Bhangra
Moves: From Ludhiana to London and Beyond
By Anjali Gera Roy,
Published by Ashgate, England, 2010. Price: ₤55, Pages: 289
Reviewed by Dharamjeet Singh
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ith
the acceleration of globalisation, the world has certainly been
witnessing manifold transformations whose implications we have yet
not been able to map in terms of amelioration or aggravation.
Everything seems so fluid and mobile that the moment one tries to
develop any concrete understanding of the varied social phenomenon
unleashed by the giant wave of global changes, a new transmutation
occurs. The world is surely opening up and becoming smaller by the
day. Traditions and popular cultures across the globe are
increasingly getting entangled and interlocked as they brush
against each other. In the process, they reciprocally pierce the
other’s supple and wrinkled social skin to inaugurate a new era
of enhanced cultural sharing and augmented inter-social
participation while, on the other hand, seriously calling into
question fossilized socio-cultural sensibilities and age-old
beliefs of people, groups and communities.
Anjali
Gera Roy’s book Bhangra
Moves: From Ludhiana to London and Beyond is a prodigious tour de force in the writing of the complex cultural history of
popular Punjabi folk dance ‘Bhangra’. In this brilliantly
annotated and well-researched work, charged with a lucidly written
prose running into some two hundred and fifty pages, Roy has done
a commendable job of archiving the entangled genealogy of one of
the most popular folk dances and its subsequent mutations as it
winged its way across cultures, nations and continents on a
transcontinental journey. The book, though, deals with Bhangra as
a musical genre and not as a form of dance. Roy tries to take into
account the historical changes that have marked Bhangra in ways
that make the performative dimension subservient to its
historically motivated popular reception as a musical genre.
The
aim of the book, to use Roy’s words, is not only to “revise
the relation between cultural space and identity” and
desacralise the notions of ‘purity’ and ‘origins’ but to
critically interrogate autochthonous attitudes by questioning the
prevalent understandings about the existence of ossified and
clear-cut cultural boundaries. Furthermore, the book also explores
the impact of new technologies and digital networks on the very
meaning of Bhangra as alsoon its production, circulation and
distribution globally. In an attempt to trace the transnational
flows of ‘Bhangra’, Roy goes on to delineate the amorphous and
porous nature of socio-cultural practices, thereby dislocating the
misconstrued sociological bases on which cultural chauvinists in
their manifold outpourings sing the nostalgic hymns of
‘national’, ‘indigenous’, or ‘cultural’ purity. As a
result she moves towards developing a more nuanced understanding
of ‘Bhangra’ and its historical hybridizations, but without
disregarding its pristine demographical flavour.
Bhangra
is a traditional Punjabi dance, generally performed to herald and
celebrate the coming of harvest season in Punjab. It had its
beginnings in the rustic lifestyles of Punjabi countryside.
Gradually, the dance came to be performed to celebrate all kinds
of festivals from birth-related celebrations, house warming
ceremonies, marital festivities to other solemnization occasions.
Gradually, the fast-pace rhythms, energy and musical vitality took
precedence over its performative aspect.
Heera on stage. England. 1987
In
the chapter entitled “Mann
Panjab de: Fabricating Authenticity”, Roy critically engages
with the musical productions of three singers who have dominated
the Bhangra scene in Punjab, namely Gurdas Mann, Malkit Singh and
Paramjit Siddhu (popularly known as Pammi Bai), starting with the
earlier chart buster Kuldip Manak. All these three singers hail
from the rural Punjabi countryside, although presently located
outside Punjab, except Kuldip Manak and Pammi Bai. Pammi Bai is
the only singer among the new brigade who regards dance as the sine
qua non of Bhangra with stylised and structured movements
performed on the beats of traditional musical instruments. Through
a close analysis of their sonic experimentation and lyrical
innovation, Roy shows how the category of “authenticity” gets
constructed via the formation of asli/naqli binary in which
each singer represents a particular type of authentic panjabiyaat
(or Panjabiness) vis-à-vis a specific form of inauthentic panjabiyaat.
Roy then goes on to analyze Daler Mehndi’s innovative repertoire
as a talented singer with his background in classical music. With
his unique style of playing with nonsensical words, repetitive
sounds and innovative loops in the form of Bhangrapop, he made
Bhangra a crucial part of the mainstream Indipop scene during the
1990s. And then she examines how this hybrid form called
Bhangrapop has been able to establish itself, against severe
criticism, on the strength of its ability to cater to the demands
of a westernized urban Punjabi sensibility located in cities that
cavorts to its high frequency beats and Indianised-western rhythms
in new-age discotheques.
Malkit Singh. 1996
The
opening up of Indian markets during the 1990s radically
transformed the contours of political economy in India and brought
the issue of culture invasion to the fore, particularly with
“the privatization of the Indian skies” (129). The setting up
of satellite television networks and novel electronic
communication channels ushered in a new era of cultural change in
India, making way for “the invention of Indian youth cultures to
the advent of music television on the subcontinent” (153). This
democratization of the satellite space surely helped Punjabi
singers to make sonic and lyrical experiments. It enhanced their
visibility at the national level. It is around this time that the
mainstream Bollywood Hindi music started including Bhangra beats,
rhythms and singles in their films in a big way. This led to
“…the subordination of lyrical content to the sound and
music” to facilitate its reception and consumption across the
wider non-Punjabi audience (209). The proliferation of TV
channels, with the additional advantage of 24-hour music channels
like MTV, Channel V, B4U, ETC Punjabi, 9X and many regional music
channels, greatly added to the commercial consumption of music.
Consequently, Bhangra got transformed “from an ethnocultural
signifier of Punjabi celebration to a shared national signifier of
[fun] and joy” (166). Emphasizing the displacement of dominant
sonic hegemonies and taste hierarchies by modernised Bhangra, Roy
says that Bhangra mutants have proved “the most successful
instance of brand marketing in recent marketing history” though
its valorization and reification in global commodity markets.
Roy
debunks the fashionable notions of cultural purity and
essentialism which feed on binaries like indigenous/alien, sanskriti
(culture) /apasankriti
(other culture), we/others, regional/national and local/global.
Against this, Roy contends that “cultures have always leaked
into each other through the permeable boundaries in the everyday
practices of Panjabi villages”. She argues for the generic
cross-fertilisation that underpins everything implied in we
understand by the word ‘culture’. Consequently, she goes
beyond the logic of “purity fetish” deployed by the
self-nominated caretakers of culture by highlighting the
rhizomatic character of all culture.
Anjali
Gera Roy’s finest achievement in this marvelous work of
scholarship is her ability to unseam ‘culture’ as a concept
and to locate its dynamic constructions, flows, and disseminations
in the streets, crossways, shops and peoples’ everyday practices
of coming together in times of need and of celebration. In this
de-suturing of culture, she also studies how the questions of
gender construction, male gaze, fetishisation of the female body,
the production of locality, the contradiction between tradition
and modernity, and the politics of identity, community and
racialised narratives are embedded in the historical definitions
of culture. This further allows her to investigate the process by
which individuals, groups or communities are able to use cultural
practices to exclude, resist and demonize other cultures, and
construct boundaries that thwart the enrichment and the very
becoming of cultural practices through interaction with diverse
cultural traditions.
The
book remains predominantly descriptive at all levels
notwithstanding the analytical components. It would have been much
more fruitful if Roy had included a chapter on the production of
Bhangra in contemporary times vis-à-vis the capitalist state’s
instruments of control. David Suisman and Susan Strasser, in the
introduction to their fantabulous and path-breaking study Sound
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, argue that the question
is to decipher how “the combined effect of the cultural,
psychological and acoustic properties of music is wielded as a
blunt instrument of state power” (2). This has been happening at
regional as well as national level. Nonetheless, Roy’s book will
definitely be an invaluable addition to the studies of popular
cultures in India. The book, for sure, sheds light on new fields
of research and critical enquiry. For scholars working in the
fields of cultural studies and critical musicology, the book is
particularly indispensable. •
Works Cited
Roy,
Anjali Gera. Bhangra Moves:
From Ludhiana to London and Beyond. Surrey: Ashgate, 2010.
Suisman,
David and Susan Strasser. Sound
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
•
[Courtesy
South Asian Ensemble,
Vol 3 No 3, Summer 2011. Email: sae@gmail.com]