Asian Kool or Punjabi Kool? Bhangra's global invasion

Abstract

The common understanding of Bhangra as a hybrid British music makes one overlook the fact that it is derived from a Punjabi harvest dance of the same name. Echoing ethnomusicologists' interest in the discovery of the musics of ‘others’, the British media hailed it as ‘Asian Kool’ and ‘the voice of the Asian youth’ marking the British Asian presence on the British pop cultural scene. British culture studies examined Bhangra developments in Britain and their centrality to the formation of Asian youth cultures and hybrid British Asian identities. In these studies, Bhangra's reinvention as ‘Asian Kool’ was attributed to its hybridization with Afro-Caribbean sounds. But Bhangra's appropriation in the black cultural politics of Britain has marginalized interventions it has made on the Indian subcontinent. The exclusive focus on the Bhangra explosion in Britain has eclipsed Bhangra revivals on the subcontinent, and the emphasis on its British antecedents has concealed its origins and continuity with the Punjabi harvest dance. While Bhangra's acquisition of ‘Black Kool' through its mixing with black sounds of reggae, rap and hiphop has been cited as the primary reason for its revival and increasing popularity among youth in Britain, a study of the transformation of the stereotyped representation of the Punjabi in the Indian imagination through the arrival of ‘Punjabi Kool’ is yet to be done. Through examining two acts of individual creativity – of Gurdas Mann in the 1980s and of Daler Mehndi a decade later – that led to the reinvention on the Indian subcontinent, this essay argues that Bhangra had turned ‘Kool’ in India independent of its ‘blackening’ in Britain through ‘Bhangrapop's’ appropriation of the josh spirit of the Punjabi harvest dance.