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Pushpendra Singh’s 2020 film Laila Aur Satt Geet, also known as The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs, makes Laila’s struggle to choose her own life a lens on Kashmir’s contested identity and autonomy. Singh has stated that this political allegory guided his adaptation, but it is not the film’s only possible meaning: its seven folk songs, a tale adapted from Vijaydan Detha, and echoes of the Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded also shape Laila’s journey.
What is Laila Aur Satt Geet about?
Directed by Pushpendra Singh, the 2020 Indian feature is in Gojri and Hindi with English subtitles. It follows Laila, a young woman in the Gujjar-Bakarwal pastoral community in Kashmir. Her marriage to the shepherd Tanvir is determined by a contest of strength; afterward, a persistent policeman courts her. The film follows Laila’s wit and efforts to retain independence amid the demands placed on her. MoMA’s program note describes it as an allegorical feminist fable.
The story adapts Vijaydan Detha’s Rajasthani folktale Kenchuli, but Singh relocates it to Kashmir. He has said that the relationship between Rajasthan’s Gujjars and the nomadic Gurjars and Bakarwals in Kashmir drew him to the material. News about harassment of Bakarwal shepherds and permits issued by forest officials also informed his decision to shift the setting, according to an India Today interview. This is a dramatic adaptation, not a documentary portrait of every member of the community.
How does Laila’s story become an allegory for Kashmir?
The connection begins with choice. In Singh’s account, the contest that decides Laila’s marriage suggested the predicament of Kashmiris who, he said, “do not have the autonomy to make their own choices and decide their future.” The comparison is his political interpretation of the story, rather than a neutral description of Kashmir’s status.
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Singh stated the allegory directly in a director’s note reproduced in the Film Bazaar catalogue: “The struggles in Kashmir in India have always reminded me of those questions. Hence, I decided to adapt a folk tale where the struggles of a woman become a metaphor for the struggles of Kashmir.” Laila’s constrained agency gives the film a personal way to approach questions of authority and self-determination.
The landscape and its movement add another political dimension. The Indian Express interview connects the film’s wandering herders, security forces, borders and demands for identity papers to its political present. Those elements place Laila’s intimate story within a world shaped by movement and control, without reducing the character to a symbol alone.
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What do the seven songs mean?
The songs are part of the film’s structure, not simply background music. They mark chapters in Laila’s story and trace shifts in her emotional life, including marriage, migration, regret and playfulness. The Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles program describes the folk music as touching on those themes; the Film Bazaar catalogue presents the chapters and songs as stages in Laila’s movement toward renunciation.
That structure lets the film move between Laila’s outward circumstances and her inner life. The songs make her changing responses legible without turning the story into a straightforward political statement: the allegory unfolds alongside an individual journey.
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Who is Lal Ded, and how does she relate to the film?
Lal Ded, also known as Lalleshwari, was a fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic and poet. Film descriptions connect her poetry and renunciant tradition to Laila’s awakening and eventual renunciation. MoMA identifies Lalleshwari’s poems among the film’s sources, while IFFLA uses the name Lal Ded/Lalleshwari. The film is not a biography of the mystic; the connection is an influence and a spiritual or poetic parallel.
Singh has also described Laila’s final shedding of clothes as a metaphor for Kashmir shedding an old identity and finding a human core beneath competing claims. In a NewsClick interview, he said, “For me, it was about Kashmir: It has to shed its old identity, and something new has to emerge from it.” That is Singh’s reading of the scene, not a definitive meaning imposed on every viewer.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why adapt a Rajasthani folk tale to Kashmir?
Singh’s approach treats oral storytelling as flexible enough to hold both an inherited tale and contemporary political concerns. In a Scroll interview, he defended the combination of present-day references and an imagined story world, arguing that oral traditions and literature already bring such elements together. He put his concern succinctly: “The trend of realism forgets about imagination.”
That perspective helps explain why Kenchuli can serve as the film’s narrative foundation without making the Kashmir setting a claim of documentary realism. Singh uses the folktale’s questions about a woman’s choices to explore a distinct political context, while the songs and Lal Ded references open a poetic and spiritual dimension.
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