateway on a bike. She hits a wheelie in front of Devgan with Sarai Lashkari Khan in the background. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Even when we were watching the trailer together Ridhima and Somya were busy spotting the gaping hole in the Mosque at Lashkari Khan visible for split seconds in the scene. I mean, come on…heights of conservationism and maybe institutionalization of our minds to only think as architects before we thinking as common man. Well if architecture is a service to society, then the thought process should be the flipside of this- as a common man (a person at the user end) first and then as an architect.

No one has heard of caravans for centuries now. Trading caravans are a forgone culture of the past. The world moved one to better ways of doing trade. Trade is not really carried out on the Grand Trunk road anymore. And Sarai’s were built to house moving Caravans- they are called “Caravansarai(s)”. So now if the people have started encroachment because they serve as better homes than they do now as trading motels then it is the culture of the present. Culture is dynamic, it is ever evolving. Then why does heritage and architecture have to be static? How can the people associate themselves to the Sarai’s if all we keep telling them is “don’t do this here, and don’t do that here.” If they have forgotten why it stood there in the first place, it is to us to remind them, to teach them and equip them with knowledge, because without knowledge of the past preserving the present is impossible.

Movies were once called talkies. I assume it’s probably because they talk to the people as before them movies might have been mute. I didn't Google it because I want to keep my ignorance intact in this case. And movies have been known to be a social stimulus among the youth. They bring the present and the past to the people and put it out there for them to watch, witness, judge and not just be entertained by. In days when talkies never existed, we depended on the printed word for making ourselves heard. Today the movies do it for us. So I think talkies are good, they are Socially Relevant. Maybe we could use them to convey heritage conservation related issues as well, in the way that it reaches the masses and makes them a party to the responsibility of ownership and belongingness to the historicity of their settlements.