For the last week I've been trying to learn as much about bhangra, the much-acclaimed and highly-globalized Punjabi folk music, as possible. This blog post is sort of from-the-hip, as I haven't delved deeply enough to verify some of my preliminary conclusions, but here's the sense I'm getting:

Though originally the province of the Sikh community, bhangra has, in the last fifteen or so years, been appropriated by many desis, or diasporic South Asians, in their confrontation with dominant cultures in the West. In the process, this once-regionally-and-ethnically-specific music has become a marker, ironically enough, of both pan-Indian and Pakistani identity abroad (the Punjab was one of the two provinces chopped in half during Partition in 1947). Also in the process, in a neat example of immigrant acculturation, bhangra has been recombined with Reggae/Ragga and UK/US rap music, as evident in the songs of Canada's Jazzy B and the UK's Punjabi MC, respectively. 

So it's kind of a mixed up deal, a swirl of signifiers, some viable, some derelict. The motifs at work in this "post-bhangra" seem to be trickling back to relatively vanilla bhangra, which I think I see happening in this Gurdas Maan video, for instance. 

I'm having trouble detecting the level of irony operating in the video, but I think it could be minimal. Not knowing a bit of Punjabi, and given the video's fairly one-dimensional visual content, I have to infer what I can about the song's meaning from the user comments. From what I gather, the lyrics might be espousing tradition, lamenting social decay, and being generally (though ecumenically?) conservative. 

Complicating the bhangra subject for me is the unique place the stereotypical Punjabi Sikh, or sardar, occupies in the Indian imagination. Though Sikhs are one of India's most Western-oriented and economically-advanced ethnic groups, sardars are the butt of many (good-natured) jokes in India which characterize them, for the most part, as helplessly, delightfully and dumbly Indian -- sort of the way blonde jokes operate in the US. These jokes, in my experience, can portray the sardar as an embodiment of the traits that self-aware, (sometimes elitist) India recognizes in India-at-large: for example, lack of familiarity with Western customs and technology. So as I see it, the Sikh, as sardar, seems to serve a sort of goofy trickster role: as a source of subcontinental pride, he is (1) a symbol of autochthonous (perhaps backward) Indian identity, (2) an equally salient icon of transnational South Asian identity, and (3) a readily consumable commodity on the global culture markets!

Other interpretations are encouraged. And again, my thoughts here are provisional.

Please note the comment of one youtube viewer, 12wanderer34: "those bearded fellows have some hectic dance moves and beards". 

They sure do.

Labels: cultural transformation in diaspora, desi, global pop culture, sardar, tricksters

posted by Alex Cref at 3:49 pm