ARI Working Paper Series

The hybridization of Bhangra, a Punjabi harvest dance, with Western beats of pop and black beats of reggae, rap and hiphop in Britain in the mid 1980s brought it international visibility and has made it part of global youth culture. However, purists on the Indian subcontinent, particularly in Punjab, offended by the ‘vulgar’ content of the Bhangra music albums, dismissed the new Bhangra mutants as inauthentic and sacrilegious. This Working Paper plays on the etymology of the term ‘vulgar’ to examine the origins and development of the marginalized Punjabi dance genre that was appropriated in the production of Punjabi identity after the partition of Punjab in 1947. Arguing that the sacred and the profane invariably overlap in traditional musical categories, it examines Bhangra in relation to the Bakhtian notion of the carnivalesque to show how Bhangra texts, even those with ‘vulgar’ content, can be used to perform the Punjabi sacred in birth related rituals and ceremonies. Similarly, the performance of Bhangra by Punjabi/South Asian youth to perform identity or community in ‘sinful’ settings of clubs and parties proves the portability of the harvest ritual in identity narratives. The Paper concludes that once Bhangra enters the popular cultural space, it is subjected to the rules of popular cultural commerce and shows that the fetishizing of Punjabi music and body, rather than the exposed female body, on which global consumerist desires are fixed is a genuine cause for concern.

Full text is not available, this working paper is withdrawn, as it has now been published as Bhangra Moves: From Ludhiana to London and Beyond (Aldershot: Ashgate 2010).