By Anjali Gera Roy, Published by Ashgate, England, 2010. Price: ₤55, Pages: 289

Reviewed by Dharamjeet Singh

With 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.

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[Courtesy South Asian Ensemble, Vol 3 No 3, Summer 2011. Email: sae@gmail.com]