Bhangra Music and Identity in the South Asian Diaspora

Limina, Volume 11, 2005
Sandeep K. Varma
Bhangra is in the Blood
What is bhangra?
Simply and historically, bhangra is a traditional folk music from the region of Punjab, a lush
valley situated between India and Pakistan, two countries in the subcontinental group now
problematically generalised and termed ‘South Asia’. Punjab is one of the most fertile regions in the
area, and remains a place where bhangra is still commonly used in harvest celebrations, weddings,
and religious festivals. 4 This ‘folk’ background gives bhangra an authenticity, a cultural origin in
whose terms its representations are often framed. 5 Most bhangra is sung in the Punjabi language, a
Sanskrit-based cousin of Hindi and Urdu, which are the national languages of India and Pakistan
respectively. Punjabi also serves as the official language of the Sikh religion. Brightly-costumed
dancers wearing turbans, as mandated by Sikhism, and loincloths, called lungis, continue to be the
traditional image of bhangra.
Bhangra can fall into a framework that represents and recreates the divides inherent in Indian
and South Asian regional socio-political relations. In India, a state/territory is often a religious,
linguistic, and culinary boundary. For example, Gujarati can refer to a diasporic people, a statehood
(of Gujarat), a language, a type of food, music, or a visual aesthetic. In bhangra music, popular South
Asian culture is reproduced within the dominant Punjabi/north Indian paradigm, as it is with
exported ‘Indian’ food such as the generic curry and tandoori chicken. These constructs, premised
on a simplistic colonialist understanding of ‘South Asia’, ignore not only regional and state
subjectivities, but also fail to acknowledge complex identities based on transnational cross-pollination.
As the Punjabis were displaced, bhangra followed them around the world – first throughout the
Commonwealth in the ‘old’ (exclusive) diaspora during the British Raj and the turn of the twentieth
century, and then worldwide from the 1960s onward in what Vijay Mishra calls ‘a new diaspora
of late capital (diaspora of the border)’, whose defining characteristic is mobility. 6 Following this
trajectory, bhangra has gained emblematic public status as an element of the Punjabi ‘ethnoscape’, the
disjunctive movement of people and workers in a ‘global cultural flow’. 7 Although Punjabi is a minor
player when placed in the hierarchy of world languages, bhangra has retained its Punjabi lyrics, and
more prominently, its characteristic syncopated rhythmic cycle and the presence of the dhol drum. 8
These ‘folk’ characteristics of bhangra have also become part of a modern ‘Trans-Asian/Translasian’
of bhangra into fusion forms which resist new diasporic nostalgia. 9 Amateur bhangra bands
have been performing at weddings and other social occasions in Punjabi communities, such as that
in London, since the 1960s, reproducing bhangra and creating new forms through improvisation. 10
Expanding beyond the Punjabi diaspora, bhangra has come to represent the ‘South Asian’
diaspora as a whole, since the constructed term ‘South Asian’ has been applied to all people with
ethnic, religious, or cultural heritage emanating from anywhere in the south Asian region – which
includes the nations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Afghanistan. ‘South
Asian’ attempted to advance identity beyond simply an Asian or Indo-centric focus, but the term
may be too expansive, failing to represent subtleties of identity. The grouping ‘South Asian’ as
a geographical reference has no nation or religion in its root meaning, and constructs a highly
provisional language, a kind of theory in itself, for ‘thinking about how people see themselves
as part of broader social formations’. 11 The ‘South Asians’ have spread from their homelands
throughout the globe, establishing a presence in nations such as the United States, Britain, Australia,
Canada, Fiji, Singapore, and Kenya, among many others. 12 In each of these locations, new diasporic
identities have been imagined and created. In each of these locations, bhangra plays in homes, at
parties, in clubs, at charitable benefits, and at festivals. 13 In each of these locations, it is important to
consider whether bhangra means the same thing to all South Asian people, with their multifaceted
and disparate South Asian backgrounds.
Today, it is not only the cross-pollinated, hyphenated identities of the South Asian diaspora, but
more importantly of their second- and third-generational offspring, who are reappropriating and
creating the cultural forms into which bhangra has evolved. 14 As these ‘new diasporic’ generations
– who are not technically ‘displaced’ – struggle to ‘possess the hyphen’ of their identities, they
metaphorically carry bhangra in their blood; in their inherited diasporic longing for the sacred earth
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http://limina.arts.uwa.edu.au