bhangra

bhangra, folk dance and music of the Punjab (northwestern India and northeastern Pakistan) and the popular music genre that emerged from it in the mid-to-late 20th century. Cultivated in two separate but interactive styles—one centered in South Asia, the other within the South Asian community of the United Kingdom—the newer bhangra blends various Western popular musics with the original Punjabi tradition. It enjoys an immense following in South Asia and within the South Asian diaspora.

The term bhangra originally designated a particular dance performed by Sikh and Muslim men in the farming districts of the Punjab region of South Asia. The dance was associated primarily with the spring harvest festival Baisakhi, and it is from one of the major products of the harvest—bhang (hemp)—that bhangra drew its name. In a typical performance, several dancers executed vigorous kicks, leaps, and bends of the body to the accompaniment of short songs called boliyan and, most significantly, to the beat of a dhol (double-headed drum). Struck with a heavy beater on one end and with a lighter stick on the other, the dhol imbued the music with a syncopated (accents on the weak beats), swinging rhythmic character that has generally remained the hallmark of any music that has come to bear the bhangra name.

In the mid-20th century the bhangra dance began to gain popularity beyond the Punjab, and, as it did so, it became divorced from the agricultural cycle, emerging as a regular feature of wedding festivities, birthday parties, local fairs, and other celebrations. With the change in context came changes in other aspects of tradition. The term bhangra expanded to encompass not only the dance but also the instrumental and vocal music that was associated with it; the large dhol was replaced by the similar yet smaller dholak, played with the hands; various local instruments—such as the flute, zither, fiddle, harmonium (a portable, hand-pumped organ), and tabla (pair of single-headed drums)—were added to the accompaniment; and the topics of the song texts broadened from agricultural themes to include literary, romantic, and subtly comic material. In the later 20th century, guitar, mandolin, saxophone, synthesizer, drum set, and other Western instruments were added to the ensemble.

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Bit by bit, bhangra began to amass an audience that extended beyond the boundaries of South Asia to Britain. There the music gained momentum as a positive emblem of South Asian identity, particularly in Southall, the predominantly South Asian suburb of London’s West End. In 1979 a Southall group called Alaap released Teri Chunni De Sitare, a forward-looking album that combined the ornamented vocal melodies and metric framework of bhangra with the rhythmic drive and synthesized orchestral interjections of disco dance music. Offering a modern musical image with a distinctly South Asian flavour, the album received such an enthusiastic response that it catalyzed a craze for the “Southall sound.” The frenzy was fueled throughout the following decade not only by Alaap but by other Southall groups working the bhangra circuit, among the most notable of which were the Heera Group, Premi, and Holle Holle.

Aside from matters of musical style, British bhangra differed from South Asian bhangra in other significant ways. It was initially cultivated through “daytimers,” special midday performances that afforded young South Asian men and women the opportunity to hear the music without violating taboos that restricted such socializing (among South Asians) in the evening hours. These events also provided a venue for men and women to dance together as couples to the sound of South Asian music. This was unprecedented in South Asia, where, if couples danced together at all, they did so to Western popular music. Although the new bhangra eventually seeped into the nightclub scene, the daytime concerts remained integral to the promotion and development of the genre.

The lyrics of early British bhangra, with their focus on partying, dancing, and simply having fun, were generally more repetitive and less substantive than those of their counterpart in South Asia. A change came in the mid-1990s, however, when British musicians such as Apache Indian, with his album No Reservations (1993), and the group Fun-Da-Mental, with Seize the Time (1995), began to use their music as a vehicle for poignant social commentary. Not only did these and other artists address such issues as racial conflict and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, but they tapped stylistic features of reggae, rap, and other African American and Afro-Caribbean popular music genres that were internationally emblematic of sociopolitical resistance. Alongside these topical changes, the song texts shifted increasingly from Punjabi to English or to a mixture of the two, ultimately making the music more appealing to an international market.

Meanwhile, bhangra in South Asia experienced similar changes, although its style generally retained a clearer link to its rural folk roots. Gurdas Maan was widely acclaimed—and criticized—for his creative juxtaposition of traditional, modern, Western, and South Asian elements, both in his lyrics, which often addressed the clash between Western and South Asian traditions, and in his musical style, which featured a notably polished electronic underpinning. Maan is largely credited for elevating Punjabi music from a regional tradition to one that draws audiences throughout South Asia. Expanding the music’s listenership was indeed one of Maan’s priorities; to that end, he sang in a simplified Punjabi for Hindi-speaking audiences and also composed songs in Urdu, a language closely related to Hindi and spoken in northern India and Pakistan.

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Both bhangras have continued to develop—albeit along somewhat different trajectories—in the 21st century. The South Asian style enjoys a tremendous following, particularly within South Asia. The British style, by contrast, has a strong listenership not only in the United Kingdom but also within South Asian communities of Canada and the United States. Some of the British artists, moreover, have been picked up by the world-music industry, which to some degree has allowed them to develop a more diverse intercontinental audience.