Foreigners dancing on tunak tunak

Popular Music and Society

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Vol. 35, No. 3, July 2012, pp. 333–358

Migration Shaping Media: Punjabi Popular Music in a Global Historical Perspective

Gibb Schreffler

Looking back over 75 years of Punjabi popular music, one can see the changing nature of the relationship between the individual and the “home” culture. In the pre-Independence era, “Punjabi” identity had yet to play a major role in recorded music, whose chief value had been entertainment. By the 1960s, music had acquired the function of forming a concise idea of Punjab with which its cosmopolitan audience could easily identify. By the 1990s, Punjabi identity, as espoused in its music industry, was marked by the idea that, by its very nature, to be Punjabi was to be global.

Introduction

So-called bhangra music is a type of Punjabi popular music now well known around the globe. Its existence is largely the result of a Punjabi diaspora—a phenomenon I prefer to read as just one aspect of a larger phenomenon of migration into, within, and out of the Punjab region of South Asia. Diaspora sites were not the only places it was produced, and yet the global sense of place (Massey 155) that is central even to contemporary music produced within Punjab would not exist without them. It would be similarly inaccurate to characterize bhangra music, as has often been the case, as something pre-existing that Punjabis brought with them to diaspora locales that was subsequently “fused” with western elements. Rather, I argue that it emerged, both in Punjab and abroad, as a stopgap during a period that was marked by the combination of large-scale experiences of separation from the homeland with as yet poor communication channels. Moreover, the emergence of bhangra was just one episode along a sweeping trajectory of Punjabi popular music. This trajectory has been especially influenced by the trajectory of Punjabi migration, one in turn that interacts closely with processes of modernization and nationalism. Migration shaped the ebb and flow of the music as it fluctuated between catering to very local expressions of Punjabi culture and to the needs of individuals removed from the homeland—by space, by modernity, or by both.

ISSN 0300-7766 (print)/ISSN 1740-1712 (online) q 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2011.600516

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By looking back over 75 years of Punjabi popular music, I paint a broad picture of the changing nature of the relationship between the Punjabi individual and the “home” culture and land of Punjab. In this first cumulative narrative of Punjabi popular music, we see an example of the interrelated nature of mediated music, cultural identity, and travel.

Punjab: Home and Abroad

Punjab is a cultural region in the northwest of South Asia, its geographic core being the plains around the “five rivers” of the upper Indus system. Historically its most important industry has been agriculture, which is reflected in the high social status enjoyed by the dominant ethnic group of landowning farmers, Jatt. The mother tongue of most inhabitants is some form of the language called Punjabi, which is also the adjective for people and products from the region. “Punjab” as an administrative unit was at its largest as a province of British India, 1849 – 1947. As a current political designation, the term “Punjab” refers to the most populous province of Pakistan and a small but relatively wealthy state of India.

Punjab is characterized historically by many migrations of people, and the major historical landmarks tell a story of foreigners coming into the region and settling down. A popular narrative, important to Punjabi identity, argues that successive waves of invaders and travelers, having come through this primary land route into India, were responsible for building a “rich” Punjabi culture (see e.g. Latif).

Equally important to Punjabi identity is the largest migration within the region, associated with the 1947 Partition. With India’s gaining independence from the British Empire in that year and the simultaneous creation of Pakistan, a national border was draw between the two countries that ran through the middle of the Punjab region. The idea that Muslims should concentrate in Pakistan and that Hindus and Sikhs should concentrate in India compelled many to migrate across the new border. The result was a population exchange between the two sides numbering several million people, and the resentment, chaos, and bloodshed that ensued on Punjabi soil remain in the cultural memory as a profound physical and spiritual uprooting. There became two Punjabs to speak of (i.e. West/Pakistani and East/Indian), each having its share of immigrants or refugees from the other.

To grasp the sense of Punjabi identity with which we are concerned here, one must also factor in the phenomenon of migration out of the region. Since the mid-twentieth century, Punjabis have been one of the most populous, well-traveled, and prominent South Asian groups living outside their cultural homeland. Numbering up to three million, they are especially concentrated in the United Kingdom, North America, and the Middle East, and in British Commonwealth nations everywhere. More than raw numbers, there has been a social impact of this emigration that it is impossible to ignore. Every resident of Punjab has some relative or friend who has emigrated, and the economy of families depends much upon the reparations sent by those working abroad. The situation gives Punjabis, no matter what their social status or how “deep”

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they live in a village, a remarkably cosmopolitan world view for a people from a landlocked region.

Both “push” and “pull” factors have led to Punjabis’ widespread emigration from Punjab (Talbot and Thandi). Though the Silk Route lured Punjabi traders to seek fortunes and the spiritual to travel to religious sites, the phenomenon of a diaspora really begins with the advent of the British Empire in Punjab. The annexation of the Punjab Province to British India in 1849 meant that the Punjab region was now connected with the far-reaching processes of the Empire (see Tatla). At the same time, the late nineteenth century in Punjab was marked by poor economic conditions, famines, droughts, epidemics, and a population explosion (Jensen 24)—push factors. Local Punjabi employees of the government had occasion to be sent or appointed to other locations within the British Empire, and migration by some members of families was a defense strategy to ease the strain locally. Punjabis were especially important to the Empire in the areas of food production and security (Tatla 49), and opportunities in these areas constituted major pull factors. The agricultural colonization of the western forest regions in the late nineteenth century entailed a large-scale recruitment that brought preferred Eastern Punjabi agriculturalists to the Western Punjab.

Punjabis’ status as subjects of the Crown made emigration possible. Recruitment into British military services and police assignments were what first instituted a global diaspora. Through these, Punjabi men established networks, from Burma to Singapore to Hong Kong, and eventually to Canada. Others were employed to work on the Ugandan railways project and on associated services in East Africa (Tatla 53 – 4). Such networks opened the channels to migration for other forms of work—for example, as business people serving these communities. By the twentieth century, Punjabis were established halfway across the world. From 1903, Punjabis began work on the Western Pacific Railroad and in lumbering on the western coast of Canada. And after 1909, several hundred Punjabi men arrived in California’s Imperial Valley as agricultural laborers.

The character of the first wave of global travel by and emigration of Punjabis was acute. Migration was almost exclusively the purview of males. It took these male relatives away from families for extended periods—even forever. No one could really say when or if the individual would return. With this, one can understand the cultural milieu that produced the formula at the start of so many traditional short verses (bolı¯a¯n) and songs by women: “Twelve years you’d gone off to earn; what have you brought back with you?” Indeed, even before the advent of the recording industry, Punjabis’ songs were permeated by themes of separation that reflected their experiences.

It is useful to consider the early period of migration and what it meant to Punjabis’ sense of their cultural identity. Emigrating men had essentially left Punjab behind them. Of course they enjoyed the familiarity of each other’s company. Yet, by and large, they did not maintain strong connections with the homeland. For example, those in California married Mexican women and started new families. Even if they had not been driven by prohibitive immigration laws and economic necessity

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(Leonard 62ff.), a rather dramatic break with the past still would have been required. Not only did they have to forget their previous wives and children, but they were also marrying beyond the pale of community (caste) and religion into a new ethnic group. This illustrates the difficulty of maintaining a link with the homeland in the era before rapid transportation and communication.

After World War II and Independence, there came a second phase of emigration from Punjab. Within the rearranged nations of India and Pakistan, Punjabis found significant roles throughout major cities as business people, government officers, entertainers, and truck drivers. Major overseas migration began in the 1950s. Men again went alone to labor in factories in the UK. Expecting to return to Punjab after earning money in the former Empire, the men led quiet lives of minimal engagement with the local culture. The demographic of emigrants to the United States was quite different. After a ban on immigration from Asia, the America reopened immigration in 1965, with preference for highly educated individuals in needed professions, such as doctors and engineers. Even through the beginning of this period the trend continued for a certain sublimation of heritage.

In this second act of the migration drama, the character of the emigrant community changed drastically. In time realizing that, realistically, they would not return to the homeland, emigrants found the opportunity to bring family members—women and children—to live with them. In the UK there was a rush to bring family over before a deadline set by the Immigration Act of 1971. In North America the option to bring their families had been there, and became an attractive idea. Having a relative living in the United States increased one’s ability to emigrate there. All this meant settling down in a new country and represented the start of diaspora communities. With the idea of staying came the need to reproduce culture and community life. In Punjabi culture, the women of the society are often looked to as bearers of tradition. Moreover, so many of the traditions and rituals that are associated with Punjabi culture have to do with the life cycle and the family. If emigrants were not to return to Punjab, then they had to live as Punjabis wherever they were.

The third act featured the children of immigrants, born in the diaspora. This again changed the community’s relationship with Punjabi heritage. Parents tried to raise their “foreign”-born children as they would in Punjab (albeit a past Punjab), while the children often wondered what bearing this supposed Punjabi heritage had on the way they were living their lives elsewhere. Indeed, they were challenged to separate Punjabi culture from English, since the cultural web in which they found meaning was indivisible. Still, they also found themselves subject to the dominant discourse that, as Baumann found in his study of 1980s London, “equates culture with community and indeed ethnic identity” (Contesting Culture 97). For the second generation to accept and to be accepted by the local society—something often avoided by their parents— they required a strategy. One tendency was to conceive of distinct, different entities—in other words, essentialized “cultures.” This reified notion of “cultures” made it possible to juxtapose them, highlighting their differences through discursive combinations like “East meets West.” Second-generation Punjabi immigrants were supposedly heirs to

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two distinct cultures, and their task became one of “negotiating” the identities associated with each one. The 1980s technique of juxtaposition was superseded by a seemingly more sophisticated concept of “hybridization,” “syncretism,” or, to use the popular 1990s phrase, “fusion” (see Sharma 33). Whatever the concept is called, it depends upon essentializing identity, especially through the use of key signs. As the third generation of Punjabis abroad emerged, they found yet more sophisticated concepts of cultural identity. While acknowledging the culture of their upbringing, their special membership in a group may be phrased in terms of a subculture that frequents certain “scenes” (see Maira).

New Punjabi emigrants of the last two decades experience migration very differently from their forebears. With rapid communication, transportation, and mass-media distribution, it is possible for emigrants to keep in close touch with Punjab and even frequently travel back there. One could say that even before emigrating they have experienced the diaspora, and some live in a world where neither “here” nor “there” has much significance. The virtual “Punjab” in which they live is constructed of selected signs. Popular music is one of the preferred vehicles for them.

Worlds of Music in Punjab

The mediation of traditions in the commercial industry format, as the agent of culture promotion, and through other such modern channels, is what is mostly responsible for the idea of a generic Punjabi “music.” In reality, what one might approach from the outside under the rubric of music consists of numerous not necessarily related practices, circumscribed more tightly by prescriptive cultural norms than what passes as “music” in the West. Music-making in Punjab is an especially marked activity. One could draw the analogy to a similarly marked activity in American society—sex—whereby variations in the elements of gender, money, relationship, privacy, and religion all have the potential to drastically affect how the act is perceived. Likewise the act of performance (read, music) in Punjabi society has been compartmentalized by the established norms that govern it.

In traditional Punjabi music culture, performance within each of several “worlds” is subject to certain social restrictions. Though there is nothing absolute about the implied boundaries that separate these worlds, nonetheless a sense of boundaries can be perceived. One can identify these worlds of performance in Punjab in terms of the musical act’s nature and function. Each is further marked by commonalities in such features as who performs and why they perform, as articulated through such dimensions as gender, profession, and ethnicity. In order to properly circumscribe the mediated world—Punjabi popular music—I contrast it with the other worlds that preceded it, and which I identify here.

The Amateur World

Performance in this world is done by people who are not considered to be performers. What they do is considered to be either a ritual act or one of no consequence, like

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speaking. This is not “music” in the local sense. The vast majority of this activity comes under the rubric of “singing”; it is first and foremost a recitation of texts. The repertoire of “folk song” (lok gı¯t), according to strict application of that term, fits most precisely into this world. Playing of instruments is limited to a few that are coded as domestic implements or as exceedingly amateur in their associations. Women are the main performers in this world. Most of their performances coincide with ritual occasions, and they often mark stages in a ceremony. Most importantly, this type of performance is for oneself and the immediate community in which one resides; no external “audience” is addressed. It is participatory by nature and the performers are not formally trained, nor do they perform for payment. Although specific ethnic groups may have their particular practices, individuals are not limited by ethnicity.

The Professional World

Here, performance is exclusionary—that is, it is marked by a sharp division between a discrete audience and the performers. The latter are professionals, which means first and foremost that they do the act for money (which they depend on for a living). Performance is considered to be a service for others, so the performers have the low social status of service providers. Accordingly, they ideally belong to specific families, micro-ethnic communities, by which they assert their hereditary birthright to a monopoly on this type of performance. Individuals outside of this world of performance, according to traditional rules of propriety, may not perform its repertoire. The repertoire includes, along with more difficult texts, “music” proper—sangı¯t. Along with music go instruments, the tools of the trade of these performing professionals. In order to perform such difficult repertoire, the performers are highly trained. In contrast to the amateur world, this world is dominated by men. Some women perform, but under certain conditions of exception or under the penalties of social transgression.

The Sacred World

The sacred world sometimes shares qualities of each of the foregoing and is, in a way, an alternative to them. The spiritual nature and devotional function of this type of performance allow for the transgression of the usual norms. In the same way that a rhythm-and-blues and a gospel song may be nearly the same except for the stated intent of their performance, performances in the sacred world may resemble other types of performance with respect to musical form while allowing for very different standards of participation, professionalism, and context. If the amateur world corresponds roughly to “song,” and performances in the professional world are “music,” then performance in the sacred world is “devotion.”

The Art World

Performance in the art world is guided by the notion that it may exist as a discrete phenomenon without necessary attachment to social function. Its only alleged

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function is aesthetic appreciation—“art.” Because it is pan-regional, it is in fact a cosmopolitan type of performance. And while its repertoire was earlier only the purview of performers of the professional world, its supposed abstraction and detachment from local values has opened it potentially to anyone.

The Mediated World

Prior to the advent of a music industry in Punjab, the layperson had a rather limited involvement in the production of music and was also limited as to when he or she could hear music. This situation changed dramatically with the emergence of the most pervasive world of performance in contemporary Punjab, the mediated world. It is characterized most significantly by mass mediation and its effect of separating a performance from an immediate context. The fluidity of recordings and broadcasts in crossing cultural boundaries upsets the traditional norms of performance practice. So while repertoire deriving from earlier worlds of performance may be performed in the mediated world, it functions very differently. Commercial recordings dissolved certain barriers between the conventional worlds of music-making. On one hand, the venture was commercial—a trait of the professional world that was closely linked to its strictures on ethnicity, class, and gender. On the other hand, the faceless potential anonymity of the sound-recording medium allowed for subversion of certain norms about who may perform for entertainment and what one’s pedigree must be. Indeed, while in the past each world of music-making had functioned to suit some aspect of Punjabi social life, products of the music industry were rather awkward specimens. They brought with them the notion of experiencing music without performance context.

The Development of Punjabi Popular Music Beginnings

Commercial production of sound recordings in India began in the first decade of the twentieth century. Phonograph records1 and the equipment to play them on, however, long remained inaccessible to most people. The industry was monopolized by the Gramophone Company of India (often under the label of its largest subsidiary, His Master’s Voice), which the Punjabis knew affectionately as kutte-valı¯ kampanı¯—“the dog company.” Being more oriented towards broad cosmopolitan tastes, especially for film songs, the Gramophone Company of India neglected regional vernacular genres for the most part (Manuel 38). Radio began in 1927, but, being controlled by the state, also limited what it broadcast. In this case, that other cosmopolitan music, “classical” art music, was favored.

The first commercial recordings of Punjabi vernacular music came in the early 1930s. These were of trimmed-down arrangements of weighty ballads, performed by small group ensembles called dha¯dı¯ and da¯sta¯ngo. One can understand the reason for these genres’ appearance on record, being that such ballads constituted the main form

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of Punjabi music designed exclusively for listening entertainment. While their performance occasion was customarily a fair or a wedding, they were far less bound by any particular context. Moreover, the intricate yet rustic ballads were the work of professional performers. Other extant formats of music-making really made little sense on record from a cultural perspective.

Performance style did change rapidly, however, to suit both the limitations of recording and the audience for what was long a product affordable only to the well-off. The traditional ballad style was followed by lighter songs that could fit neatly into the short recorded format and that contained timbres genteel enough for the upper classes. Film songs, the staple of all the regional recording industries of India, had worked well in these respects. Cinema with sound began in India in 1931, and it was not long before film song became the dominant mode of popular music. Such pieces were explicitly composed and polished, and set to the accompaniment of an orchestra that mixed western instrumentation with Indian instruments. Punjabi recorded music of the 1930s through 1950s was largely in this vein.

In fact, Punjabis played a notable role in the production of film music in the nation at large. The influential film-music composers Feroz Nizami and Ghulam Haider, from Lahore, shifted to Bombay in 1944. Major actor-singers, later just playback singers, hailed from Punjab. These included the first superstar of Indian cinema, Kundan Lal Saigal (1904 – 1947). His younger contemporary, from Lahore, was Noor Jahan (1926 – 2000). A child star, she appeared in her first (silent) film in 1930, and recorded her first song for a Punjabi film in 1935. Noor Jahan learned classical singing from an early age. In fact, she was from a family of the hereditary professional performer community Mirasi. As such, she represented the transition to the modern media era from one when the only women performing on stage could be ones from hereditary professional communities. Another of the successful playback singers whose work dominated twentieth-century film song is Shamshad Begum (b.1919). Hailing from Amritsar, she started singing on the radio in 1937, then for films under music director Ghulam Haider. Shamshad Begum shared the studio with another great Punjabi crooner, Mohammad Rafi. He is said to have learned his craft from imitating the singing of a faqir (ascetic) in his village near Amritsar. Such was the case that by mid-century, recorded singers, though they were often trained classically, were not generally descended from hereditary performing communities.

Commercial “Folk” Music

In the 1950s a new brand of folk-style music emerged on record. A few artists existed, outside the mainstream commercial sound, who brought the spirit and tone of village balladeers while creating more contemporary material. Lal Chand “Yamla Jatt” was born in district Lyallpur (West Punjab) in the first decade of the twentieth century. He composed his first song in 1949; by 1954 he had recorded more than thirty of his songs on the HMV label. So iconic were his songs for Punjabis that by the 1960s they were already being collected in anthologies (e.g. Yamla Jatt). Lal Chand

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is credited for developing the one-stringed instrument the tu¯mbı¯, itself iconic of Punjabi “folk” singers nowadays. An interesting fact about Lal Chand is that he went by the stage name “Yamla Jatt,” suggesting that he belonged to the mainstream Jatt ethnicity, which would be shared by most of his audience. However, in actuality he was a professional performer of the old school, from the Chamar community (a marginalized “outcaste” group, but one that also had the option of performance within its purview). His personal ethnicity was in essence mediated by recordings, and to be conveniently imagined as a mainstream Jatt did not hurt his widespread appeal. In this new, mass-mediated world of Punjabi music, one’s ethnic identity could be disregarded. In real life, however, it remained both apparent and of social consequence. When I met his son, Jaswinder, in 2005, the family was living in poverty in the same ghetto in Ludhiana that had emerged from a Partition-time refugee camp.

Something of a reverse scenario occurred with another original balladeer on record, Hazara Singh “Ramta.” He was born in district Montgomery (West Punjab) in 1926, not into a performing family, but into a Jatt family. Having seen Lal Chand “Yamla Jatt” perform in Delhi in 1954, he himself took up folk singing with the tu¯mbı¯, and by 1956 he had recorded his “Landan dı¯ Sair” (“A Stroll around London”). Two points are important. First, his stage name, “Ramta,” meaning “rover,” evoked the archetypal image of the roving faqir ascetic who sings as he wanders. It also applied to a persona he had created in his compositions of a decidedly modern man who had roved all over the world wherever Punjabis had gone and who had seen what they had seen. Second, in actuality, he had never been to London when he told of his “stroll” through that place. That he knew bits about it speaks to the currency of this information within the Punjabi community. Hazara Singh followed his “London” composition with songs about places in the Punjabi diaspora. He sang about going to New Delhi, Bombay, Kampala, Mombasa, Nairobi, “West Asia,” and “All of Europe,” in addition to England. Afterwards he always returns to Ludhiana to tell anecdotes of the amazing things he “saw” there. In “Ramta¯ mema¯n vich”—“Ramta amongst the English Ladies” (1968)—he comically relates a harrowing, yet wholly imagined tale of awkward encounters as a Punjabi man among the perceived too-open English women. Following are sample couplets (translation is mine).

[Over there,] the number of women is high and men are scarce; In London, ladies are cheap and flour is dear. Here, dark-skinned folk find no appreciation;

There, every lady is falling after a Black man.

He goes on to name check such places as Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square, Soho Road, and Oxford Street, speaking of the licentious fashions and numerous “pigeons” (young ladies). Hazara Singh Ramta’s songs were the first among those diaspora songs to juxtapose “East” and “West.” They represented the Punjabi villager coming up against modernity.

The 1960s saw, in the Punjabi music industry, the emergence of a type of popular “folk song.” This was not lok gı¯t in the strict sense of orally transmitted, anonymous compositions that featured in ritual events. Rather, these “folk songs” were listening

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pieces that drew their appeal from their simplicity, Punjabi language, and topical references to Punjabi life and themes. A number of these were older popular songs, drawn from anthologies like Randhava’s (Panja¯b de Lok Gı¯t), as well as those remembered in the community, although a majority were newly composed texts by the active songwriters of the time. In these ways the repertoire was much like the “folk” music of the revivals in Britain and America in the 1960s. It was the songs themselves that were considered to be “folk”; the musical settings and accompaniments were very much in the film-song mode, being explicitly arranged and containing sounds that were foreign to rural music. The first singer to emerge in this genre was Lahore-born Asa Singh Mastana (1926 – 1999). His was a crooner style, but the texts he sang fronted Punjabi cultural identity. An example is his nationalistic “Balle nı¯ Panja¯b dı¯e Sher Vachhı¯e” (“Bravo, O Lion-daughter of Punjab!”), with lyrics by film writer Nand Lal Noorpuri.

Of perhaps longer-lasting impact, and really the icon of this new notion of “folk” singing of Punjab, was Surinder Kaur (1929 – 2006). Her career is illustrative of the fundamental changes to Punjabi music culture that were made possible in the media era, and her work represents ground zero for the new paradigm of Punjabi popular music. Surinder Kaur’s background was quite different from that of her contemporary, the Mirasi-born Noor Jehan. Not only was Surinder Kaur born into a Jatt family, but that family was also one composed of very orthodox Sikhs who did not approve of singing. Her uncle had stated that singing was the work of “Kanjars” (crudely glossed, “prostitution-mongers”), and that girls of sardar (landowner) families do not sing; “Good girls sing only devotional hymns” (Surinder Kaur, Personal interview). Her predicament was like that of other laywomen of the time who were entering into singing for films, challenging norms of gender and caste roles. Born in Lahore, Surinder Kaur first learned singing in the classical style from Master Inait Husain of the Patiala gharana. In 1943 she began singing on the radio. The Partition took her first to Delhi, then to Bombay, where she joined the ranks of playback singers and recorded for fifteen Hindi films. It was in the early 1960s that Surinder Kaur began to focus on recording Punjabi songs in the film-song format. Her early recordings revived older songs, such as the West Punjabi dance tunes

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“Latthe dı¯ Ca¯dar” and “Langh A Ja¯.” She learned many of these from her guru, Professor Mohan Singh. Together, the two revised or amended the revived texts a bit to polish them for recorded format (Surinder Kaur, Personal interview); her husband, Joginder Singh Sodhi (whom she married in 1952), would also have a strong influence on her selection of texts to sing (Chandan). An interesting example of this process of revival is her song “Ma¯va¯n te Dhı¯a¯n” (“Mothers and Daughters”), which she recorded with her older sister Prakash Kaur. According to Surinder Kaur’s telling, their mother used to hum the melody—she actually used no words, since she believed singing was wicked. So for this recording, words were created for the melody. Surinder Kaur’s recordings became classics. The revived, mass-mediated forms of traditional and newly composed songs [re]entered the oral tradition, becoming popular to sing at women’s wedding parties or whenever a regional mood was desired.

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With this genre of popular music, which Surinder Kaur’s work epitomized, Punjabi music had acquired a new function. Its value lay not only in its surface entertainment value—where epics, ballads, and mystical poetry had earlier sufficed—but also in forming an encapsulated idea of Punjab. For modern world residents of Punjab these songs could reaffirm a sense of Punjabi identity, and for the increasing number of Punjabis living outside Punjab, they provided a commodified connection to the home culture.

One last thing to consider about Surinder Kaur’s role in the new paradigm is that she may have been successful not despite her nontraditional social position, but rather, in part, because of it. A performer-community woman would have been limited in her appeal to the mainstream by her supposed less than “wholesome” image. This image is that from which Surinder Kaur’s family sought to shield her— and themselves—as her reputation continued to be a concern. She related an anecdote to illustrate her relationship with her husband, a professor who never allowed her to sing so-called dirty songs. Due to his concerns, Surinder Kaur would not sing at weddings, as it brought to mind the stigma of the hereditary professional female performers. However, she was once invited to perform at a function by the Chief Minister, Pratap Singh Kairon. It was only upon arriving that she realized it was a wedding. She received a substantial sum for the performance, and all the way home she was worried about telling her husband what she had done. When she finally did, he became irritated and threw the earned money away outside (after which, Surinder Kaur surreptitiously told a servant to go and retrieve it). Despite such concerns, she was never subject to any indignities. Indeed, the image of Surinder Kaur effectively elevated the status of Punjabi singers, or at least had created the option of being a performer while maintaining one’s “respectability.” For the mainstream Punjabis, in Surinder Kaur they had a performer of their own social class, who represented them. Consequently, the songs Surinder Kaur is best known for may appear to be even more “Punjabi” than earlier folk songs! Like the really traditional ritual songs that women sang and which represent the lay Punjabi contribution to music, these popular ditties were sung by a “wholesome” woman (the preferred tradition-bearing sex), and they were available to and singable by all Punjabis. From a Mirasi or other hereditary professional, audiences would expect a certain style of ornamented, even elitist music. This, by contrast, was a suitable music for the middle classes and urbanites.

Country Music

From the late 1970s, products of the Punjabi music industry became even more populist and also more inclusive of social classes at the lower end of the economic scale. Until that time, while Punjabi music was distinct linguistically, sonically it had much in common with popular music at large in India (i.e. film song). As Manuel documented, India’s more or less homogenized product of a dominant record label remained the case until the advent of inexpensive cassette production and independent labels (63). These independent labels, because of lower expense, were

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able to offer recordings of smaller-market, regional (e.g. Punjabi, Gujarati, Bhojpuri) material. By the 1980s, cheap cassette players from abroad, along with the low-cost cassettes, made recordings accessible to lower-income people. The tastes of this market, in turn, influenced the output: a more homegrown sound that reflected rustic timbres in both voice and instrumentation. Such music did not need to sing about “Punjab” to sound Punjabi. Instead, the singers were free to sing about the minutiae of daily life. This was very local music, for local Punjabis; it represents the opposite end of the spectrum from the transnational expressions of much of today’s current “bhangra” music. And one can understand the nature of the latter more clearly if one contrasts it with the music of this era.

The style and content of Punjabi popular music of the 1970s to 1980s were markedly different from what preceded it. Its texts were decidedly more piquant than those of the nationalistic folk revival, often presenting risque´ scenarios. The vast majority were newly composed. The music as well was new and innovative. It used the raw sound of village musicians, to which were added some western instruments, set in snappy arrangements. The most successful composers in this vein were K. S. Narula and Charanjit Ahuja. Through the 1980s this sort of commercial “country” music, Punjab’s equivalent to Nashville, held wide appeal with rural Punjabis. Its themes and presentations appealed especially to the working class and the provincial. Indeed, consumed by and performed by lower socio-economic groups, some aspects made it appear to be “low class” to the more genteel.

A popular format was that of the duet (doga¯na¯), which drew its risque´ quality from the rare situation it engendered: a man and a _ woman singing together on stage. Its dialogue format of singing and (usually) sharing the same microphone enhanced the innuendo. Suggestive lyrics in many songs sealed the deal as to what these singers’ intentions were presumed to be. The number of such duos is countless. One of the most successful with the safer audience was K. Deep and Jagmohan Kaur, a married couple who maintained a sense of comedy and parodied songs by earlier artists. The duo of Ranjit Kaur and Muhammad Siddiq paired up a Sikh woman and a Muslim Mirasi man. Much of their repertoire spoke to the so-called driver (i.e. truck, bus) demographic. This subgenre remains what is played in most trucks and buses throughout the East Punjab. A common theme in the lyrics involves the interaction between a truck driver and a female hitchhiker.

The most notorious of the duos was Chamkila and Amarjot. Amar Singh “Chamkila” (1960 – 1988) was born “Dhani Ram” in a Chamar family. Being from a poor community, Chamkila left school after the fifth grade and labored in factories. By 1977 he realized his dream of becoming a singer when he was taken as a student by Surinder Chhinda, one of the leading artists of the 1970s. But Chamkila’s initial skill came in writing songs—in his career he wrote over one hundred. In them, he uses the Malwa area’s local dialect to address taboo topics of rural Punjabi life, like pre-marital sex, inappropriate inter-caste and intra-clan relationships, and drug use. Chamkila’s work was alternately derided as obscene or praised for its great ability to speak boldly to real-life concerns. Fans of

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Chamkila’s lyrics defend him by arguing that he told the unvarnished truth about the relationships and social ills in his community. His own inter-caste marriage to his duet partner, Amarjot (of the Tarkhan, carpenter caste), intensified the controversy over his music. And even though he attempted to prove himself to Puritan audiences by releasing three full albums of religious songs, he had already done too much to injure the sensitive feelings of that period. Chamkila’s music was the antithesis of the righteous philosophy of the contemporary militant leader J. S. Bhindranwale. In 1988, when arriving at a concert, Chamkila, a pregnant Amarjot, and their band members were shot dead by unknown assailants. With his image as the “voice of reality,” some contemporary audiences laud Chamkila as the equivalent to fallen icons of hip hop, like Tupac Shakur. A book in memoriam after his death contains the testimonies of many greats of the music industry as to Chamkila’s musical and lyrical brilliance (Shaunki). His legacy has spawned many imitators, who come unabashedly from minority communities. They especially play up the image of romance embodied in the malefemale duet format of singing, which stands in stark contrast to the chaste presentations found in the mainstream. All in all, Chamkila’s allegedly “dirty” lyrics are less important for what they say than for what they stand for in representing the cultural sphere of the downtrodden classes of society and their struggle against the dominance of the values of the landed classes.

The democratization of the recording industry during this period also allowed for the re-emergence of ballad-style traditional singing by a few artists. Kuldip Manak (b.1959) was a leader in this style. He was born “Latif Muhammad” into a Mirasi family, but his Sikh-sounding adopted name obscures or downplays his Muslim heritage. A great proportion of his songs made reference to the classic love epics, and his adherence to a traditional style have made him something of a hero to younger generations in the age of mass production.

Punjabi Pop

On other fronts, the music industry of the 1980s had begun to go international. While the “country” music was about as locally “Punjabi” as one could go in the commercial world, a concurrent trend towards westernization broadened the appeal of Punjabi songs. This was the genesis of the contemporary concept of “Punjabi pop,” or what would eventually be called “disco bhangra.” Beginning in the early 1980s, the music industry was showing the influence of western dance club music—the driving, “four on the floor” disco rhythms. This sort of rhythm, naturalized into Indian music through western-style dance sequences in film music, went contrary to the traditional sensibilities of Punjabi rhythm embodied by the dhol (barrel drum) rhythms of Punjabi dance. However, the galloping Punjabi bhangra¯ dance rhythm—in this case domesticated on the small drums dholkı¯ and tabla¯—could_ effect a similar experience. What is most significant is that the rhythm of recorded music was being oriented towards dancing more than ever. One must remember that, up until this point,

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entertainment music, for which one mainly sat and listened to the lyrics, occupied a different world from the dance “music” of the dhol drum. This is what was really “modern” about this music—it was dance music that one might listen to without dancing. This music also began to incorporate the “western” sounds of the synthesizer and other electric instruments more, while at the same time removing some of the rough edge of the village music.

Some of contemporary East Punjab’s most praised singers of recent decades got their start in this musical era. Gurdas Mann’s 1982 “Dil da¯ Ma¯mla¯ hai” (“It’s a Matter of the Heart”), with music by Jaswant Bhanwra, is one of the breaking recordings in the disco genre. Mann is a Sikh Jatt who nonetheless has cultivated for himself a “Sufi” image. In this way, he has connected himself back to the older, Islamic atmosphere of Punjabi music. His popular voice and winning personality, along with a concentration on the “timeless” (read: pre-Partition) aspect of Punjabi music has seen him through many changes of Punjabi music, independent of genre. Although it is not intentional on the part of Gurdas Mann, one can see him as the icon for another trend in mainstream Punjabi music. Like that of Surinder Kaur before him, Gurdas Mann’s background had none of the unsavory characteristics usually associated with professional musicians in Punjab, and his respectful, non-partisan image appeals to Punjabis across classes. Let it also be noted that almost from the beginning of his career, Gurdas Mann has starred in successful films, granting him the superstar status of actor-singer that had become the normal paradigm in the western music industry.

Another notable singer who emerged at the same time as Gurdas Mann is Hans Raj Hans. From the Hindu Chamar community, Hans Raj has also cultivated a “Sufi” image that transcends the barriers of community. He was first inspired to sing, like Gurdas Mann and other laypersons before him, by a wandering faqir. To be clear, however, Hans Raj’s success derives less from his image and more from his incredible musical chops. He is the disciple of Sufi maestro Puran Shahkoti, and he has regularly recorded compositions in a qawwali music style. What makes him unusual yet successful in the world of Punjabi pop is that he alternates these pieces with some rather banal disco pop. Thus, both credibility and popularity are maintained. However, the trend for disco-style songs that emerged during the time of Hans Raj, Gurdas Mann, and other 1980s singers merely showed the possibility of consuming Punjabi songs in a western mode.

Diaspora Punjabi Music

The most complete transformation of Punjabi music to a western cultural paradigm was really seen in the diaspora. By the 1980s, a diaspora Punjabi music had come into its own in the UK. Early migrant laborers there had had few occasions to enjoy their native music. In the absence of common social ritual occasions for music—no families meant no marriages and no childbirth—there was little cause for music-making in the amateur world. As for entertainment music of the professional world

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that required no particular context, remember that most performers (minimally the musicians) came from marginalized social classes and were much less likely to emigrate. In other words, there would have been no one to play this music. What this left for Punjabi musical sustenance was:

(1) Recordings of popular music, to whatever small extent they were accessible to those living abroad. Punjabi recordings would have been overshadowed by Hindi film-song recordings.

(2) After temples were built, devotional music was available to performers ranging from amateur to professional.

(3) Eventually, amateur music performance took place, mainly on western instruments.

Thus the stage was set for the democratization of the Punjabi profession of music. As with the post-1960s “rock band” paradigm in western music, it would eventually be taken as given that “anybody” could perform music commercially. As relatives were brought over and families established, expanding contexts for music allowed it to flourish. Yet without the traditional professional musicians and their teacher-disciple line of knowledge transmission, the music produced was necessarily divergent from that produced in Punjab. Even the ritual-based, traditionally amateur music had little to sustain it away from Punjab.

Fortunately, in the 1970s the Punjabi community in the UK was the most diverse of the diaspora, and this contributed to it being a center for Punjabi music. A number of the leading musicians had come out of the Punjabi community displaced from East Africa. In this era when the intensity of global interaction was not yet so great (cf. Appadurai 27), a new Punjabi community created its own music culture, based on memories of the cultural past and responses to new social situations. By the 1970s some bands, especially in the Midlands, had formed to perform at community events. They imitated the popular repertoire of the time, which included mostly ghazal (a genre of romantic couplets) and film songs, but also included Swahili songs and Indian-language cover versions of western pop music.

It was not until the dawn of the 1980s that this musical activity actually began to constitute an “industry.” Before then, perhaps, the second-generation diaspora audience had yet to grow up. By the 1980s, young Punjabi Britishers were seeking entertainment in the local, western mode of nightclubs and concerts, where they could dance and meet up with social partners. This was available to them in the form of the English music, but the settings for that were decidedly non-Punjabi. Did their sense of Punjabi identity cry for some familiar link? For young UK-born listeners I would argue that this was of less importance; they would be content with most of the English music. Punjabi music provided not so much a broad sense of identity as a local sense of community. Older Punjabi audiences found it familiar, and for the young people to also find enjoyment in it created the possibility of shared social occasions. Diaspora

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Punjabi music could serve another social function, because parents approved of it as something safe and culturally meaningful. This allowed—allowed being used here literally—groups of South Asians to socialize in large numbers. Emigrant parents were more likely to give permission to their children to attend such events where, according to their reckoning, the children would be in a wholesome environment. Furthermore, such an environment encouraged the all-important process of selecting a mate from within one’s community. Overall, Punjabis of varying ages with varying degrees of relationship to the motherland found through music an avenue to acculturate to English society and a unifying support “scene.”

British Punjabi-language bands began to call what they played “Modern Punjabi Music” (Boparai). According to one telling, the first band to play gigs was the Saathies, in mid-1966 (Khaila). They were followed shortly after by bands such as Bhujangy Party, Anari Sangeet Party, the New Stars, and Chirag Pehchan. Bhujangy had a hit in the early 1970s, “Bhabiye Akh Larr Gayee,” which lays claim to being the first Punjabi song recorded with electric/rock band instruments. Though these artists, all from the Midlands, were the most active early on, the first to record extensively and garner success came from Greater London’s Southall, an area still known as “Little Punjab.” One could say that the start of the local music industry began with the establishment of Multitone Records (founded in 1979), which, through the 1980s, controlled the majority of output. (By the mid-1990s, Birmingham would take the lead as a center of British-Punjabi music production [see Dudrah, “Cultural Production”].) One of the most successful groups early on was Alaap. Their 1979 first album, Teri Chunni de Sitare (Multitone), contained a rather light musical style, influenced by the film-song ghazal. It was not until a few years later that a more rousing style of music came into favor. Alaap’s 1982 track “Lak Patla Patang,” for example, included a few traces of bhangra dance sounds, such as a dhol-like sound and shouted exclamations. The style was known as the “Southall beat,” or, because of the associations with bhangra, “bhangra beat.” It should not be noted, however, that this music overall bore little resemblance to any accompaniment to bhangra dance in Punjab, and the evocative use of the term “bhangra” applied primarily to the fact that it was Punjabi and dance-oriented. Journalists and academics (e.g. Bennet; Dudrah, “Drum ‘n’ Dhol”; Poole; Warwick) have often made the mistake of describing “traditional bhangra music” as if it were a genre that Punjabis brought with them to Britain as far back as the 1960s.2 This popular conception collapses “bhangra”—indeed, Punjabi music generally—as if it were an ahistorical, singular (albeit “rich”) tradition that only experienced a change with the advent of revolutionary British Punjabis. On the contrary, not only had Punjabi musical expressions been under constant evolution, no such notion of “bhangra music” existed until the 1980s, when “bhangra” was being used to describe something new. By 1985, some discos began to specialize in this bhangra music. Along with this went the phenomenon of “daytimers,” which referred to bhangra-based club events during the day. Over fifty major bands were active—the market could barely support them, but these bands labored out of love. Moreover, the scene was stylistically diverse, ranging from rock to disco to reggae. The sound also varied

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geographically. In these Golden Years of British Bhangra, communities had local music that filled all their social functions (see also Banerji).

The tenor changed somewhat in the period 1986 – 87, when the English press “discovered” bhangra music. Newspapers sensationalized the phenomenon, especially employing the stereotypical image of “quiet Asians,” who were portrayed as rebelling against their culture (see Banerji and Baumann; Baumann, “Re-invention”). They seized upon the idea of children skipping school to secretly attend daytimers. It was not long before the bhangra music phenomenon had to be “explained.” What was probably more of a smoothing over of generational differences was usually painted as a way of negotiating “identity conflicts”: “East versus West,” “traditional versus modern,” and such. Surprisingly little in the lyrics of the music evidenced identity “conflict.” While a few standout songs quite effectively made reference to local things to create a sense of place and cultural humor (see, for example, Dudrah’s exposition of such lyrical examples, “Drum ‘n’ Dhol,” 15 – 19, or Taylor’s discussion of Apache Indian, 155 – 72), most in fact retained the cliche´s of Punjabi love songs and bolı¯a¯n. I respectfully submit that while we may glean some insight from lyrics, it was the semblance of “traditional music” (inclusive of traditional texts) that was equally important, if not more so, to audiences, many of whom, furthermore, did not have a sophisticated command of Punjabi. In this light it seems to have been more what bhangra could do on the social level, rather than the psychological level, that caused it to be embraced. Leante refers to a “double social need”—of the younger generation identifying as Punjabis in the West, and the older generation wanting to transmit traditional values (115). Consider, for instance, the effect of bhangra music in reforming gender roles. In creating a “dance floor,” women were allowed to mingle with men in ways they had not done before. When one listens to the idiosyncratic music of groups like 22 Karat, the Anjana Group of Bradford, or Sagar of Yorkshire, it is hard to imagine these bands being self-conscious.

The idea of two competing identities that need reconciliation became, perhaps, a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the 1980s rolled into the 1990s, this concept was realized through new ways of producing music. Two trends of the time can be identified that would have a bearing on how Punjabis approach music today. The first was the emergence of a “folk” style within bhangra. Punjabi music in Britain had had minimal interaction with the music industry back in Punjab. Recall also that much of UK Punjabis’ knowledge of music was self-acquired and did not replicate practice in Punjab. The shift was brought about by the phenomenon of Malkit Singh, a young singer who moved to England from India in 1984. He was not a UK-born youth with English tastes, nor was he an older immigrant with memories only of the past era of co-opted commercial music. This was someone who had grown up with the music scene that valued a “folk” aesthetic (in 1970s1980s Punjab) and had gone through the university system that had by then institutionalized bhangra dance presentations accompanied by the raw sound of dhol and bolı¯a¯n verses. The recordings Malkit Singh made for the UK’s Golden Star label were collaborations with artists from India who were similarly in touch with the current tastes. This meant a preference for a bolder,

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rural style of singing and a stripped-down accompaniment that used dhol. One may note now that throughout the early 1980s, the sound of an actual dhol was rare in bhangra music records—one reason being that few dhol players, hereditary professionals as a matter of course, had emigrated. Malkit Singh’s “Hey Jamalo (Tutak Tutak)” of November 1988, based on a traditional Sindhi song, hit big in the UK. It featured the bare dhol playing of Ustad Kaku Ram, who at the time was one of the primary accompanists to bhangra teams in Malkit’s home area, Jalandhar. The track was a breakthrough, as it seemed to re-infuse a sense of Indianness into British Asian music. So began the hunt for authenticity. The second trend was one towards the total mechanization of music production. Perhaps it began with the use of more and more synthesizers by bands like Heera. And it continued with the setting of songs to drum-machine-created house beats by bands like Pardesi Music Machine. This spelled a shift away from a traditional live band, where each member plays an instrument, to studio-based production where a single individual can create tracks through synthesis and multi-tracking.

These two trends came together in the 1990s, beginning in a rather literal way. In 1990, British-born Punjabi DJ and producer Bally Sagoo was given access to master tracks of Malkit Singh’s Golden Star recordings. Sagoo was primarily a fan of soul, reggae, and new dance music, and he later admitted to not really liking “bhangra” (Hardy). It is not surprising, then, that Sagoo would hear the straightforward Malkit Singh tapes as many reggae listeners hear: as raw material for re-mixing into a fresh re-interpretation. The result was an entire re-mix album, Wham Bam. The juxtaposition of the traditional-sounding Punjabi music with the very contemporary dance rhythms and production method made the statement of “dual-identity” with more finesse than had ever been done before. It was the beginning of the re-mix and sampling era.

The technology of sampling and overdubbing lent itself to the juxtaposition of disparate elements. This stands in contrast to the earlier “rock band” paradigm of diaspora Punjabi music where, in a sense, the immigrant Punjabis were expressing themselves in local modes but with a Punjabi “accent.” The newer paradigm, more a phenomenon of diaspora-born Punjabis, called for more deliberate fusions. Turino has called such acts creative indexing, the juxtaposition of two or more indices in novel ways (242). Yet a potential issue with fusions or juxtapositions is that in order for one to perceive the juxtaposition, certain elements must be clearly marked or recognizable. The more distinct the elements combined, the more dramatic the juxtaposition. Thus, re-mixes of this sort often depend upon essentialized or sharply iconic musical features. Ethnic identities were essentialized through such stereotypical musical features. With these, a producer could make a sonic “argument” for the idea of competing cultural identities. It was not subtle, but for some listeners it was very satisfying.

Indeed, this fusion music was part of a wider trend in the West in the 1990s, to which the current generation responded almost intuitively. As hip hop was a template on which performers laid their regional expressions and highlighted their affiliations, for many Punjabi youth in the diaspora, music was the ground on which they might

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proudly display their heritage. Performers and even audiences displayed these juxtapositions in their sartorial and verbal styles. The first such artist to gain mass exposure was Britain’s Apache Indian (Steve Kapur). Not coincidentally, he emerged from the Jamaican reggae world, one that had long played on the peculiarities of essentialized identity. Like other rappers (“DJs” in reggae parlance), Apache Indian distinguished himself by playing on his Indian heritage in some recordings. Consequently, he drew a large South Asian fan base, especially after January 1993’s “Arranged Marriage.” The track begins with a simulation of rhythmic filling patterns on a dhol, followed by the ubiquitous Punjabi kahirva¯ rhythm, immediately announcing its Punjabiness. The lyrics speak humorously of a young man of the diaspora who is torn between his desires for a western bachelor’s life and the traditional comforts of a conventional Punjabi wife. The press dubbed Apache Indian’s music “a very British sound” (Whittington), and Taylor wrote that Apache Indian’s music “exploits free-floating signifiers of Appadurai’s ethnoscape” (155).

Bhangra music was consumed in other countries of the diaspora. New York, Chicago, and Toronto were some of the places where the South Asian population was dense enough to support a Desi club scene. These populations were not dominated by a Punjabi component, as the community was in the UK. In these settings, bhangra music was first and foremost something South Asian, rather than something Punjabi. In fact, the meaning of “bhangra music” had changed from “Punjabi pop” (as in India and the UK), to emphasize the mixture of “Indian” and “western” elements. At its broadest, “bhangra” referred to any popular, non-film music with reference to things Indian. It was consumed side by side with the other popular genre of the time: dance re-mixes of Hindi film songs (see also Diethrich).

Some Punjabis had different ideas in Punjabi-dominated centers on the West Coast, like the San Francisco Bay area and Vancouver. These were places where, by the 1990s, the link to current culture in Punjab was quite strong. The interest was in things “authentically” Punjabi, rather than simple nods to the “Desi” experience. What is more, a few individuals had gained the know-how of Punjabi musical practice. The music they would create presented not a western subject with roots in India, but rather a Punjabi subject who was savvy in the ways of the world. It took juxtaposition further through the combination of Punjabi folk music sounds and tough urban rhythms. The timbres of Punjabi folk music had already been coded as “tough” themselves, in the era of the working-class country music. Moreover, the Punjabi villager, through such stereotypical images as the “Maula Jatt” series of films, had been coded as a sort of “Original Gangsta.” Audiences for this music had shed the broadly ascribed stereotypes of awkwardness in being “Indian” in the West that earlier plagued bhangra performers and listeners. Instead, Punjabi was one among many ethnicities on the urban landscape that had found its niche in hip-hop culture. The leading producer of this music was Sukhshinder “Shinda,” a talented musician from the UK who had learned the dhol from master Lal Singh Bhatti—one of the few traditional artists of that instrument to be based in the diaspora. The use of algoze (double flute), tumbi, and dhol in combination did not make sense from the standpoint of traditional

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music practice, but as sonic signifiers they were all important in creating the feel of a roots-aware Punjabi pop. This so-called hardcore folk scene was decidedly global. The collaboration spanned between Shinda (UK), Bhatti (California), and singers like Maddan Maddi and Jazzy B (Vancouver). The latter created a personal image in the format of Apache Indian, replete with the display of national flags and gold bling in the form of Sikh symbols. The Punjabi music industry was becoming transnational.

Bhangra Music in Punjab

This brings us back to Punjab. In the mid-1990s the Punjabi popular music industry faced the challenge of emerging from the rubble of the militancy period with poor memory of the past. The knowledgeable traditional performers had languished beyond resuscitation, and the folk style of commercial music had fallen out of fashion (e.g. after the assassination of Chamkila). To emphasize something as “Punjabi” was, in the wake of the Khalistani movement, controversial. About the same time, India was opened to foreign investment, and Punjabi society was becoming consumption driven. Nowadays, one can hardly throw a stone in Punjab without it hitting an advertisement for Coca-Cola or some such major corporation—just as likely to be painted on the wall surrounding a farmer’s property. The shift to mass consumerism and creature comforts of modern life may have been driven by a need to “forget” the previous decade. One could almost say that the middle classes needed a steady stream of things to buy. Music was needed for the weddings, parties, and cars that mark the sweet life.

I contend that without the phenomenon of the diaspora, residents of Punjab would not have developed such a strong sense of regional identity. The demand for a dance-oriented music that could be conveniently purchased and consumed, all while being recognizably Punjabi, was driven by the needs of transnational Punjabis. In this genre, the quality of Punjabi regionality was not found in the sharply local timbres and genres. Those were still the purview of the rural, the working class, and the specialists. What the lay, college-educated, cosmopolitan people were familiar with was the long co-opted and nationalized folkloric bhangra dance. Staged bhangra dance—up to this point following a different trajectory from popular music—had already been estab-lished as an icon of Punjab, as well as an activity that allowed for the display of signs of Punjabiness. Now it had become the basis for commercial music.

Since that time, the majority of commercial music has been set to bhangra-style (kahirva) dance rhythms. Although such songs would not work for actual, proper bhangra dance performances, they function fine for the unorganized dancing at wedding receptions or the time passed on a long car trip. The quasi-traditional images of folkloric bhangra dance are strongly linked to the music. Music videos and stage shows usually include bhangra-style dancers behind the singer. The sound of the music is relatively uniform, as it is orchestrated by a small number of composers. The image of the singer and the themes of the lyrics vary, however, to appeal to different classes and ages, and to local or national audiences. Locally oriented Punjabi pop caters mainly to the in-Punjab audience, while there is a portion of the genre that is

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more nationally oriented. Designed for broad appeal, with a simplified Punjabi language, the latter is consumed widely in North India as disco music.

An example of a mainstream artist from each sphere will suffice. For Punjabi audiences, Surjit Bindrakhia (d.2003) did much to maintain the association between popular music and bhangra. Unlike many singers, he sang in the traditionally full-throated, strident voice and performed lyrics drawn from bhangra dance practice. His music, therefore, was well suited to dancers at parties. Most songs, however, were rather formulaic, using the songwriting team of Shamsher Sandhu (lyrics) & Atul Sharma (music). The latter’s work is easily recognizable for its constant use of a stilted, synthesized tumbi sample. Like the pedal steel in American country music, this effect made “bhangra” music immediately recognizable. For non-Punjabi audiences, singer Daler Mehndi offered a taste of “bhangra” that was easily comprehensible to the national audience. Although a Punjabi by heritage, Mehndi was raised in the outside city of Patna (Bihar). He emerged as a star in 1995 when his first album sold 20 million copies. One could say that Mehndi’s music affected Punjabi pop’s challenge to the long-standing dominance of film music as India’s popular music. As a result it showed the national “face” of Punjab; the seemingly prosperous and happy Punjab state was reflected in the image of a well-fed, turbaned Sikh, opulently dressed, rolling in hay imported into a Mumbai recording studio. For local Punjabis, this music was surely a double-edged sword. They could take pride in the success of a “Punjabi” product, but with reservations—it did not really represent them. Still, such [inter]nationally palatable music could be credited with carving a space for Punjabi pop music,3 creating the industry that would allow room for the local artists.

Global Punjabi Music

The first decade of the twenty-first century saw the disintegration of difference between Punjab-grown and diaspora Punjabi music, characterized by a global industry. The set of “top” songs played at most Punjabi weddings across the word at a given time is generally quite uniform. In East Punjab, the music industry works much like it does in any western country. Music videos, many with very high production value, receive frequent play on television. Indeed, numerous MTV-like channels are devoted to broadcasting these Punjabi pop videos all day. A visitor to East Punjab is now bombarded with this music at every turn. It has become something of a custom that when a guest comes to one’s home the host turns on a music video channel to fill the gap of idle moments. The music is very visually centered. The images presented— too numerous to analyze here—make certain arguments about Punjabi culture that become difficult to challenge due to their ubiquity. One thing that can be said: particular images of both the local and the global have come to represent things “Punjabi.” Trends include the fronting of very obvious, often fanciful (outsiders’) characteristics of “folklife,” to intensify a sense of national or ethnic pride. Still, these images and gestures of “traditionality” are effective in establishing a satisfying feeling of authenticity. Another trend has been the collaboration between artists from East

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and West Punjab, another by-product of Punjabi nationalism. Let this not, however, suggest that there is a single-direction process of homogenization. With the opening up of access to and control of media (i.e. through digitization, downloading, home production), there has been a dynamic burst of involvement in music by young Punjabis (mainly in the diaspora). This is especially notable given the fact that the artists come largely from families without music performance traditions.

The past decade has seen the search for the final frontier of Punjabi music: mainstream global recognition. This has progressed on several trajectories. One has been the “world music” trajectory, where Punjabi musical characteristics are appropriated as and marketed to listeners searching for something exotic. The approach of directly presenting bhangra music, packaged as “world music,” as in the compilation The Rough Guide to Bhangra, has not succeeded. Far more successful in insinuating Punjabi sounds into the global dance music sphere has been the UK-based The Dhol Foundation. The artistic director of the group, Johnny Kalsi, had first played the dhol with the British bhangra band Alaap in the late 1980s. Originally trained on the western drum kit, Kalsi sought musical avenues outside the limited bhangra industry. He has been involved in such 1990s “world fusion” groups as Transglobal Underground and The Afro-Celt Sound System, along with the more recent English folk-fusion project, The Imagined Village. The style of music produced by The Dhol Foundation has much in common with these groups. The major difference is that, while in those groups the South Asian percussion was one component of the juxtaposition of essentialized ethnicities, The Dhol Foundation fronts the image of the dhol, with the willfully vague evocation of authenticity through this and other floating signifiers of tradition.

Another trajectory moving towards mainstream integration of Punjabi music has been the pushing of barriers by diaspora Punjabi artists who are involved in the hip-hop scene. Beginning with including homegrown rappers in their productions, they have moved to collaborations with rappers from the wider hip-hop scene. The most successful of these collaborations, albeit not deliberate from the outset, was UK producer Panjabi MC’s “Mundia¯n ton Bach ke.” Rapper Jay Z, who had apparently heard the track in a club in Europe, was featured on a re-mix of the track in Spring 2003, “Beware of the Boys.” It became a Top 40 hit in the United States, being listened to widely by non-Punjabis. And while the Orientalism of Jay Z’s lyrics are scoff-worthy, what is truly remarkable about the track is that it contains long stretches of Punjabi singing (by vocalist Labh Janjua). The success of this track, with its strange language (Punjabi) and instrumental hook (the indexical tumbi riff) set off a rediscovery of “bhangra” music by the western media. Shallow inquiries and the inevitable analysis of Punjabi music as “folk music modernized” set in motion another cycle of re-imagining. Punjabis listeners would again weigh recognition against misrepresentation.

Conclusion

Just as “Punjab,” a changing land of ever-shifting borders, took some time to emerge as a geographic construct, so the notion of a “Punjabi identity” was not self-evident from

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early times. Punjabi historian J. S. Grewal argues that such a notion only emerged in the late eighteenth century, insofar as written references began to be made to a “Punjabi” language and “Punjabi” people (Social 13). However, significant ground for the concept had been laid through the development of Punjabi vernacular literature since the seventeenth century (Grewal, “Punjabi Identity” 45). A similar role, as I have demonstrated, has been played by music industry products since the mid-twentieth century. In the period of colonial rule (i.e. starting in 1849), this sense of regional identity may have been toned down, only to re-emerge after Independence (Grewal, Social 13). It was during that re-emergence that handy signs of identity were sought, as, for example, with the folkloric bhangra dance of the 1950s. However, as the Punjabi community has changed, so too has the sense of identity that Punjabis have maintained, from national to transnational. In the contemporary sense of Punjabi identity, the old and the new, the local and the global are but opposite sides of the same coin. At various times and in various places, these seemingly contradictory representations of Punjabiness have been mixed, juxtaposed, and fused according to individual needs, to define and express Punjabi identity. What is notable is that, regardless of what the specific variation is, no matter how “authentic” to the local regional milieu a thing may be, it would seem to be even more “Punjabi” with some degree of cosmopolitanism, miles traveled—distance. Punjabi popular music, at home and abroad (a distinction that means much less in recent years), has thus evolved to neatly represent certain dualities that are considered to characterize Punjabi identity: East/West, guardians of tradition/embracers of new technology, local/diaspora.

In sum, Punjab’s music industry has reflected the changing social circumstances of Punjabis. At the start of the music industry (1930s), Punjabi performers appeared less aware of their “Punjabi” identity. Recorded music’s chief value had been entertainment. Arguably, as the industry developed (1940s – 1950s), regional identity was subsumed by nationalism and pride in one’s country. At the advent of the 1960s, the concept of a genteel folk music emerged that, for the first time on a large scale, glorified the Punjab region, in the process forming a concise idea of Punjab with which its cosmopolitan audience could easily identify. Its appeal was couched within the greater sense of nationalism, however, in terms of a Punjab for those people distanced from Punjab by geography or modernity. It was the beginning of something like the identification-at-a-distance (translocal) that characterizes today’s music. While this phenomenon was never supplanted, the industry of the 1970s – 1980s was dominated by more local expressions of Punjabiness. This was also important in the reconnection to roots that would set the ground for an indexically more “authentic” version of Punjabiness. At about the same time, the influence of the diaspora had become huge. While in the beginning that music was also very local and relatively unconscious, by the 1990s the gap between Punjab and wherever one was—geographically and culturally—had become a dominant theme. In migrant communities, signs of Punjabi heritage became important in articulating cultural identity that was not grounded by geography. Music became a prime vehicle to carry these signs. Diaspora musical activity helped to globalize the industry and connect the periphery back to the center. By the mid-1990s,

356 G. Schreffler

Punjabi identity, as espoused in its music industry, was marked not only by certain mass-mediated stereotypes that cohere as “Punjabiness,” but also by the idea (e.g. expressed in bhangra music) that by its very nature, to be Punjabi was to be global. A balance between displays of local authenticity (the female) and well-heeled modernity (the male) was a sort of ideal at the turn of the millennium. As one old Punjabi man said to me, “India is the Motherland; America is the Fatherland.”

Notes

[1] These were called kale tave, or “black griddles,” in Punjabi, after the disc-shaped iron griddles on which bread is cooked.

[2] Cf. Ballantyne (126ff.), a historian who more accurately characterizes the development of the genre. A detailed disambiguation of the performance genres referred to, at one time or another, as “bhangra” and a comparative analysis of the social contexts and musical characteristics of these genres and their antecedents would be complicated and beyond the scope of this article.

[3] In more recent years, Daler Mehndi’s “Tunak Tunak Tun” has even become an ironic hit among non-Indian audiences.

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