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South Asian History and Culture

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Situating bhangra dance: a critical introduction

Gibb Schreffler

To cite this article: Gibb Schreffler (2013) Situating bhangra dance: a critical introduction, South Asian History and Culture, 4:3, 384-412, DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2013.808514

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2013.808514

Published online: 01 Jul 2013.

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South Asian History and Culture, 2013 Vol. 4, No. 3, 384–412, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2013.808514

Situating bhangra dance: a critical introduction

Gibb Schreffler*

Department of Music, Pomona College, Claremont, CA, USA

Punjabi bhangra has been a recurrent topic of discussion within the studies of South Asian identity and vernacular culture since the 1980s. Such discussions, however, have suffered due to lack of published information on bhangra’s cultural and historical con- texts. Consequently, discussants have had to rely upon information available from recent popular media and casual participants. Popular narratives tend to oversimplify bhangra as being or deriving from ‘Punjab’s traditional folk dance,’ often without a clear sense of what constitutes ‘folk dance’ in this context or the relationship between such a dance and the particular bhangra with which one may be familiar. The resultant picture of contemporary bhangra as the quintessential Punjabi harvest dance, even if ‘modern- ized,’ is inadequate to interpret the acts of performers and audiences of what are, in fact, several dynamic phenomena. There is a danger of characterizing bhangra as a too-uniformly understood aspect of Punjabi heritage, and of reducing its performances to mere displays of Punjabi identity, if the past and present practical needs, aesthetic decisions, and situational intentions of participants are not registered. Intended to offer such a contextual framework, this article provides a social history of bhangra dance, in three theatres: Western Punjab before 1947, Eastern Punjab after the Partition, and the Punjabi Diaspora since the late twentieth century. Particular attention is paid to the individuals who have shaped the development and their circumstantial motivations.

Keywords: culture; western Punjab; eastern Punjab; Diaspora; identity

The term bhangr. ā identifies several phenomena that take the primary form of dance and music connected with the culture of the Punjab region of India and Pakistan. Since the concept of bhangra was reconfigured in the 1950s, at which time it began to be linked to Punjabi ‘national’ identity, the scope of what it means to ‘do bhangra’ has greatly expanded. The literature about bhangra, however, has yet to elucidate the development of this expansion. Instead, due to the speed of its growth (over the last quarter-century), to bhangra’s appearance in different forms in different places, and to the complications wrought by the unqualified use of a single term, much writing has failed to adequately dis- tinguish the ‘bhangra’ under discussion from others. It appears to be enough that bhangra is something ‘Punjabi’, and the vague notion of it being ‘traditional’ or at least tradition-based seems to tie all the phenomena together in a relationship that is ‘obvious’ and without any need for explicit documentation or historical underpinning. One may receive the impres- sion from such discussions that bhangra, whose origins are supposed to lie somewhere in the unknowable past, is at the core of Punjabi music and dance, and has simply varied to suit the times. However, this perception would be incorrect, for while all the phenomena

*Email: [email protected]

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

South Asian History and Culture 385

labelled as bhangra may be connected with a Punjabi culture, they form only a fraction of that culture’s musical-choreographic output. Nor are these different bhangra phenomena necessarily off-shoots of a single tradition or concept, but rather time-and place-specific creations of music or dance that became linked chiefly through sharing the same name and being tagged as Punjabi.

Bhangra dance: its three theatres

The focus of this exposition of bhangra’s expansion is not music. As a term for music – perhaps as it is best known globally – ‘bhangra’ has referred to dance-oriented popular music styles since the 1980s. This situation has created much confusion for new observers, especially as the tendency in the discourse introducing these musical styles has been to take the genre’s name as its starting point and, on this basis, to make allusions to the Punjabi harvest-time rituals in which context the word ‘bhangra’ is first thought to have appeared. Yet, native Punjabis have historically made a clear distinction between ‘music’ of this sort (that is, sangı̄t) and ‘dance’. It is not that sound has no relevance in this case, but rather the live accompaniment to bhangra dance generally has not been considered ‘music’ in the customary sense, much less called ‘bhangra music’. In Punjab, the so-called ‘bhangra music’ is understood to be a genre of popular music and connected to bhangra dance, in its primary definition, only through shared allusions to certain common musical (e.g. kahirvā tāl) and conceptual (e.g. regional, ‘folk’) features. Moreover, few of these features had actually been established when ‘bhangra music’ was first developed. The popular music style, in contrast to the bhangra dance, is seen as something forward-looking; adoption of the label ‘bhangra’ indicated that the music was, unlike earlier Punjabi popular music, for dancing, and yet it was to be dance with a Western connotation: ‘disco bhangra’. ‘Bhangra’ in this discursive context was a token signifier of a Punjabi element to the product, yet used in a way as to suggest a mixture, something untraditional. As people later danced to further developed forms of ‘bhangra music’, their dancing (again with token, shared elements of Punjabi dancing generally) could be viewed as ‘bhangra dance’, and yet to conflate that sense of bhangra with other designated forms would undermine the goal of understanding them. This is just what happened when Diaspora-based club-goers started relating their dancing to harvest rituals and when dancers of a similar ilk started to use club music as the accompaniment track for new folkloric dance routines. Accordingly, it is not that bhangra dance’s sound component is to be removed from this discussion, but rather that popular music phenomena called bhangra require a separate discussion – too lengthy to incorporate here – within the trajectory of Punjabi (or, indeed, global) popular music. I have done this in a prior article,1 with the hope that one may integrate the dance and music trajectories as appropriate.

The present article maps bhangra phenomena that take the primary form of dance. It is based in the assertion that there are, indeed, multiple forms of dance being called bhangra, and not that bhangra represents a single tradition in dance that has simply ‘evolved.’ I view as generally unhelpful the notion of ‘traditional’ versus ‘modern’ bhangra dance; all might reasonably be said to have developed traditions of a sort, and more than one has modern ele- ments. This article provides an exposition of what I consider to be the three main, broadly distinguishable bhangra dance phenomena: a localized village dance practiced before the Partition, a nationalized stage dance developed after the Partition, and a popular ‘heritage’ dance of the Diaspora. All these are understood to have variations in form within them, yet each has a developmental history, geographic situ, and ethos that distinguish it as a recog- nizable phenomenon. That this historical–geographical–conceptual differentiation has not been made adequately within the literature is the main reason for this article.2

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In the light of the high profile of bhangra in discussions of South Asian identity, much is at stake in how bhangra is discussed. There is a danger of characterizing bhangra, a seeming common ground of Punjabis, as a too-uniformly understood aspect of Punjabi heritage. Yet not only has bhangra signified different concepts with each new generation – even with each new decade – there also exist notably different understandings of bhangra concurrently, within Punjab and Diaspora locales. Much of the writing that invokes bhangra offers cultural analyses without a clear understanding of its history, jumping at once from the notion of a static, ‘traditional’ bhangra to a ‘modern’ or ‘hybrid’ bhangra.3 Moreover, in presenting bhangra, writers have tacitly adopted their and their informants’ own localized perspective such that a part appears to represent the whole. I argue that these tendencies inadvertently contribute to a postmodernist discourse that, while purporting to acknowl- edge the fluidity of definitions, leaves bhangra undefined while giving the impression that bhangra is nonetheless something ‘out there’ – that is, lacking history and agency. The rubric of ‘bhangra’ has, indeed, been used creatively by individual Punjabis as a sort of shell to fill with various forms of expression; however, when one talks about bhangra, especially in academic discussion, one rarely intends to give equal weight to all forms. Is it not, then, rather irresponsible to exploit bhangra for its broad recognizability while one is really addressing the significance of a specific form to a limited group of people?4

Parsing the concept of bhangra historically and contextually, as I attempt in this article, would reduce scattershot discussions.

Also at stake in understanding the history of bhangra is the issue of how bhangra should be connected with a Punjabi identity. Must bhangra be connected to identity at all? One notices a dramatic difference between the discourse of most academic writers about bhangra in the Punjabi Diaspora and that of the participants within the dance-culture itself. In the former, discussion of identity is pre-eminent,5 while in the latter, matters of aesthetics and logistics are most discussed. While it is not unreasonable that issues of iden- tity should factor into the participants’ relationship with the genre, too much focus on these issues means the neglect of the artistic dimension. The danger here is of reducing bhangra’s performances to mere displays of a Punjabi identity. Moreover, identity-centred narratives have an influence on future productions; in some performances, the symbolic function of bhangra forms means also a lack of attention to aesthetics. Older artists, whose laments are sometimes dismissed as inflexibility to change, are often disappointed in what they find to be lack of aesthetic nuance in newer productions – that is, a lack of attention to the aesthetics cultivated through their training in bhangra as an art form. While we are not in any position to judge whose aesthetic sensibility is ‘best’, by differentiating forms, we create a space in which each can be recognized on its own terms. Performers’ concepts of themselves in relation to bhangra performance and their methods of creating it are, therefore, best discussed within the specific generic and historical contexts to which they belong.

Most ideas about bhangra dance can be understood in relation to three broad phe- nomena, corresponding to distinct locations and periods of development. Each has had different reasons for and emphasized different aspects of its performance. Distinguishing these phenomena is necessary to counter aspects of what, through many years of obser- vation, I perceive to be the dominant narrative of bhangra. This narrative might be as follows:

‘Bhangra, the main dance of Punjabis, is very old, if not ancient. Though the precise origins of the genre are debated, its genesis relates to harvest festivities; Punjab is first and foremost a land of agriculture. Nonetheless, Punjabis tend to perform bhangra on every happy occasion,

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and music derived from it constitutes one of the main genres they enjoy listening to. Bhangra is the common heritage of Punjabis; it is their folk dance and, as such, represents traditional Punjabi culture in its emphases, namely vigour, energy, and the agricultural ethos. Even as Punjab modernized, Punjabis preserved bhangra. However, with social modernization, there have been some changes, too; bhangra that one sees may not be fully traditional. Notably, younger generations have mixed traditional bhangra with newer or Western elements in an expression of their modern Punjabi identity. While bhangra in Punjab tends to be traditional and represent authentic Punjabi culture in all its vibrancy, the hybrid expression of Diaspora performers is no less valid and it offers instructive examples of how Punjabis have reacted to issues of emigration and globalization.’

The examination of each of three theatres of bhangra development that this article offers presents challenges to the above narrative. In the first theatre, Western Punjab before 1947, we see that bhangra practice cannot be dated earlier than the late nineteenth century, and that it may have been borrowed by Punjabis from the nearby Pashtuns. Further, its practice was limited to a small geographic area mostly within Western Punjab, making it an unlikely candidate as the dance form of the ancestors of most Punjabis. More still, although its per- formance was connected with harvest festivities, it does not appear to have been a part of many other occasions. In the second theatre, Eastern Punjab after the Partition, we see that a new dance called bhangra was invented that contained limited content in common with the older dance and was placed in a context with entirely different aesthetic emphases: the stage. Most of the audience for this dance was unfamiliar with the older form, and readily accepted what was presented them by creative performers. Most importantly, rather than a traditional dance becoming suddenly ‘modernized’, this mostly new form was con- tinually developed and expanded with each decade since the 1950s. In the third theatre, the Punjabi Diaspora since the late twentieth century, we see that the basis for construct- ing the so-called hybrid forms was not so much a bhangra form ‘brought’ from Punjab, but rather media products that were lately produced in the world of popular music and film. Furthermore, participants have not consistently been interested in creating fusions, being perhaps more interested in trying to recreate what was considered the traditional style, but within the limiting constraints of access to information and instruction. Across all three theatres, we see the expansion of the concept of bhangra in relation to a Punjabi identity, beginning first perhaps as something not connected to cultural identity at all and ending with the possibility of bhangra evoking Punjabiness at the expense of other aspects. Recent performers, however, have become disenchanted with the way bhangra evokes a generic Punjabi identity. Dancers in India have turned to other, less-recognizable Punjabi dances, while dancers in the Diaspora have reframed bhangra as a competitive sport with judging criteria independent of notions of authenticity. Still, one cannot ignore the aspect of identification. This article is intended to allow more nuanced forms of identification.

The development of discourse on bhangra dance

Never having received more than a few lines of description before the mid-twentieth cen- tury, bhangra was taken up as a topic of interest after the folkloric dance of that name attained notability through national-level performances in India. Literary writers briefly noted their observations from the 1950s through the 1980s.6 However, during this period, there was little of substance written on bhangra within its expected academic vein, Punjabi folklore.7 Beginning in the 1960s, a few folklorists wrote descriptive overviews of the set of commonly recognized Punjabi folk dances (lok nāch).8 These overviews were ahistori- cal, and did not acknowledge the folklorization of dance that was then under way, and yet

388 G. Schreffler

one wonders how much the recent images of a staged dance may have also influenced their descriptions.

To this point, foreign writers had not taken much interest in bhangra dance, although the popular music style in England that was being called bhangra by the mid-1980s – shortened from such labels as ‘bhangra beat’ and ‘disco bhangra’ – attracted attention. Around 1986–1987, the English press ‘discovered’ bhangra music. Academic literature that emerged shortly after interpreted the phenomenon, from a sociological perspective, as a means of Diaspora Punjabis for negotiating ‘identity conflicts’.9 These works became, in the 1990s, the standard bibliographic references on bhangra for ethnomusicologists and other scholars of culture who were taking an interest in popular music and Diaspora.10

The first major writing to address bhangra dance was Nahar Singh’s Panjābı̄ Lok-Nāch in the late 1980s.11 However, this substantial work, written in an academic register of Punjabi language,12 would go unread by those outside of the Indian Punjab. Moreover, Nahar Singh had little cause to situate his discussion within the context of what was then becoming, but was not quite yet a global phenomenon. The next major work to include bhangra dance was in English, Iqbal Singh Dhillon’s Folk Dances of Punjab (1998).13

Dhillon, Director of Youth Welfare at Panjab University, was in-charge of the organization and judging of dance competitions at ‘youth festivals’. Concerned largely with the origins of Punjabi dances, Dhillon also took the pragmatic approach of presenting bhangra as it was then being practiced on the stage. He was the first writer in English to emphasize folkloric bhangra as a creation of the 1950s.

I entered the field in 2000, where I found little anxiety among practitioners in India about the ‘invented tradition’ nature of folkloric bhangra.14 Though the younger (often student) dancers were generally unaware of its history, the dance directors and drummer- accompanists were. However, they also availed of artistic licence and engaged with the stage-oriented aesthetic aspects of the dance. My approach to studying the subject was one of ethnographic fieldwork and especially through the vantage of the dance’s focal instrument, the drum d. hol. Taking up Dhillon’s narrative of folkloric bhangra as an amalgamation of steps accrued from several sources of Punjabi folklife and inventive choreographers, my early work analysed it in terms of what the associated rhythms for these steps might tell us about folkloric bhangra as a crucible of modern Punjabi cultural performance.15

A few other non-Indian scholars took interest in Punjabi bhangra dance, although these did not produce major works or were not focused on the dance aspect.16 Through the 2000s, Western-based writing continued without historical or substantial musicological– choreological information. A notable exception is Tony Ballantyne, who, following Dhillon’s and the present author’s work, acknowledged ideas of the reinvention of bhangra as a folkloric dance.17 Another writer is Anjali Gera Roy, whose recently published book on bhangra, although focused on music, considers movement as well.18 During the last decade, communications opened up between writers and Punjabi bhangra practitioners of the Diaspora, especially through Internet discussions,19 and aficionados began to reorient their concept of bhangra – up until then viewed as the de facto traditional dance of their parents’ homeland.

Of particular note among Diaspora agents is Teginder Dhanoa, a Punjabi-American belonging to a family whose members were among the first to bring bhangra dance to North America. In the early 2000s, Dhanoa, with his associated group Punjabi Lok Virsa, gave several presentations about bhangra at university campuses for Diaspora audiences. In the mid-2000s, Dhanoa and his father, Surinder Singh, initiated a documentary film project on the history of bhangra. The Dhanoas conducted important interviews with some

South Asian History and Culture 389

of the individuals best positioned to remember a community bhangra and the development of folkloric bhangra. With the demise of most of these individuals, the possibility of further oral history is now extremely narrow.

The current state of the field is characterized by a degree of increased awareness of the historical manifestations of bhangra dance, yet we are still without an accessible ref- erence for the details of its broad development – the aim of the following sections, which represent a synthesis of observations gathered over more than a decade observing these phenomena.20

Early historical data

The origins of bhangra dance are unknown. The early details of what is called bhangra are also ambiguous, meaning that it is also difficult to argue how, when, or why it developed in distinction from other and prior dancing in the Punjab region. Prior writers on bhangra have made no attempt to date the term, rather simply presuming the dance to be very old.21

One may immediately gain some perspective when one considers that, though bhangra may now be the best known (i.e. by name) of the Punjabi dances, no mention of it has been discovered in the medieval history and literature. The extensive writings of the Sikh Gurus – sixteenth to early eighteenth century – give it no mention, although they refer to some form of a different dance, jhummar.22 Even the poet Varis Shah mentioned the Punjabi dances jhummar, sammı̄, lud. d. ı̄, and dhamāl, yet did not mention bhangr. ā. Shah’s narrative epic poem Hı̄r, composed in the 1760s and set in Western Punjab’s area of Sandal Bar, is notable as a particularly rich portrait of Punjabi cultural life of its time, and the absence of bhangra from this source may be considered significant. Moving forward, one does not find bhangr. ā in the first Punjabi dictionary of 1854, published by the Presbyterian Mission, although again the dances giddhā, jhummar, and dhamāl do appear. While one might argue again the Mission’s headquarters of Ludhiana was outside the historical bhangra area, it was also far outside the area of jhummar dance. The lack of discourse on bhangra suggests at the outset that it may not have developed until at least the second half of the nineteenth century.

References to bhangra dance of some sort first appear at the margins of the Punjab region. In a British colonial report from the Kohat district (a Pashtun area) – the ethno- graphic work for which was conducted in 1883 or earlier – one finds the Khattak tribal sword dance referred to as bangra. The author notes, incidentally, that the Muslim clergy of the area had within the last few years prohibited much music and dance. And although there is some implication that the community’s sword dance may not have been included in this ban, the prohibition of its accompanying instruments, the pipe (surnāı̄) and drum (dhol) had more or less stifled it.23 Attribution of the dance to the North-West Frontier gets support in the form of a report of 1930s on the local Pashtun people, who it says were ‘well known for’ ‘Bangra.’24 And more recently, the Khattak tribe located in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan has been said to practice a ‘bangr.ā’ dance variant of the more general Afghan dance type, atan. .

25 All of this suggests that Punjab’s now-famous dance may have originally been borrowed from a nearby cultural group. Judging from its style, it certainly seems as though it may have belonged to a culture outside of Punjab’s core because, compared to the much more widely attested and more widespread Punjabi dance jhummar,26 its actions appear fierce and vigorous.

A report from the Rawalpindi district, first published in 1884, finally mentioned a dance with the spelling ‘bhangra.’ The ‘bh’ of this, in that area’s Pothohari dialect, would be pronounced as a voiced unaspirated tonal, /b` /, as opposed to the unvoiced /p` / it would

390 G. Schreffler

represent in the centre of Punjab and the way it is pronounced today. This ‘bhangra’ appears alongside sammi, ‘lodhi’ (luddi) and dhamal as the dances performed at weddings.27

Another report from the adjacent Attock district, 1930, gives the same information.28 What may be noted here is that Rawalpindi and Attock, on the Pothohar plateau, which borders on the Khattaks’ area, were outside the Punjab plains and the area that would later be ascribed to bhangra as it came to be known. Furthermore, bhangra as remembered later on was not a dance of weddings. It is possible to see this as an intermediary step in the dance’s diffusion, and where bangr. ā became bhangr. ā.

A few years later, in 1890, bhangra emerged in the centre of Punjab, somewhere in or near Sialkot. Oddly enough, the reference is not to the customary bhangra, but rather to an adapted performance intended to conform to Christian values. The context was a recently invented ‘Christian mela’ held for the growing number of converts by the local mission and evidently meant to substitute for the usual sort of melā or festival in which disapproved activities would usually take place. In the ‘Christian bhangra’ the usual ‘foolish’ songs were replaced by ‘Christian hymns and Gospel truths.’29 We can reason from this that by this time some sort of ‘regular’ bhangra had been practiced at country fairs. The existence of bhangra in Punjabi-language culture by this time is further attested in a dictionary from the 1890s, appearing as ‘bhangrā’ and ‘bhāngrā’,30 yet defined only vaguely as, ‘A dance which is often danced in villages’.31

It is only later that we find more detailed references to bhangra in the area and in the context that matches the vision of the dance provided by personal informants of more recent decades. An example appears in the Gazetteer of the Sialkot district for 1920, in which bhangra is introduced as follows:

‘In the spring, up to 1st Baisakh when the wheat is filling in the ear, the Jats gather at the daira nightly to dance and sing. The song, which is usually of an erotic character, is always a solo, and during the singing all present stand still. At the end of each verse the audience join in the chorus, dancing all the time. The dance is known as bhangra’.32

These lines positively identify community-based bhangra as it came to be known. We get the place (Sialkot district), the time of performance (nightly leading up to the mid-April harvest festival of Visakhi), the site (in recently cut fields), the participants (the mainstream Jatt people of Punjab, not Pashtuns), and some details of the nature and manner of perfor- mance (bawdy verses and the interesting custom of not dancing until the final refrain of the verse). We also get the sense that the writer understood bhangra to be not so well known to his readers. Indeed, there is no reason to assume that bhangra was at this point a famous dance.

There are several possible explanations for why, if bhangra existed before the 1880s, it was not mentioned until then and why it remained scarcely noted by contemporary writers. One is that the ‘core’ geographic area in which bhangra was practiced was quite limited – among the most limited of Punjabi dances. Nahar Singh, whose information was evidently gathered in the 1980s from personal informants who had practiced the community bhangra, places it in an area stretching North–South from Gujrat to Shekhupura, and West–East from the Chenab River to Gurdaspur.33 Jugindar Singh, from the closer temporal vantage of 1960, adds Sialkot district to these areas.34 My own informant Harbhajan Singh, who grew up in the twilight years of the practice in the area of Shakar Garh (erstwhile Gurdaspur district), emphasized Sialkot and Jammu as central sites.35 That this was the heartland of bhangra is indicated by Harbhajan Singh’s assertion that people of those areas only danced bhangra, as other dances (e.g. jhummar) belonged to other areas. Bhangra’s historic area,

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then, can be said to have been the centre of the northern part of Punjab, an area of perhaps 17,000 square kilometres.36 The centre of activity within this area has been said to be Wazirabad, where the annual Visakhi fair provided the primary venue for people from the neighbouring districts.37 Almost the entirety of this area, with the exception of a portion of Gurdaspur district on India’s border, is now contained within Pakistan. One may register as well that the major eastern (i.e. Indian) areas of Punjab have been claimed to be positively lacking such a dance.38 Author G.S. Brard, born in 1930 in the Malwa area, notes that men from his Jatt community had generally shunned dancing as something effeminate and not respectable.39 Hence, despite the strong nationalistic identification with bhangra by Punjabis of Indian origin today, or else its common portrayal as a shared point of heritage for all Punjabis, this dance would only have been practiced by residents of a smallish, mainly Pakistani area.

A second possible reason why the historical record on bhangra is so slim is that it was infrequently performed due to its limited performance context. Bhangra was linked to the spring harvest festival Visakhi, which falls on the first day of the local calendar’s month of Visakh (mid-April). During the month leading up to the Visakhi festival, Chet, the harvest, most importantly containing the staple crop of wheat, was gradually reaped. Bhangra was performed more or less nightly when the day’s work was over.40 The day of the Visakhi holiday, marking the end of this period, represented the time of joy when, the wealth of the fruited crops being distributed, the people of Punjab celebrated and spent their disposable income at regional fairs. Such fairs were the sites of particularly robust and more formal (i.e. conscious of an audience) dancing. According to Harbhajan Singh’s account, this time of year and these contexts made up the ‘only’ times when bhangra was performed.41 Moreover, there are statements to suggest that, by some point at least, the evening sessions leading up to the Visakhi fair were at least partially viewed as practice or ‘rehearsals’ for the main event, making the event even more important and the possibility of incidental bhangra dancing less likely.42 Overall, one must not assume that Punjabis were dancing ‘all the time.’ The colonial ethnographic editor Rose, who offered a patchy description of Punjabi dances (yet gathered no information on bhangra) made the fascinat- ing observation that dancing was only done in Punjab ‘as a popular pastime’, when in the hill regions and the Indus valley. Elsewhere, he says, dancing was something done by pro- fessionals of specific castes and that, furthermore, it was ‘more or less confined to religious or ceremonial occasions’.43 This is significant in the light of currently popular narratives that imagine bhangra to have had a place on almost any celebratory occasion. If, as the accounts suggest, bhangra was indeed not a ‘generic’ or multipurpose dance that was per- formed year-round at weddings and so forth – that is, if it was intimately connected with and even defined by its harvest-time context – then this might be why it was not frequently noticed by or mentioned in the general accounts of observers.

One might also suppose that, although the word bhangr. ā had not yet appeared in print before the late nineteenth century, it is likely that some form of dancing, by this or another name, had been occurring at Visakhi time in this area before then. Like all cultural forms, bhangra dancing would have had a history of development, and it is possible that, year- by-year, characteristics were added to it which only by the early twentieth century were considered conventional. Along these lines, a third possible explanation for the paucity of bhangra references is that this phenomenon was quite simply not yet firmly labelled and conceived of in the abstract as a particular dance form. It was, perhaps, a general mode of performance that included more than just a set of dance steps and songs. And although it would manifest locally developed and context-specific aesthetics that gave it particular characteristics, these did not cohere immediately as a formally conceived dance-type.

392 G. Schreffler

Community bhangra

I use the label ‘community bhangra’ to refer to bhangra dance that was performed within local communities in village-based settings before the Partition. One might say this bhangra was not ‘staged,’ which would be true for the most part, although there were spec- tators and a certain degree of preparation for certain performances. Likewise, one might call this a ‘participatory’ dance; again, although it was usually characterized by the lack of boundary between ‘performer’ and ‘audience,’ at times there were a designated set of dancers. A distinction might be made, then, between dancing bhangra in private sessions during the harvest season and the rather more ‘public’ performances at Visakhi fairs.

Our picture of the community bhangra is derived from the few printed descriptions and from the memories of personal informants; although by the time anyone had thought to inquire, such informants were few. As a result, one must also rely on an analysis of bhangra as performed by informed artists in the post-Partition era and the difficulty if not dubious task of stripping away accretions of the stage art to postulate what features were most likely a part of the community dance.

Annual harvest celebrations provided the venue for dance, singing, play, and revelry. Within this context, bhangra sessions appear to have been a distinctly male outlet for release, in which excessive consumption, taboo language, and physical exertion could be enjoyed. The session included men performing vigorous movements, sometimes squatting and leaping. Nearby and about, young men might be creating a ruckus, ‘dueling’ with canes; quarrels and intoxication were ubiquitous accoutrements to the evening and fair- time celebrations. Bhangra was not simply a dance to be done; it encompassed the hustle and bustle, the stomping and jumping of the sort that took place during celebrations. It may be revealing that in the Punjabi language, one does not ‘dance’ (nacchn. ā) bhangra, rather one is said to ‘do’ (literally, ‘put’) bhangra – bhangn. ā paun. ā. Yet aside from this amor- phous ‘event’ and vibe, as it were, what were the specific mode of performance and the aesthetics of community bhangra?

Bhangra was danced in an ‘open’ (khullhā) format lacking any particular organization – save a closed or broken circle formation that could expand or contract to accommodate impromptu participation. Like other dances of the region, the basic idea was to travel coun- terclockwise in a circle, although the dance actions one might perform were rather free and individualistic. Steps often involved an alternating rocking, forward and back or in towards the centre of the circle and back out, all while progressing in the circle. Bending at the knees, throwing both hands up in the air, and relaxed at the elbows were the common body positions.

Between bouts of dancing, individuals stepped into the middle of the crowd of dancers to sing–recite extempore or cliché lines of poetry delivered in a declamatory style. An intro- ductory verse, in the form of a ‘call’ to dance, was called sadd or Dholā. An example of such a sadd is the following, collected from bhangra drummer Garib Dass:

o pār jhanāṅ toṅ disdā ai belā belioṅ pār visendā ai d. holā o d. ab ke d. aggā mārı̄ṅ o shaikhā ye duniā jhat. dā melā

44

Across the Chenab, high grasses are seen And beyond those grasses still, lives my beloved. Firmly strike the mallet, O drummer – This world is but a moment-long fair.

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Figure 1. One cycle of a version of the bhangr. ā rhythm for d. hol. The top line represents the treble side of the drum and the bottom line represents the bass side. Transcription by G. Schreffler.

Figure 2. One cycle of a version of the kahirvā-style rhythm for d. hol. It is performed with a ‘swing’ feel to the eighth notes. Transcription by G. Schreffler.

After the last line of verse, a drummer played a drum-roll or rhythmic signal (tor. ā), leading into a metred groove and dancing by all. The dancing was occasionally interrupted by breaks for the recitation of more sadd verses as all stood to listen.45 There were no ‘songs’ (gı̄t) as such with bhangra, but rather refrains constructed from short verse forms. Indeed, Harbhajan Singh emphasized that there was not much singing at all.46 Print sources support the claim of recent informants that the verses were very often bawdy.47

The only necessary musical accompaniment to bhangra was the barrel drum d. hol, played by a hereditary professional hired for the occasion. It might also include playing on the reed pipe (shahnāı̄ or surnāı̄). One or two main rhythmic grooves were played. One of these, the quick time rhythm most exclusively connected with the dance, is appropriately known as bhangr. ā (Figure 1).

48 There was also a swinging, half-time groove, used for less vigorous dancing, which is analogous in form to the ubiquitous North Indian pattern called kahirvā (Figure 2).49

Throughout the years of my fieldwork, people stressed the informality and simplicity of the Visakhi bhangra. The dancers wore no ‘costume’, but rather just regular dress. Dancers might tie bullock’s bells around their ankles, however, for a noisy and rhythmic effect.50

Only men danced bhangra; public dancing by women was frowned upon in this cultural area. In terms of caste participation, Harbhajan Singh said that bhangra dancing was inclu- sive of ‘all castes’.51 However, it is clear that the local majority population was of the Jatt and other agricultural ethnicities, and it stands to reason that these farmers probably made up a majority of the dancers.

Folkloric bhangra

At the time of the 1947 Partition of Punjab, the very social networks that had made Visakhi fairs thrive would have been in chaos. For many practitioners of bhangra, now uprooted from their ancestral lands, there was no regular context for its performance. Recall that, firstly, most of the bhangra area was in what had now become Pakistan. For those practi- tioners who were able to remain in their native area, country fairs without their estranged brothers must have been joyless. And for the many migrants from Western Punjab who were resettled in the East, the trauma of reorganizing their lives and ties to the land would have made dancing a low priority. Further on, processes of modernization, on both ‘sides’ of Punjab,52 created an unfavourable environment for the community practice of dance.

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As the region industrialized, other entertainments like film and popular music superseded the traditional country fairs.

About this time, many modern nation-states had given birth to the phenomenon of folkloric dance troupes.53 Folklorized reconstructions of dance, while outside of their cus- tomary context, also began in Punjab soon after the Partition. These were initially put together by individuals at a grass-roots level, not as mandated by state agencies, though their potential for use in iconic displays of the region would quickly be realized. Thus a folkloric dance inspired by bhangra would be developed that became a ritual not to mark Visakhi, but rather state holidays, and to represent the Indian Punjab region generally. Folkloric bhangra developed as a practice through which to embody a modern Punjabi identity.

An anecdote tells of the performance of a Punjabi men’s dance in the refugee camp for the Western Punjabis displaced by the Partition, at Kurukshetra, India, in April 1948. It was performed on the occasion of a visit to the camp by Prime Minister Nehru and former Viceroy Mountbatten. Under the direction of Chaman Lal Rana, who had migrated from the area in which bhangra was practiced, these men’s dance to the dhol was done simply and given no name.54 A photograph taken in the autumn of 1947 in that very camp appears to show refugees dancing in a vigorous fashion like bhangra (Figures 3 and 4). If this was the case, it represents one of the earliest photographs of what might have been the community bhangra or at least the style of dancing on which the performance for India’s visiting leaders may have been based. It shows just how free and unorganized the dance could be. What is more, it shows how dance could have functioned as a means to engender feelings of unity in a new place.

In 1948,55 some men who had also gone through the experience of migrating to Eastern Punjab formed a dance troupe, and by the early 1950s they started to give public perfor- mances. These performances were: for a municipal project inauguration in village Bhadson (Patiala district), August 1951; at an agricultural exhibition at the Polo Grounds in Patiala,

Figure 3. Refugees from Western Punjab dancing in the camp at Kurukshetra, 1947. Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Used by arrangement with Magnum Photos.

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Figure 4. The PEPSU bhangra troupe, with Deepak brothers Gurbachan and Manohar (at left) and dhol-player Bhana Ram, 1954. Photo: Courtesy Sangeet Natak Akademi.

March 1952; and on the Ridge during the Summer Festival in Shimla, 1953.56 These were not the first times that something like bhangra had been staged, per se. Recent interviews by documentarian Teginder Singh Dhanoa, with individuals who saw the community bhangra before the Partition, reveal that at the fairs on Visakhi day, groups from surrounding vil- lages had by the later years come to be scheduled to present their bhangra in a competitive fashion.57 Nevertheless, the folkloric dance that began to be staged at events after the Partition was born of a different source and motivation.

Following Independence, Indian Punjabis had begun to reshape their sense of national- ity. This process of establishing an identity within the new nation was evident in the actions of the administration of the short-lived political state known as The Patiala and East Punjab States Union (PEPSU), a unit composed of erstwhile princely states.58 In 1952, a PEPSU administrator, the Raja of Nalagarh, Surendra Singh, as if in one of the last hurrahs for the institution of royal patronage, set his sights on the folkloric dance troupe that had attracted attention at the above events.59 The Raja was keen to film the group, and subsi- dized the purchase of uniforms and equipment.60 At his behest, the dance troupe created a sort of dance medley, an amalgamation that, within the compass of one routine, displayed glimpses of various regional Punjabi dances.61 The initial concept, however, may have actu- ally come from a troupe member, Manohar Deepak. In a magazine interview circa early 1960s, Deepak stated his motivation:

‘After the partition, people from Punjab were scattered in all places. I combined several Bangra dances into one judicious combination so that it contained various elements from various places in Punjab. My combination of several Bangra dances into one proved happy. Many Punjabis felt that they were seeing something belonging to their region, and it had the effect of giving something to every one’.62

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As per its early title, the group’s performance routine would represent ‘Men’s Punjabi Dance’, with no pretence to representing any one dance wholly and authentically. For administrators of PEPSU, it represented ‘the’ dance of Punjab – plain and simple.

With the Raja as Chairman, PEPSU’s Minister of Development as President, and others comprising a committee, the troupe was set up from that point under the patronage of the (princely) state. The troupe was officially presented by the Raja at a livestock fair in village Thehri (Patiala district), 1953.63 At this event, the Raja declared the dance to be ‘our state dance’ and ‘our dance of Punjab’. At one point the dance was even called ‘the dance of Patiala’.64 This PEPSU dance troupe revolved around brothers from a Kamboj commu- nity family of the Mahirok clan from Sunam, a small, provincial city about 56 kilometres west of Patiala. Its most visible personality would be the above mentioned Manohar Singh Deepak (1932–2006), then a student at Mohindra College in Patiala. Manohar started the group with his older brother, Gurbachan Singh (1923–1968) and with Chaman Lal Rana. Another Deepak brother, Avtar Singh (1929–2008), joined later, to form the core of the group’s dancers. Few individuals of Punjab’s more dominant landowning community, the Jatt, were however part of the group – one of them being fellow Mohindra College student Balbir Singh Sekhon (1930–2006), a native of the Patiala area. Manohar and his company, the sons of landowners, faced criticism from their peers for taking up dance performance; however, they had in mind a mission to revive the fading Punjabi dances.

Equally important to the troupe, however, were musical artists of the itinerant Bazigar clan whom the Partition had forced to migrate from Western Punjab.65 Some time around 1948,66 the Deepak family patriarch, the brothers’ grandfather, Captain Ram Singh, began to patronize this clan of Bazigars, who had been awaiting future relocation in the refugee camp in Ludhiana and were then resettled in Sunam. The Bazigars brought their essential expertise in dance and music to the ensemble. Among them was the godfather of mod- ern bhangra dhol-playing, Bhana Ram, and the algoze (double fipple-flute) player, Mangal Ram (Singh). Several of the group’s dancers were also of the Bazigar clan. It was largely these Bazigar artists who taught Western Punjabi dance forms to the Eastern Punjab-based Deepak family.67 The Deepak brothers had actually grown up in the Western Punjabi canal colony areas of Sargodha and Faisalabad (Lyallpur), but that was not a centre of historical bhangra practice and, as noted, dance had not been encouraged in their community. The Bazigars had been based in nearby bār areas of Western Punjab, in which bhangra was not practiced, but as dance specialists and nomads passing through other areas they had gained a knowledge of many dances. All this is to say that the dance presentation worked up by the group – even evident in its costumery for the first several years – seems to have reflected styles more characteristic of the more southerly areas of Western Punjab. In fact, as told by the son of Bhana Ram, Bahadur Singh, the troupe had actually focused on a presentation of the jhummar dance of the same area before that was ‘set aside’ due to the popularity of the new bhangra.68

A pivotal event in the history of Punjabi dance took place when the PEPSU troupe along with a couple dozen other young men were invited by the Ministry of Defense to represent PEPSU for the Republic Day festivities in New Delhi, 26 January 1954 (Figure 5). India’s annual Republic Day is celebrated by a parade displaying military might and national symbols. As well, groups from each state in India converge in the capital to display cultural forms that are emblematic of their respective regions. The primary vehicle for this display is music and dance. Under these circumstances, it must have seemed imperative that the newly drawn Punjab region prepare a dance that could clearly represent its identity. This 1954 Republic Day parade performance was significant for two reasons. The first is that,

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Figure 5. Unidentified group of Bazigar dancers performing a dance including an acrobatic stunt included in early folkloric bhangra, ca. 1950s. Photo: Courtesy Sangeet Natak Akademi.

for this particular presentation, the PEPSU troupe settled upon the catchy and more suc- cinct title ‘bhangra’ for their medley-style performance.69 The second reason was that it exposed the Indian nation at large to Punjabi dance, to which many onlookers took with great enthusiasm. One spectator expressed the following:

‘Although many other dances [at the Republic Day event] had far greater artistic value, [the bhangra] proved the most popular item . . . The gentle opening followed by the triumphant, powerfully suggestive yells, seemed to fascinate the women. That these tall sinuous men could be as soft one minute and as strong the next seemed to stimulate them, as indeed is the whole purpose of the dance’.70

One of the women thus ‘stimulated’ was Bombay film actress Vyjayanthimala, who later turned her bhangra-inspiration into a dance for the film New Delhi (1956).71 The routine of the PEPSU troupe generated enough interest for the group itself to be featured in several films in the years following,72 and Manohar Deepak went on to become a film star. As for Republic Day, the group returned each year up through 1957.

Some of the new creations of the PEPSU troupe throughout this period – legitimate products of artistic licence – were nonetheless accepted by unknowing observers as rem- nants of the older, community bhangra. In this paradigm, movements and rhythms from various sources were combined to make a more interesting presentation. One spectacular new feature was the inclusion of acrobatic displays, introduced by the Bazigar members of the team. The Bazigars are known for their traditional profession of acrobatics, and it seems that before folkloric forms were standardized, there had been much playful varia- tions in Punjabi dance (Figure 6).73 The PEPSU troupe’s appearance in the film Naya Daur (1957) is full of tumbling, along with their oft-pictured signature stunt of one man standing atop a pot, which is itself upon another man’s head. The PEPSU troupe sang songs with their bhangra, and, with Mangal Ram’s algoze, added minor instrumental accompaniment. Bazigar Harnam Singh played the plucked lute tūmbā, seen clearly in Naya Daur. Another

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Figure 6. One of Master Harbhajan Singh’s groups performing bhangra on stage on Republic Day, New Delhi, 1970. The dhol-player in the background is Garib Dass. Photo: Courtesy Sangeet Natak Akademi.

Bazigar, Mahi Ram, played the percussive metal tongs, chimt.ā. 74 In the film Jagte Raho

(1956), we see dancers dramatically introduce the sapp (‘snake’), a sort of wooden lattice- work clapper that expands and contracts.75 Yet another ‘prop’ of sorts to be used was the kāt.o, a roughly carved ‘squirrel’ set atop a pole whose ‘mouth’ and ‘tail’ are jerked into action at the pull of a string.76 The latter two accoutrements, along with the farmer’s staff (khūnd. ā), would go on to be utilized to great visual effect by bhangra groups, starting in the late 1960s.77

In a subtler way, the PEPSU group added aspects that one might attribute to the ‘Spirit of the Nehru Era’. This modern bhangra was to embody the ‘tireless Punjabi spirit’, which in turn mirrored the spirit of a hopeful independent India in general. PEPSU troupe dancer Balbir Singh Sekhon was known for his admonitions that one must always keep up one’s head when dancing bhangra, since, ‘Punjabis bow to no one’ (except their Gurus).78

Dancers were to appear as gay as possible, and dancers on recent bhangra teams have been ordered by their coaches to smile as much as possible. ‘Vitality’ and ‘virility’ are words that often appear in modern descriptions of bhangra.79 Indeed, more than some- thing that appeared as quintessentially Punjabi, even in this earlier period, this bhangra was deemed appropriate to represent India in a positive (and, notably, secular) light. For example, dancers from the PEPSU troupe entertained Soviet leaders during their visit to the region in 1955,80 and when Prime Minister Nehru brought a cultural delegation to China in 1955, along with it went part of the PEPSU group.81 Modern bhangra’s style and format were successful in making the dance local, national, and international all at once.

With the change of just a decade, in the early 1960s, a new era of folkloric bhangra began. New groups led by Master Harbhajan Singh began to bring a different interpre- tation of folkloric bhangra on the Republic Day. Harbhajan Singh (b. 1938), in contrast to the Deepak family, came from an area where bhangra had been danced historically.82

Harbhajan Singh’s group thus lent a certain authoritative knowledge of community

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bhangra to the choreography. At the same time, they were also beholden to accept the new standards set in the amalgamated art now associated with the term. For example, routines included a received version of a jhummar dance step. Whereas the tone of the Bazigar-influenced PEPSU troupe’s dance (as can be seen in 1950s films) was rather play- ful and soft, Harbhajan Singh’s became more emphatic and angular (Figure 6). Harbhajan Singh led the Republic Day groups annually without break until 1976, and several times afterwards.83

The rearrangement of Punjabi dance under the rubric of ‘bhangra’ was becoming institutionalized by the 1960s. Numerous colleges formed bhangra teams to rival the prac- tice started by Manohar Deepak at Mohindra College. Of note among the early colleges were DAV College (Jalandhar), Khalsa College (Amritsar), and Baring College (Batala).84

College ‘youth festivals’ provided the stage where modern bhangra’s new additions would become canonized. For these annual events, students from the colleges in a given area meet at a central location not only to mingle, but also to compete, in the areas of the arts, crafts, and their knowledge of various subjects. The most popular aspect to these festi- vals has been the dance competition, which, up until the 2000s, had consisted primarily of a bhangra dance competition for males and a giddhā competition for females. Both events have packed halls with rival groups who were full of spirit not only for their col- leges, but also filled with nationalistic sentiments for Punjab – as they believed to have been displayed through its ‘folk’ dances. Each year, beginning a couple of months before the competitions in November, college dance teams began daily practice of their routines. These were prepared under the direction of a professional coach and to the accompani- ment of whatever musicians were necessary. Winning teams at the ‘zonal’ (i.e. district) level proceeded to the ‘interzonal’ (i.e. all-state) level. The competitive nature of these college bhangra ‘teams’, and the involvement of professional ‘coaches’85 and university staff members put in-charge of bhangra activities, encouraged the streamlining of a typical bhangra routine. These circumstances also made it possible to quickly canonize any new additions to the routine. Institutionalization became complete as successive batches of stu- dents went through the school system having learned more or less established versions of bhangra routines. Indeed, universities provided the environment where folkloric bhangra received its most consistent support. Colleges and not village fairs became the sites where the post-independence Punjabi youth got initiated into bhangra.

In the 1970s especially, many new movements, rhythms, and songs were incor- porated into folkloric bhangra. A key figure in this respect was Sardar Bhag Singh (1928–2008), who had emigrated from the Northwestern area of Punjab at the Partition. He became Deputy Director of the Punjab government’s Department of Information & Public Relations, and started being in-charge of state bhangra groups from 1968. While a dancer with extensive knowledge of several Western Punjabi forms, Bhag Singh’s main interest was writing for theatre and film. That is, he was a creator of works for the stage.

In 1971, there occurred perhaps the most significant event to affect the form of folkloric bhangra since it was brought to the stage. A bhangra group, under the direction of Bhag Singh, was sent to perform at the 4th International Folk Festival in Monastir, Tunisia. The dozen-member entourage for this prestigious international event included dancer Harbhajan Singh (still in-charge of Republic Day bhangra) and Patiala-based dancer and theatre director Harpal Tiwana (1935–2002), along with dhol-player Lal Chand Bhatti. As Bhag Singh once explained, each participating national group was allotted 40 minutes to dance in the festival. Realizing that the current parade- and competition-oriented loop of bhangra was of insufficient length to sustain extended interest, Bhag Singh’s group made up eight or nine new dance movements for the event.86 Henceforth these steps, known

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collectively as the intarnaishanal chālāṅ (‘the international moves’) were absorbed as a feature of nearly all the bhangra presentations. Bhag Singh would later regret his ‘mistake’ in having taken the decision to contrive these movements.87

A paradigm emerged in which it was customary to add steps (and accompanying rhythms) to the mix of bhangra’s routine. Although there were different people present- ing bhangra in slightly different ways, within the institutionalized context, such variations were not generally viewed as individual contributions or creativity as such. It was as if folkloric bhangra consisted of one general pool belonging to the anonymous ‘folk’. So far as disbelief remained suspended and folkloric bhangra was a ‘traditional’ Punjabi dance, the tendency was to willfully obscure the changes brought in by individuals – a principle that goes a long way in explaining what I have found to be the erasure of memory of the 1971 Tunisia event. Nevertheless, it was obvious that folkloric bhangra had changed very much since its genesis. The method of always adding to the pool that made up ‘the’ bhangra dance, rather than selecting from among possibilities to create individual choreographies, would eventually show in its extreme.

Development of folkloric bhangra’s routines largely occurred in the major East Punjab cities of Chandigarh, Patiala, Ludhiana, Jalandhar, and Amritsar. These were places that had prominent colleges with bhangra teams and local communities of dhol-playing accom- panists. Individual developments, however, would have been shared when teams came together at the annual youth festivals. There were also major events, in addition to the Republic Day parades, at which performers across the state came together and new cus- toms were started. For example, the production of the film Heer Ranjha (1970), shot in a village near Kharar in 1966–1967, featured a major dance sequence with many performers who would go on to spread what they had learned there. In 1982, the ninth Asian Games were held in Delhi and featured hundreds of dance performers. At least one new step and rhythm was introduced to bhangra at that time.88 In this way, the dance was being regularly systematized.

By the mid-1980s, a more or less standard form of folkloric bhangra was established, though trends like the revival of jhummar in the early 2000s continued to affect the form of specific sequences.89 The typical stage presentation of folkloric bhangra in this form had come to include a dizzying array of steps, yet crunched into a timeframe of just around ten minutes.90 It stood in great contrast to Punjabi dances in more naturalistic contexts, which would dwell on a few steps and one or two rhythms for long periods. The rules of competitions at youth festivals influenced both the establishment of such a timeframe and the desirability of including the maximum of variety91 within such a tight performance. Moving in synchronization, the performers are coordinated from action to action, moving smoothly and without pause. The dhol-player must rapidly shift among a set of over twenty rhythms to cue and match each action. Such a tight and dense presentation is achieved only after daily drilling of the routine. And so, the overall modus operandi of folkloric bhangra is significantly different from the community dance. The former is something highly ‘staged’ and far from participatory, and yet, paradoxically, it has often been viewed as representative of Punjab’s common ‘folk’ – a view enhanced by its gaudy costumery that seems to burlesque farmers’ attire of an earlier era. Indeed, folkloric bhangra’s consistent appeal seems to have stemmed from this dual nature. It can reference the past and tradition, while at the same time its paradigm encourages the incorporation of the new and diverse.

Even into the twenty-first century, no cultural presentation in the Indian Punjab was considered ‘complete’ without (folkloric) bhangra, for which the honour of the last item on the programme was usually reserved. Such has been the prominent profile of ‘the Punjabi folk dance, bhangra’ that it is recognized as the dance supposedly most emblematic of

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Punjabis. When folkloric bhangra dance is performed in further removed contexts outside of Punjab, the tendency has been to view it as ‘traditional’ and to collapse the palpable distinctions between this and the pre-Partition community dance.

Diaspora bhangra

The folkloric paradigm of Punjabi dance helped to inspire yet another dance phenomenon in Western countries where Punjabis have settled and been born. Staged presentations of bhangra dance have occurred in most of the nations with sizeable Punjabi communities. The largest bloc of dance groups is based in Canada and the United States, where com- petitions and participating teams make up what dancers often call the North American Bhangra Circuit. Most of the major Canadian and American universities with significant South Asian populations have some sort of bhangra team, competitive or otherwise. Other groups, not attached to universities, exist as ‘heritage’ ensembles for exhibition purposes or ‘elite’ competition teams. The concept of what these groups do is comparable to that of the college teams in Punjab so far as the purpose is to create a staged presentation that is both entertaining and, at some level, representative of Punjabi identity. The phenomena exhibit great differences, however, with respect to their performance details and the par- ticipants’ ideas about how what they are doing relates to historical aesthetic values and practices.

As will be seen, Diaspora bhangra dance did not develop as a direct extension of prac- tice in India. However, some bridges may certainly be identified. India’s PEPSU troupe had in their day spawned several imitators, which would go on to serve the practical func- tion of filling out the ranks for large performances.92 One of these was the troupe Nachdi Jawani of Patiala, some of whose members beefed up the core of PEPSU dancers in the film Naya Daur.93 The import of this is that a few of the members of Nachdi Jawani – Gurdev Dhanda, Kirpal Khanna, and Amraou Sekhon – soon emigrated to America, thereby taking the seed of folkloric bhangra to the Diaspora. The young men set out for the US in 1960, on student visas and with bhangra instruments d. hol, chimt.ā, and algoze in tow. During a stopover in Bangkok, the trio performed bhangra for a local TV station. From Bangkok, the dancers travelled to San Francisco on the S.S. Franklin, aboard which they danced bhangra on the deck for other passengers.94 The local press had heard of the fascinat- ing dancers aboard the ship, and they were bombarded with interviews upon their arrival. In the US, the Nachdi Jawani members joined already-arrived teammate Jaidev Dhanda, who had brought bhangra outfits when he came in 1959. Along with a few other gentle- men that Jaidev had primed, they formed a dance troupe that began performing around California and at colleges, including the University of Nevada, Reno. Ms. Kartar Dhillon, an American-born daughter of one of the Punjabi pioneers in Northern California, saw the troupe as a means to explore her heritage and became their manager.95 By July 1961, the group even included non-Punjabi American women.96 Under the auspices of ‘Punjab Cultural Society’, this Bay Area bhangra troupe eventually attained enough renown to be invited to perform in Washington, DC, for the nation’s bicentennial celebrations. The fledgling bhangra dance milieu represented by this group in California was later joined (in 1977) by Surinder Singh Dhanoa, who had been one of the many dancers in the film Heer Ranjha.97 In the late 1970s, Dhanoa began to advise the Indian Student Association of San Jose State University,98 whose bhangra team would go on to become one of the first such groups in North America in the early 1990s.

In British Columbia, the other large Punjabi Diaspora centre of the West Coast, bhangra took root in the 1970s. After coming to Vancouver from India as a teenager,

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Paul Binning got together with schoolmates to found the Punjabi Cultural Association in 1970.99 By 1972 the organization had formed a bhangra group, the know-how for which Binning gained from a recently immigrated friend.100 Concurrently in the early 1970s, the Lyallpur Khalsa College (Jalandhar) graduate Charanjit Saini formed a bhangra team in the Williams Lake area, The Khalsa Dancers.101 Yet another dance group, Surrey India Arts Club, was started in 1975. It included immigrants who had been dancers on the college teams in Jalandhar.102 Members of these B.C. groups performed at the open- ing of Vancouver’s Granville Island bridge (1972),103 the 1974 World’s Fair in Spokane, Washington, the 1976 Montreal Olympics, and Expo ’86.104 The large size of the Punjabi community in British Columbia, and likely the comparative ease of obtaining visas to Canada also meant that people there had better access to experienced performers from Punjab. One of the longest established traditional dhol-players in North America, for exam- ple, was Piare Lal, a Bazigar, who settled in Surrey.105 The dhol-player Garib Dass was invited to British Columbia for a 6-month residency to accompany and train dancers in 1986 and several times thereafter.106 In this way, there was some regular influx of a bhangra culture from India.

Folkloric bhangra became practiced in the United Kingdom, too, by the 1970s. A diver- sity report from the Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976, stated that Sikh groups had popularized bhangra dance. Learning bhangra dancing had been put on the syllabus of a secondary school in Birmingham.107 The report mentioned the Anjaana group of Derby and refers to ‘excellent’ groups from Southall.108 One of the latter was the Great Indian Dancers.109 Yet Britain’s bhangra scene became focused on music, which was danced to at concerts and in clubs, and on newly developed styles of playing the dhol – as a listening music rather than as an accompaniment to any formal dance.110

The phenomenon of a college performance (initially non-competitive) circuit had developed in North America by 1990 and became appreciably distinct from the scattered folkloric bhangra seeds. This is because, despite whatever folkloric models may have been offered, Diaspora bhangra in its early phase was developed largely by young people from images in the popular media. Since the late 1950s, as can be seen in films like Bhangra (1959), cinematic ‘mela’ scenes had been marrying bhangra-like dance to the popular music (i.e. film songs). These scenes created juxtapositions that did not exist in real life, e.g. musical ensembles played with dancing in a field, or women dancing with men. This created a simulacrum of bhangra – a mediated vision of bhangra style. The Diaspora dance had a strong base in the continuation of this phenomenon in most Punjabi films and, later, in music videos for the so-called ‘bhangra songs’ of the 1980s and 1990s. It was designed in live venues, much like the pantomimes of filmi dance, to match prerecorded soundtracks. What made this form of coordinated staged dance recognizably different from live stage presentations of filmi dance was its use of the bhangra popular music and the ‘Punjabi’ image taken up by performers. By the start of the 1990s, South Asian students’ associations at universities had staged performances in this vein.111

Among the first competitions to create a context for this paradigm – of film-style dance to Punjabi popular music – was the dance contest sponsored by the Artesia, California store Ziba Music.112 Starting in 1992, the Ziba dance contest included a range of film-style dance performances, including Hindi film song numbers. Although bhangra had been exhibited in Los Angeles at least as early as 1977,113 one might observe that the Southern California Punjabi community was not as connected to the folkloric dance forms of Punjab as were the communities in the Bay Area and British Columbia. Moreover, Punjabis did not numer- ically dominate the L.A.-area South Asian community as much as they did in other areas. Accordingly, neither was it an atmosphere of trying to emulate ‘pure folk’ dance, nor did

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the community have access to such tradition bearers as there were elsewhere.114 Indeed, bhangra competitions in Southern California continue to have the reputation of favouring a so-called ‘modern’ or ‘fusion’ aesthetic.

Soon after the 1992 Ziba dance contest, university-based competitions began that were dedicated to bhangra. Several universities had formed bhangra teams, often coming out of the context of the annual cultural shows given by South Asian students’ clubs. The competition organizers created intercollegiate venues for interaction. The first such regu- lar competition was founded in 1993 by the South Asian Society at George Washington University. This ‘Bhangra Blowout’ franchise quickly grew and has been held annually ever since. On the West Coast, at Stanford, the South Asian students’ club Sanskriti started their ‘Bhangra by the Bay’ competition in 1994.115 In 1999, the Berkeley Students Sikh Association started their ‘Dhol di Awaz’ and UCLA students began ‘Bruin Bhangra’. These engendered more competitive teams, events to serve other regions, and a continental ‘circuit’ in the 2000s.

The character of Diaspora bhangra, as it was broadly established, differed significantly from prior bhangra phenomena. Like folkloric bhangra in India, Diaspora bhangra is a construct of dance elements from different sources. In the case of the latter however, the newer elements tend to have come from trends in the Western, urban youth culture. It tends to prefer the kahirvā-style rhythm, which works well for both the Punjabi and Hip hop- style dancing. Hip hop dancing, indeed, provided a common ground of familiarity for the dancers, many of whom were not Punjabi, some of whom were not South Asian at all, but most of whom grew up in a society and as a generation that was saturated with Hip hop and R&B.

The different character of the Diaspora phenomenon can also be explained by the advent of women in the dance. Women have been active on Diaspora bhangra teams, some- times more so than men. Many all-female bhangra teams exist, and more still contain equal parts of male and female members. However, bhangra dance style has historically empha- sized a degree of masculinity in its movements. In order to avoid women having to perform in a fashion that is considered overly ‘masculine’, the dance was initially shaped to form a style one might call ‘unisex’. In this regard, calisthenics-style, Western pop music choreog- raphy à la Janet Jackson provided a model, as did the mixed-gender dance sequences that one finds in many Indian films. More recently, Diaspora bhangra style has become pro- gressively more ‘athletic’ (as dancers describe it), with such movements now performed by men and women.

The method of most Diaspora bhangra teams, up through the mid-2000s, was shaped by two major factors. The first, being students left to their own devices in most cases, teams lacked the ‘coaches’ of folkloric bhangra. There was a general lack of knowledge, there- fore, of how bhangra was performed in India. Thus the team choreographers or ‘captains’ pieced together whatever information they had to create the dances. Among the primary sources of this information were films, music videos, and experiences on the dance floor at wedding parties. The lack of professional coaches resulted in a less uniform face to the art, as compared to what had become formulaic and near-homogenized presentations in Punjab.

The second factor influencing method was that most Diaspora teams lacked drum- mers. Whereas bhangra dancers may have belonged to majority ethnic groups, playing the dhol in Punjab has remained nearly exclusively the domain of men of a few hereditary professional clans of minority communities. These economically disadvantaged and lesser educated individuals have had little opportunity to settle abroad.116 Due to the absence of live drumming – considered an essential element in India – most Diaspora teams danced

404 G. Schreffler

to popular music ‘mixes’.117 The effects of this with respect to aesthetics of form were significant. The popular songs usually remained in one or two rhythms, making it impossi- ble to properly ‘match’ the various actions as would be done in the folkloric bhangra. For many, however, this was no cause to be disconcerted. They were unaware of the canon- ized steps of Indian colleges, and preferred steps that were more like ‘dance-floor’ moves anyway.

Some regional differences within the Diaspora are also notable. There was an emphasis on ‘traditional’ aesthetics in Northern California versus ‘modern’ aesthetics in the South. These had less to do with how people absolutely believed one should perform and more to do with demographics and the history of Punjabi cultural production in those areas. These two different approaches to performance – one seeking to replicate as much of folkloric bhangra as it knew, and the other settled upon creating something appealing to a broadly South Asian–American pop culture sensibility – would continue to play out.

Issues of method and regional difference developed through the 2000s. On the heels of a fad for dhol-playing that developed, especially in the UK, many American-born Punjabis from non-traditional backgrounds gained access to and started to learn to play the dhol. From around 2003–2004, the number of Diaspora-born young dhol-players grew, and after mid-decade they were a common feature of many teams. However, comparatively few among these drummers have been able to accompany in full accordance with the folkloric bhangra’s standard ‘system’. Live dhol-playing is still not an essential component to the method of Diaspora bhangra, being at times something more to generate raw excitement and to create an image of authenticity.

The information divide was bridged with the introduction of videos on YouTube in 2006, which brought footage of bhangra teams in India, and Diaspora bhangra subse- quently moved closer to the Indian practice. The trend became for teams to ‘go live’ – to dance to dhol and other acoustic instruments and singing. Teams were challenged by the issue of whether to embrace this ‘traditional’ mode of performance, replete with its cultural clout, or to go with the well-established local sensibilities of ‘fusion’. The Internet became one of the sites where a ‘traditional versus. modern’ debate received passionate discussion.118

In the late 2000s such debates became discouraged in favour of an attitude of judging performances on their own aesthetic terms. More recently, while the goals of Diaspora bhangra team participants have been various (a feeling of camaraderie, an interest in exploring cultural roots, fun, etc.), their competition performances emphasize a common goal: impact. Teams battle to win the praise of the audience and judges through appeal- ing costumes, engaging music mixes, spectacular stunts, impressive synchronicity, novelty, nostalgia, or however that may be accomplished. If the folkloric groups in Punjab were like football teams, the Diaspora teams have often seemed more like competition cheerleaders – more so the urban dance crew of the You Got Served variety. In the Diaspora, bhangra has again developed as a crucible for the aesthetics of a place and a generation.

Conclusion

Most ideas about bhangra dance can be understood in relation to three broad phenomena, corresponding to distinct locations and periods of development. Each has had different reasons for being and emphasized different aspects of performance. Performers’ concep- tions of themselves in relation to bhangra performance and their methods of creating it are therefore best discussed within the specific genre and historical context to which they have belonged.

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The first known bhangra phenomenon was a relatively limited community dance of males. First noted in some form in the Pashtun areas of the Northwest, bhangra proliferated in the central Punjab areas – now mostly within Pakistan – by the 1880s. The dance in this area became associated with spring harvest festivities, where it continued to develop as it was practiced in local circles up until the 1947 Partition. Being heavily context-specific, the disruption of its context by the ensuing events of conflict and migration essentially brought an end to this phenomenon. Because it receives only scant mention in history and because interviews with past practitioners – most of who are now deceased – only began in the 1980s, its details are not well known to us. We do know that it was relatively unstructured, informal, and choreographically simple. Moreover, it may be supposed, due to lack of any evidence to the contrary, that community bhangra carried no special status in representing a Punjabi regional identity. Emphasis would have been on the event itself, in which bhangra was part of a larger expression of merriment, if not also a ritual of community.

The second phenomenon is a folkloric dance that was first developed in 1950s-India, in an initial effort to sustain dance practices threatened by extinction after the Partition’s changes. While practitioners came from the position of creating an aesthetic presenta- tion of Punjabi dance, in the atmosphere of a nationalizing Indian Punjab, their activities took on iconic significance. Individual interpretation of pieces of past dances, very few of which actually belonged to the community dance of bhangra, was nevertheless refo- cused through the lens of what ‘bhangra’ could represent: an energetic and indomitable Punjabi people. The folkloric bhangra dance became both a practical and a conceptual form, a framework within which, with a secure faith in its Punjabi essence, artists felt free to assimilate and innovate. By the 1980s, folkloric bhangra’s form was virtually unrec- ognizable from what was first developed in the 1950s. A large amount of variety within performance became the aesthetic, while overall there was an effort to standardize and perpetuate each newly established custom and to sublimate personal creativity. Because folkloric bhangra retains the concept of representing the traditions of the Punjab region and its people, its canon has developed so as to appear universal, and its performance is presented as timeless. The practice of folkloric bhangra was carried through the twenti- eth century as the Indian Punjab state’s default, non-sectarian cultural display. It could be called an ‘invented tradition’, yet it is nonetheless one of modern Punjabis’ most important traditions.

Having become institutionalized practice throughout Indian Punjab, and also having become deeply attached to displays of (Indian) Punjabi identity, the concept of bhangra took on perhaps even greater significance in the context of Diaspora Punjabis’ efforts to remain connected with their past identities and heritage. A third phenomenon emerged that retained the idea of bhangra dance as containing the essence of Punjabiness even while practical constraints and local tastes determined a very different form. The development of this phenomenon gained momentum by the 1990s, especially through cultural shows and the establishment of college teams. Notably, the more heavily mass media-based environ- ment of Diaspora bhangra practitioners led to the attachment of Punjabi popular music and video images to the dance. Diaspora bhangra coexisting with the practice of dancing to Punjabi popular music in clubs, the concepts of bhangra dance and new ‘bhangra music’ became fused. Yet despite the confusion of lay observers, the dance itself remains a discreet focus for its dedicated practitioners. Most importantly, Diaspora bhangra’s practitioners have been among those most forced to come to terms with the effect of the use of the term ‘bhangra’ to refer to many things and the related tendency to frame all as part of an essentialized ‘tradition.’ So while Diaspora bhangra has been analysed in recent years as a ‘culture competition’ that constructs an artificial notion of ‘authenticity’,119 the Diaspora

406 G. Schreffler

itself has started to deconstruct bhangra as being first and foremost a form of Punjabi iden- tity. This has happened through a renewed emphasis on artistic aesthetics and creativity. Some degree of ‘traditionality’ remains a significant raison d’etre of bhangra, but that fac- tor is, in the current evolution, not one that must be emphasized in order to maintain the sense of ‘Punjabiness’ that is at the heart of all definitions of bhangra.

One need not define bhangra too rigidly. Bhangra dance is certainly not limited to the formal activities that are the centre of each of the three phenomena discussed in this article. People also may be considered to be ‘doing bhangra’ when dancing free-form to a dhol or to recorded Punjabi-style music. At points in the past, such may have been referred to by Punjabis merely as nacchn. ā-t.apn. ā (‘dancing and jumping around’) or ‘disco’, rather than as ‘doing bhangra.’ Media images have helped ‘bhangra’ to become a colloquialism for Punjabi dance generally. This generality should be understood as a side effect of both the uninformed perception of bhangra as ‘the’ Punjabi dance and the concept of ‘bhangra’ as a musical genre of the Western dance club type. This suggests that any dance performed within a context coded as Punjabi – due to music, dress, ethnic appearance, etc. – and whose movement exhibits a minimal resemblance to certain stereotypical movements is ‘bhangra’. So far as this is a frequent use of the term, which conveys a meaning in certain discursive contexts, it must be considered to have some validity. My hope, however, is that the preceding exposition of the development of bhangra phenomena will help writers and discussants in scholarly contexts to situate their observations of Punjabi dance with greater awareness and nuance.

Acknowledgements The many contributors to the information in this article are, regrettably, too numerous to name. However, here I must specifically remember my guru, Ustad Garib Dass, who first exposed me to the Indian system of bhangra and dhol. I thank two anonymous reviewers of SAHC for their helpful critiques and suggestions. Finally, this article owes a debt of gratitude to Jim Dhanoa, who pro- vided feedback and additional information. The article is dedicated to the late Gurdev Singh Dhanda (d. 2012), credited as the first person to bring dhol to and among the first bhangra dancers in America.

Notes 1. Schreffler, “Migration Shaping Media.” 2. The musicological and choreological details of each bhangra phenomenon, by which they will

also be distinguished, are not the emphases here, rather they are provided where illustrative. 3. See for example: Gopinath, “Bombay, U.K., Yuba City”; and Dudrah, “Drum ‘n’ Dhol.” 4. See for example the broad use of bhangra in Roy, Bhangra Moves. 5. For example: Banerji and Baumann, “Bhangra 1984-8”; Chacko and Menon, “Longings and

Belongings”; and Maira, “Identity Dub.” 6. See for example: Tandon, Punjabi Century, 58; and Gargi and M.K., “Punjab.” 7. Studies of performative forms in Punjabi folklore, a field that began to develop in the mid-

twentieth century, have been largely focused on folk songs. See, Gibb Schreffler, “Vernacular Music and Dance,” 198. However, Bhangra dance did also make it into at least one general, non-Punjabi work on dance, Bhavnavi, The Dance in India, 183 (plate 94).

8. See: Jugindar Singh, “Lok Nāch”; Daler, Panjābı̄ Lok-Nāch; and Bedi, Panjāb dı̄ Lokdhārā. 9. See: Banerji, “Ghazals to Bhangra”; Banerji and Baumann, “Bhangra 1984-8”; and Baumann,

“The Re-invention of Bhangra.” 10. See for example: Manuel, “Music as Symbol,” 235–6; and Slobin, “Micromusics of the

West,” 44. 11. Nahar Singh, Panjābı̄ Lok-Nāch. 12. The work is written in a register of the language that uses many sophisticated words (some

are not even in standard dictionaries), academic jargon, and with Sanskrit-based vocabulary

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that would not be used in everyday speech and which would not likely be understood by many people who have not gone to college in Punjab or read academic writing in Punjabi.

13. Dhillon, Folk Dances of Punjab. 14. In an English piece from London’s Bazaar, Summer 1987 (‘How Not to Dance Bhangra’),

Amarjit Chandan cites a testimony to the contrary. Parbinder Singh, a captain of bhangra teams at Republic Day in the 1970s, is stated to have said he was ashamed of the dance he had performed, that it was ‘not at all a Punjabi folk dance,’ and that it should have been called something other than ‘bhangra.’ (Article copy obtained through courtesy of the author.)

15. Schreffler, “Out of the Dhol Drums.” 16. Sonja Wolter of Berlin wrote a 2002 Master’s thesis on bhangra dance after seven weeks’

fieldwork in Punjab; Wolter and I were in communication in 2001, however I am unable to locate her finished work for citation. Laura Leante’s fieldwork on bhangra dance in Punjab was done in establishing background to her excellent discussions of Punjabi music and identity, e.g. Leante, “Urban Myth.”

17. Ballantyne, “Displacement, Diaspora, and Difference.” 18. Roy, Bhangra Moves. 19. One of the early Internet discussion threads to begin this discourse was on the website Punjabi

Network, entitled ‘Bhangra – Can we call bhangra in its present form our traditional folk dance?’ Its primary discussants from mid-2001 included Tejinder Singh (dancer with Surrey India Arts Club), Amit Aulakh (college student dancer at George Washington University), Teginder Singh Dhanoa (Punjabi Lok Virsa, Bay Area), Sonja Wolter, and myself.

20. This article is drawn from research on Punjabi music and dance since 1999. Fieldwork comprised several stays, stretching for periods of months to a year in India (2000, 2001, 2004–2005, 2006) and shorter trips to Punjabi communities in Pakistan (2001, 2006), England (2009), Canada (British Columbia, 2009, 2010, 2011), and the US (California, 1999–2003, 2007).

21. In all probability, it was the website PunjabOnline.Com (1996-pres.) that most caused the spread of the ‘common wisdom’ on the Internet that bhangra dance originated in the four- teenth or fifteenth century. The site contains a widely plagiarized article, ‘Bhangra History,’ written by Clint Kelly and Jasjeet Thind (formerly of the Cornell Bhangra Club), which states without evidence that bhangra existed ‘about five hundred years ago.’ Accessed July 27, 2012. http://www.punjabonline.com/servlet/library.history?Action=Bhangra. See for example the reproduction of this common wisdom in: Singh, “Sikh Folklore,” 551.

22. Guru Ram Das (1570s) made reference to a dance called ghūmar (Guru Granth Sahib, 698). 23. Tucker, Report of the Settlement, 75. 24. Ridgway, Pathans, 71. 25. Akbar, “North West Frontier Province,” 791. 26. See Schreffler, “It’s Our Culture.” 27. Punjab Settlement and Census Service Office, Gazetteer of the Rawalpindi District, 90. 28. Punjab Government, Attock District, 144. 29. Religious Tract Society, The Sunday at Home, 415. Participants at the mela are said to hail

from nearby villages in the Sialkot district, but it is unclear whether the event was held at the Sialkot Mission or elsewhere.

30. Curiously, both of the alternate spellings lack the retroflex ‘r.’ used in today’s pronunciation, suggesting that the term may have been unfamiliar or not standardized at that point.

31. Maya Singh, The Panjabi Dictionary, 123. 32. Gazetteer of the Sialkot District, 71. 33. Nahar Singh, Panjābı̄ Lok-Nāch, map. 34. Jugindar Singh, “Lok Nāch,” 121. 35. Personal communication, February 23, 2005. 36. This estimated area would make up about 6.6% of the total area of the current states of Punjab

(Pakistan and India) combined. 37. Nahar Singh, Panjābı̄ Lok-Nāch, 63. 38. Ibid., map. 39. Brard, East of Indus, 312. 40. Harbhajan Singh, personal communication, February 23, 2005. According to Sajjan Singh

Pandher, who danced bhangra as a teenager before Partition, these nightly sessions began

408 G. Schreffler

‘15 days’ before Visakhi (in unpublished video interview with Teginder and Surinder Dhanoa, February 15, 2006).

41. Harbhajan Singh, personal communication, February 23, 2005. 42. A sense of evening bhangra sessions as rehearsals comes from the statements of Amar

Singh of Bhinder Nagar (in unpublished video interview with Teginder and Surinder Dhanoa, February 19, 2006).

43. Rose, A Glossary, 920. 44. Performed by Garib Dass, personal communication, May 2003. The currency of this verse

in the traditional era, learned by Garib Dass through oral transmission, is corroborated by its mention in the Pakistani publication, “Punjabi Folk-Songs,” 36.

45. Saini, The Social and Economic History, 138. 46. Personal communication, February 23, 2005. 47. See for example: Randhawa, Out of the Ashes, 199. 48. This version of the rhythm, which I learned from Garib Dass, was said by him to be character-

istic of the ‘old’ bhangra dance. It has more treble strokes and is performed at a slower tempo than the bhangr. ā rhythm most often played nowadays for the folkloric dance. The understood reason for this is that it was played for long stretches of dance and the dancers would become too tired if it were too fast. On the other hand, the bhangr. ā rhythm that is played in folkloric bhangra is employed as an exact double-time of the kahirvā rhythm, to display brief, very fast actions.

49. Due to some incidental historical developments, this rhythm is now often called lud. d. ı̄ by drummers in India and called chāl in the Diaspora. However, it should not be confused with the customary rhythm of the Punjabi dance known as lud. d. ı̄.

50. Personal communication, February 23, 2005. 51. Ibid. 52. The ultimate fate of bhangra in Pakistan after Partition is a topic requiring further research.

Nevertheless, Pakistani informants in 2001 and 2006 indicated to me no significant attempts to perpetuate a bhangra practice there. For example, an instrument maker hailing from Wazirabad claimed (July 2001) that bhangra had not been practiced in his town, citing the reason that the town had become ‘advanced.’

53. Shay, Choreographic Politics, 1–2. 54. Dhillon, “Panjāb de Lok Nāchāṅ,” 20. 55. Avtar Singh Deepak, February, 17, 2006 (in unreleased video interview with Teginder and

Surinder Dhanoa). 56. Ibid. In a later interview, PEPSU troupe member Balbir Sekhon said the Bhadson event took

place in 1952 (unreleased video by Teginder and Surinder Dhanoa, February 23, 2006). 57. Dalip Singh Pannu (b. 1923), February 14, 2006 (in unreleased video interview by Teginder

and Surinder Dhanoa). 58. PEPSU existed from 1949 until merging with the state of Punjab in 1956. See: Gursharan

Singh, History of PEPSU . 59. Balbir Singh Sekhon, February 23, 2006 (in unreleased video interview by Teginder and

Surinder Dhanoa). 60. Ibid. 61. See ‘modernist reformism’ of Turino. ‘[R]eformism typically objectifies, recontextualizes,

and alters indigenous forms for emblematic purposes in the light of cosmopolitan dispo- sitions and social context and programmes . . . Through this process, diverse local forms are incorporated and homogenized within the same cosmopolitan frame while maintaining surface (emblematic) differences in relation to the cosmopolitan’ (Turino, Nationalists, 16).

62. The exact source of this citation could not be determined. Scans of the pages are presented on the Mahrok clan website, Accessed October 10, 2009. www.mahroks.co.uk

63. Nahar Singh, Panjābı̄ Lok-Nāch, 63. 64. Balbir Singh Sekhon, February 23, 2006 (in unreleased video interview by Teginder and

Surinder Dhanoa). 65. For details on the Bazigar (Goaar) people, see: Schreffler, “The Bazigar (Goaar) People,”

217–50. 66. Pammi Bai, who studied with the late Bhana Ram, estimates the time was 1950 (Pammi Bai,

“D. holı̄ Bhānā Rām,” Panjabi Tribune, November 16, 2008, Magazine section, 1); however

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the patriarch Ram Singh’s date of death, January 1949, suggests 1948 may be a more precise estimate.

67. Bahadur Singh, personal communication, April 25, 2005. 68. Ibid. 69. Dhillon, “Panjāb de Lok Nāchāṅ,” 116. Avtar Singh Deepak stated that it was Gurbachan who

applied the name; teammate Balbir Sekhon stated that the rationale was due to a couple of bhangra actions being in the mix, and that the name was arrived at after some deliberation (in unreleased video interviews with Teginder and Surinder Dhanoa, February 17 and 23, 2006).

70. Tandon, Punjabi Century, 58. 71. The dance sequence featured all women dancers and the instruments algoze, chimt.ā, and

bughdū. 72. In Hindi: Jagte Raho, 1956; Naya Daur, 1957; Mirza Sahiban, 1957. In Punjabi: Jagga Daku,

1959 (without Manohar Deepak); Khedan de Din Char, 1962 (with Manohar Deepak, but without others). As might be expected, the appearance of the PEPSU troupe and succeed- ing performers in films had an enormous impact on how their South Asian audiences would come to view bhangra (and, in turn, to view Punjabis through bhangra). However, the usual pattern seems to have been one of folkloric bhangra trends appearing in film, rather than being influenced by it. The dances in films that did not utilize professional bhangra experts bore only passing resemblance to the PEPSU troupe performances – more so in the style of dress than in movement. A Pakistani film to include a bhangra scene that closely resembled the PEPSU style was Naaji (1959). In all, one might recognize a trajectory of development of bhangra within films, down to the current, long-standing bhangra fad in the Mumbai indus- try. However, this subject has more bearing on how non-Punjabi South Asians have imagined bhangra than the Punjabi self-identification with which this essay is mainly concerned.

73. Garib Dass said, in describing the jhummar dance of his Bazigar community’s past, that the dancers used to include all sorts of amusements within the dance (personal communication, March 19, 2005).

74. Nahar Singh, Panjābı̄ Lok-Nāch, 63. 75. One story goes that one of the PEPSU troupe dancers took an expandable rack, for hanging

clothes, from off a wall and found it made an interesting percussive sound (as per later team member Trilochan Singh Baath, in an unreleased video interview with Teginder and Surinder Dhanoa, February 16, 2006).

76. The introduction of kāt.o is unclear. It seems possible that the giddhā dance of men of the Malwa area, which nowadays employs this and other minor instruments, may have lent the kāt.o to the PEPSU troupe – who were based in the heart of Malwa. Most informants on pre- Partition bhangra give it no mention, and one gets the strong suggestion that it did not exist in community bhangra. One statement that contradicts this is Tandon’s claim that he’d seen it in use in Gujrat in his boyhood, ca. 1910–1920s (Tandon, Punjabi Century, 57). It is possible that he remembered incorrectly, and his statement was influenced by what he later saw of folkloric bhangra in the 1950s.

77. The 1968 bhangra group at Republic Day festivities, under the direction of Bhag Singh, first utilized a large number of these props (Harbhajan Singh, in unreleased video interview with Teginder and Surinder Dhanoa, February 15, 2006).

78. Personal communication, June 15, 2005. 79. For example: Indian Council of Agricultural Research, Farmers of India, 146; Bhag Singh,

“Bhangra: The Most Virile Form of Indian Folk Dances,” Spokesman Weekly [Chandigarh], July 20, 1981, 7; and Massey, India’s Dances, 235.

80. Brard, East of Indus, 312. 81. The delegation included Manohar Deepak, Gurbachan Deepak, Bhana Ram, and Mangal

Ram. (The Indian Cultural Delegation in China, 56.) 82. Harbhajan Singh grew up in the subdistrict Shakargarh, just west of the present Indo-Pak

border. At Partition, he came to reside on the eastern side in village Khokhar Faujian, not far from Batala. Other men of his generation, from his birth area, also came to reside in Khokhar Faujian and they, too, recalled the community bhangra.

83. Personal communication, February 23, 2005. This information is as per my personal com- munication with Harbhajan Singh, but another article states that he led the groups straight through to 1987 (Aditi Tandon, “Bhangra and Republic Day are His Greatest Passions,” Tribune [Chandigarh, on-line], December 22, 2004).

410 G. Schreffler

84. For his first Republic Day bhangra presentation in 1960, Harbhajan Singh had selected from among dancers from these colleges (Harbhajan Singh, February 2006, in interview footage by Teginder and Surinder Dhanoa).

85. The idea of ‘coaches’ and ‘teams’ is appropriate; a college bhangra team of young Punjabi males could be likened to a football team in its organization, training routine, and even ethos.

86. Bhag Singh, “Pradhānagı̄ Shabad,” 67. 87. Ibid. 88. A wrestling-inspired step called bhalvānı̄ (not to be confused with dhamāl), and an associated

t. ikā-t.ik rhythm were created (Schreffler, “Signs of Separation,” 807). 89. For an example, see Schreffler, “Signs of Separation,” 848–9. 90. One sees a typical presentation of more or less ‘standardized’ bhangra in the late 1980s on the

videocassette Learn Bhangra in 7 Days (Latta). The name of the video alone is an indicator of the degree to which bhangra’s form had been thought to be standardized.

91. Also noted by Dhillon, Folk Dances of Punjab, 149. 92. Jaidev Dhanda, personal communication, February 2, 2013. 93. Teginder Dhanoa, personal communication, October 16, 2009 and August 17, 2012. 94. Teginder Dhanoa, personal communication, August 17, 2012. 95. Gaye LeBaron, “Indian Dancers in Occidental,” The Press Democrat [Santa Rosa, CA],

July 21, 1961, 14. Article copy courtesy Gurdev Dhanda and Teginder Dhanoa. 96. Teginder Dhanoa, personal communication, October 17, 2003. 97. Dhanoa was brother-in-law of troupe members Gurdev Dhanda and Jaidev Dhanda. 98. Ibid. 99. Lena Sin, “East Meets West on Dance Floor,” The Province [Vancouver, on-line], May 4,

2011. 100. Jackson, “Union Activism,” 13. 101. Naveen Girn, web blog, August 20, 2011. http://blog.bhangra.me/post/982868860/this-is-

why-i-love-my-job-i-recently-completed. This came out of the exhibit bhangra.me co-curated by Girn and which ran at the Museum of Vancouver, May 2011–January 2012.

102. Tejinder Singh, personal communication, December 10, 2001. 103. Pande, “Bhangra Vancouver Style,” 5. 104. Press release by Museum of Vancouver, “Vancouver’s Unique Bhangra Story Revealed,”

April 27, 2011. 105. Garib Dass, personal communication, December 10, 2007. 106. Schreffler, “Signs of Separation,” 306–7. The Punjabi Cultural Association of Vancouver

invited/sponsored Garib Dass to perform at the Expo ’86 primarily, but they also had him give other performances during that time around British Columbia and also in Toronto. Garib Dass’ son, Des Raj has now (2013) finally established himself as a permanent resident in British Columbia – one of very few Bazigar drummers to do so.

107. Khan et al., The Arts Britain Ignores, 60. 108. Ibid., 58–9. 109. Leante, “Urban Myth,” 199. 110. For more on the UK dhol phenomenon, see Leante, “Urban Myth.” 111. For example, UCLA’s group can be seen in their manner of performance in 1990 on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nzo94Bi0OU. 112. Opened in 1990, Ziba was a significant hub for the distribution of popular music and film

from South Asia and the Diaspora. 113. Bhangra was performed at an Indo-American Society function in West Hollywood (“Society

to Mark 20th Anniversary,” Los Angeles Times, November 6, 1977, I11). 114. An interesting footnote to the history of bhangra dance in Southern California is a

performance by the UCLA-connected folkloric dance company Aman Folk Ensemble. Choreographed by Leona Wood, Aman performed this mixed-gender rendition in a pro- gramme broadcast on Los Angeles public television station KCET, December 1977. The performers were entirely non-Punjabi. Contextual information courtesy of Anthony Shay (July 2012).

115. Press release by Stanford News Service, “Indian Subcontinent Group to Stage Bhangra Dance Competition, Party,” dated January 30, 1995.

116. There were exceptions, for example, the presence of traditional dhol-player Lal Singh Bhatti, who settled in the Bay Area in the late 1980s and who has since trained scores of students.

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117. The customary method in the earlier years was for someone in the organization to create a music mix and for one or more captains to choreograph a dance. Teams practiced on university grounds, dancing to a boombox playing back the mix.

118. First the website Punjab Online and then Bhangra Teams’ Forum have been the main sites to host boards on which members discuss Diaspora bhangra teams, competitions, and their issues.

119. Chacko and Menon, “Longings and Belongings,” 98.

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