Music Reading Response

Anjali Gera Roy

Meanings of Bhangra and Bollywood Dancing in India and the Diaspora

ABSTRACT

The mid-1980s witnessed the invention of a new musical genre in Britain consist- ing largely of remixes of Punjabi folk music and Bollywood music. Dubbed the “new Asian dance music,” it emerged as an important site for the production of South Asian diasporic identities. From the beginning, these hybridized bhangra and Hindi film remixes attracted considerable media and academic attention in Britain and, over the last two decades, they have become a global cultural phe- nomenon, with South Asian youth from Amsterdam to Singapore dancing to these beats in clubs, at parties, at college functions and at community gatherings. While Asian dance music returned to India through its popularization in clubs and at weddings and other events, its emblematic status in the diaspora has elided other significatory functions of dance and music in popular, social and political life in the homeland. This essay examines the meanings of bhangra and Bollywood dance in India and the diaspora by drawing on fieldwork conducted among male and female youth aged eighteen to thirty-five at bhangra and Bollywood nights, clubs, community festivals and gatherings in Bangalore, Chandigarh, Delhi, Kharagpur, Kolkata, Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney, Singapore, Stuttgart, Heidel- berg, New York, Toronto and Vancouver between 2004 and 2011.

RÉSUMÉ

Au milieu des années 1980 l’on assiste à l’invention d’un nouveau genre musical en Grande-Bretagne consistant surtout des remixes du folk pendjabi et de la musique bollywoodienne. Surnommée la « New Asian Dance Music, » elle deviendra un site important favorisant l’élaboration d’identités pour les Sud-Asiatiques en diaspora. Ces remixes hybridisés de films bhangras et hindis ont attiré une atten- tion considérable des médias et des intellectuels en Grande-Bretagne et, au cours des deux décennies qui ont suivies, sont devenus un phénomène culturel global. Cette musique s’entend dans des clubs et à des soirées et des fêtes universitaires et communautaires fréquentés par les jeunes d’origine sud-asiatique de Amsterdam jusqu’à Singapour. Bien que la « Asian Dance Music » ait atteint l’Inde grâce à sa popularisation dans les clubs et lors des mariages, son statut emblématique au sein de la diaspora ne tient pas compte des autres fonctions significatives de la danse et

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de la musique au niveau populaire, social et politique dans la mère patrie. Cet arti- cle examine la signification des danses bhangra et bollywoodienne en Inde et au sein de la diaspora en s’appuyant sur un travail de terrain auprès des jeunes âgés de 18 et 35 effectué lors des soirées bhangra et bollywoodiennes, des festivals, des fêtes et à des clubs à Bangalore, Chandigarh, Delhi, Kharagpur, Kolkata, Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney, Singapour, Stuttgart, Heidelberg, New York, Toronto et Van- couver entre 2004 et 2011.

KEYWORDS: bhangra; Bollywood; Punjabi; Punjabiyat; Sikh; Sadir; Bharatanatyam; Jhumar

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The mid-1980s witnessed the invention of a new musical genre in Britain consist- ing largely of remixes of Punjabi folk music and Hindi film or Bollywood music. Dubbed the “new Asian dance music” by Sanjay Sharma, John Hutnyk and Ash- wani Sharma (1996), it emerged as one of the most important sites for the pro- duction of South Asian diasporic identities (Banerji 1988; Bauman 1990; Sharma, Hutnyk and Sharma 1996). From the beginning, these hybridized bhangra and Hindi film remixes, played at parties labelled “afternoon raves” or “dayjams,” attracted considerable media and academic attention in Britain (Banerji 1988; Bauman 1990; Huq 1996) and, over the last two decades, have become a global cultural phenomenon, with South Asian youth from Amsterdam to Singapore dancing to bhangra and Bollywood beats in clubs, at parties, at college functions and at community gatherings.1

Despite the convergences they might display, bhangra and Bollywood constitute two distinctive performance genres with divergent histories, geographies and con- stituencies. Bhangra—a Punjabi folk dance reinvented through the mixing of Punjabi and non-Punjabi genres in the 1940s and the 1980s in India, and hybridized with popular Western sounds in the mid-1980s by second-generation British Asians—was mobilized in the diasporic production of a British Asian or transnational Punjabi identity. Bollywood dance, on the other hand, refers to the syncretic song-and-dance sequences that loosely draw on diverse performative tra- ditions, form an integral part of Indian commercial cinema, and have a wider South Asian appeal. However, the South Asian space constituted by bhangra and Bollywood music in diasporic locations leads to the conflation of the two sonic and kinemic categories, which have distinctive historical origins in India. The forms of Asian dance music and Bollywood dance celebrated in diasporic youth cultures have returned to India through their popularization in clubs and at weddings and other events. Such a return, I argue, elides the historical meanings of these dance forms and the statist Indian appropriation of folk and classical dances such as bhangra and Bharatanatyam/Sadir for nationalistic ends.

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Scholars examining the various dance forms and traditions from India have focused either on the suppression of popular and classical dance genres in the invention of Indian national culture (Srinivasan 1985; Oldenburg 1991; Ram 2000; Peterson and Soneji 2008) or on the role of bhangra and Bollywood dancing in the production of diasporic youth cultures and identities (Sharma, Hutnyk and Sharma 1996; Dudrah 2002a). Essays collected in a volume edited by Sharma, Hutnyk and Sharma (1996) were the first to call attention to the emergence of an Asian underground in Britain, and situated its resistance in the cultural politics of blackness, as South Asian youth appropriated blackness as a strategy to resist white racism. A few years later, Sunaina Maira investigated desi (South Asian) parties in American universities and colleges to locate an Indian American socio-cultural space, and Jacqueline Warwick identified the presence of South Asian dance spaces in Toronto and Vancouver (Maira 1999; Warwick 2000). Subsequently, Gayatri Gopinath, Rajinder Dudrah, Jigna Desai and others revealed these spaces to be fissured by language, ethnicity, region, gender, class and caste (Gopinath 1995; Dudrah 2002a; Desai 2004). While shedding new light on the centrality of bhangra and Bollywood music and dance to the formation of South Asian youth identities, these studies interrogated their emergence as the ethno-cultural signi- fiers of a unified diasporic identity. But the significance of bhangra and Bollywood dancing in causing the return of dance in the Indian nation has not received schol- arly attention, and their emblematic status in the diaspora has elided their other significatory functions in the popular, social and political life in the homeland. This essay hopes to fill this lacuna by drawing on fieldwork conducted among male and female youth aged eighteen to thirty-five at bhangra and Bollywood nights, clubs, community festivals and gatherings in Bangalore, Chandigarh, Delhi, Kharagpur, Kolkata, Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney, Singapore, Stuttgart, Heidel- berg, New York, Toronto and Vancouver between 2004 and 2011.2 While con- firming the centrality of bhangra and Bollywood dancing to the production of a South Asian popular cultural space in the diaspora, and of South Asian diasporic identities, the fieldwork reveals that the symbolic significance acquired by dance in the diaspora triggered the return of social dance in India. As scholarly studies in the area are scarce, the essay largely draws on media reports, interviews, social Web sites and participant observation to make some conclusions about the social impli- cations of the return of dance in India.

Dance and the Nation

The significance of dance as the historic site on which the Indian state produced gendered, caste or ethno-linguistic bodies through its regulatory practices is reiter- ated in the present through the diasporic production of bhangra and Bollywood as the preferred sites of the contestation between purity and hybridity, multicultural- ism and diversity, and the West and the non-West. The postcolonial construction of national dance offers a textbook illustration of the relation between state power,

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the power of the body and the control of life (Peterson and Soneji 2008). The colo- nial state’s ban on dances performed by all categories of dancing girls—such as devadasis (female servants of the gods in temples) and tawaifs (courtesans)—began with the anti-nautch (Hindi for “dance”) campaign in 1892 and led to the 1947 legislation that was endorsed by Indian reformist movements. These state efforts foregrounded the body of dance as a site of the contestation of the moral with the immoral.3 The disavowal of the court tradition of Kathak and the temple arts of Bharatanatyam and Odissi was due to their conflation with immorality by colonial administrators and nationalist reformers; this, along with the public debate on the hereditary devadasi system, led to the reinvention of a sanitized dance tradition by the postcolonial Indian state (Srinivasan 1985; Oldenburg 1991).4 The globaliza- tion, appropriation and resistance of bhangra and Bollywood dancing must be framed against these historical contexts.

The origins of many of the dances in India are believed to date back to antiquity and are sanctified by the sacred myth of the cosmic dance of the Hindu God Shiva (Sundar 1995: 236).5 Horrified by the imbrication of the sacred with the sensual in Indian dances, and their performance by the stigmatized devadasis in temples and by tawaifs in palaces, Christian missionaries and colonial administrators denounced Indian dance or nautch as “immoral” (Dubois quoted in Sundar 1995: 242). Schol- ars such as Veena Oldenburg, Kalpana Ram, Amrit Srinivasan and Pushpa Sundar have effectively demonstrated how the nationalist project re sponded to the colonial representation of Eastern dance as primitive, decadent and immoral, and revealed the complicity of middle-class, upper-caste brahmin nationalists with colonial mis- sionaries and administrators in the denunciation of dance as “decadent” (Srini- vasan 1985; Oldenburg 1991; Sundar 1995; Ram 2000, 2005, 2009). Scholars have also shown that classical dance at the beginning of the 20th century was produced through the excision of the sexual in the construction of divine origins for dance (Srinivasan 1985; Oldenburg 1991; Sundar 1995; Ram 2005, 2009). While Old- enburg has traced the impact of the anti-nautch campaign on the tawaifs in North India (1991), Srinivasan has argued that the vigour of the anti-nautch campaign led to the complete suppression of the Sadir, a dance performed by devadasis or young girls dedicated to Hindu temples much “before formal legislation was enacted against temple dedication in 1947” (Srinivasan 1985: 250–51). And Pran Neville and Krishna Dutta have traced the history of the birth and demise of nautch in Lahore and Kolkata respectively (Neville 1996; Dutta 2003). The anti- nautch movement appears to have been a pan-Indian movement. As Pran Neville points out, it also reached Punjab, where the Punjab Purity Association of Lahore launched a forceful movement against nautch and issued a booklet in 1884 con- taining educated Punjabis’ reservations about nautch. But for the tawaifs—or kan- jaris as they were called in Punjab—nautch continued to thrive in Punjab due to the patronage of the landed gentry, the emerging business classes and the princely states (Neville 1996). However, since the anti-nautch movement was largely

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directed at temple and court dances performed by women belonging to the stig- matized communities of devadasis, tawaifs and kanjaris, male dances of Punjab such as bhangra and Jhumar were not directly affected even though public danc- ing continued to be shunned by upper-caste males until the 1980s as an effemi- nate activity performed by low-caste nachars (female impersonators) or mirasis (hereditary performers), who would don female attire and sing and dance in melas or chinds for their pleasure.6 In other words, male dancing was restricted to hered- itary performers in Punjab until 1947, and continued with the naturalization of bhangra as Punjabi music through its teaching in schools and colleges. Bhangra— a Punjabi dance genre that has its origins in West Punjab and was marginalized in favour of the more popular Jhumar until 1947—was reinvented by the leg- endary dholi (drummer) Bhanna Ram Sunami and appropriated by the newly formed Punjab state in the formation of postcolonial Punjabi identity.7 This occurred partially due to the displacement of Jhumar practitioners after the parti- tion of India into India and Pakistan in 1947 and the Pakistani state’s withdrawal of patronage to musicians performing singing and dancing in secular contexts (Lybarger 2011 118–19).

Ethnomusicologists have called attention to the production of a “cult of authentic- ity” around a positively inflected rusticity that is equated with bhangra, whose ori- gins appear to be implicated in the struggle for power between the Punjab region and the centre after the formation of the postcolonial Indian state (Schreffler 2005). The appropriation of bhangra in the mobilization of a Punjabi identity by the newly formed state of Punjab after 1947 was consolidated with the rise of Sikh separatism in the 1970s and the call for a separate homeland for India’s Sikh popu- lation in the diaspora after the anti-Sikh riots in India in 1984. Despite bhangra’s production as Punjabi dance in India, Islamic injunctions against dancing and the displacement of Hindu Punjabis after partition led to its gradual disengagement from Hindu and Muslim spaces and its exclusive attachment to Sikh Punjabi iden- tity, particularly after 1984. The contemporary reinvention of bhangra in the dias- pora as the “new Asian dance music,” then, demands a recognition of the symbolic importance that came to be attached to it as a source for Punjabi ethno-cultural identity in India.

Similarly, Hindi popular cinema remained a disavowed Indian cultural form until the end of the 20th century despite the role it played in the production of the nation and national identity even when it developed largely independent of state support. Instead, the new postcolonial state imposed its control through its refusal to air film music on the state-owned broadcasting channel All India Radio until 1952 (Quereshi 1999: 83). As popular film’s cultural capital was calculated in an inverse ratio to its economic capital by the elite definers of culture, the genre was not deemed worthy of serious consideration by the Indian state.8 The song and dance in Bollywood cinema—an eclectic amalgamation of indigenous folk and

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classical genres, spiced up with Western influences in a characteristically Bolly- woodesque mix—was not granted recognition as a separate genre until the 1990s, when the Western media recognized Bollywood dance as a category, and its pop- ularity and performance by second-generation Indian immigrants in clubs and basements in London, New York, Toronto and Sydney surged. Unlike Hindi film song, which was long assimilated in the national psyche despite its being perceived as “corrupting” (Kaviraj 2004: 63), Bollywood dance continued to be denigrated by the postcolonial Indian state until the late 1990s through its association with “decadence” and Westernization. The denigration of Bollywood dance parallelled the dismissal of Western-style dancing in clubs as promiscuous and alien to Indian cultural sensibilities.9

Banishing Social Dance from the Indian Republic

Inscribing promiscuity on Bollywood and Western dance, the new postcolonial Indian state also discouraged, if not banned, social dancing in elite British clubs after 1947 as part of the decolonizing project. In view of the fact that a small minority of educated English youths were permitted the privilege of joining their English friends in ballroom dancing even prior to independence, the ‘‘English style of socialising’’ could be kept alive after independence only by the tiny Anglo- Indian population, alumni from missionary institutions, members of the armed forces and their families, and a few civilians (Khan 2005). Yet, with the construc- tion of Western dance as promiscuous, social dancing was displaced by the forbid- den pleasures of the nightclub, where female dancers were made to serve male voyeuristic desires. In an ironic reconstruction of the disavowed courtesan culture, a number of nightclubs sprang up in metro cities like Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi after 1947. These clubs offered their customers the titillating pleasures of cabaret, in addition to playing Western pop, rock and jazz music. Courtesan dance (mujra) also returned with a vengeance in the 1990s in the homes of the nouveau riche in Delhi and Mumbai (D Parthasarathy, interview by the author, October 2008).

Contrary to the ubiquitous images of a “dancing India” dominating Hindi cinema since Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (1994) and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), social dancing in urban Indian spaces, earlier confined to the exclusive clubs and gatherings of the anglicized elite, returned only in the late 1970s with the rapid growth of clubs called discos.10 This was probably a fallout of the hippie move- ment among urban, Westernized, middle-class Indian youths.11 Playing Western pop, rock, jazz and an occasional Indian film or pop hit in addition to disco, these clubs were not inscribed with the same sexual significations of disco music in the West (Verma 2005). Due to their exorbitant cover charges, the discos—usually located in the basements of luxury hotels—attracted a largely affluent youth clien- tele. Other anglicized youth attempted to replicate the ambience of the discos in

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private parties often held in their parents’ homes. Rights of admission to these par- ties were determined by social and economic background; social dancing in mixed groups remained an exclusive, upper-class affair. With the exception of Indipop— such as the albums of Usha Iyer (now Uthup), Sharon Prabhakar or Nazia Hussan— Indian music in Hindi or any other language was not played in the clubs or at the parties, nor did disco dancing among the affluent segments percolate to the broader spectrum of Indian society despite “the disco wave” in Hindi film music and dance during the same period.12 Other than the dandiya (a ritual dance per- formed with wooden sticks) nights organized during the nine-day Navaratri fes- tival in Mumbai and Gujarat, public dancing was virtually unknown among Indian middle classes until the late 1980s.13

Although public dancing in the Indian Punjab was not “an extraordinary affair” (Seizer 2005)—bhangra became integrated in Punjabi ritual contexts such as wed- dings and other birth-related ceremonies by the early 1970s, and began to invite limited male participation—bhangra dancing on the streets, in stage shows or in clubs became widespread only after the bhangra revival of the mid-1980s in the U.K. As late as the 1990s, Peter Manuel observed that “typically at Punjabi wed- dings a few men may dance excitedly around the drummers, and occasionally a woman will dance a few steps, to applause and cheers” and that “in stage shows of top performers men often start dancing in the aisles” (Manuel 1993: 80). But he categorically stated that “there were no nightclubs in India where couples could dance to Punjabi music (or any music, except Western pop, in discotheques located in urban five-star hotels)” (180).

Dance India Dance

It was the bhangra revival led by Gurdas Mann in the mid-1980s and by Daler Mehndi in the 1990s that would transform public dancing from a “rustic” Punjabi pastime to a national obsession by the end of the millennium.14 Since the mid-1990s, India appears to have been gripped by a dance fever ushered in by Mann, Mehndi and the Bollywood film industry. Initially confined to sangeets (pre-wedding functions) and weddings, by the new millennium, dance permeated both the “sacred” space of traditional rites and rituals and the “secular” space of leisure and entertainment, in a strange case of real life mirroring reel. Not only was the odd young woman—who would dance a few steps in the Punjabi baraat (wedding procession) before return- ing giggling to her sahelis (friends)—joined by the intrepid many (Manuel 1993), mothers and grandmothers threw themselves into dancing with abandon in ritual contexts such as sangeets and mata di chowki (ritual installations of a mother god- dess).15 Similarly, while families dancing to bhangra or Bollywood music had been integrated into the Punjabi baraat since the 1970s, its subsequent incorporation into the rituals of other Indian ethnic groups was a new development triggered by bhangra’s invasion of the Indian popular cultural space—including Bollywood.

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North Indian and possibly Gujarati and Maharashtrian wedding and festive ritu- als have been sufficiently Bollywood-ized since the mid-1990s, so that popular perceptions about public dancing as a “degrading” activity for Indian adults have been altered ( Jayant Bapat, interview by the author, November 2004).16 But the Bollywoodization of bhangra, which transformed the Punjabi harvest dance into national popular music, also led to the conflation of Bollywood and bhangra danc- ing, which had traced altogether different trajectories historically.

While calling attention to Gurdas Mann “dancing about animatedly” on stage, Manuel had observed that in India, “punjabipop”—as he calls the new bhangra mutant—did not accompany the same amount and kinds of social dances that had developed in Britain (1993: 180). A few years later, however, with Daler Mehndi’s emergence on the Indian popular cultural scene, not only Punjab but also Indian youth of all ethnicities began to dance to bhangra tunes. The same period simulta- neously witnessed the proliferation of a club culture catering to different tastes and pockets in Indian cities. The new club culture was dominated by bhangra and Bol- lywood dancing, often in deference to the preferences of the new rural and urban rich (Cook: 2009).17

By the end of the 1990s, dancing became as much a part of the national imaginary as singing, a trend that has continued in the twenty-first century. The integration of Bollywood-style dancing in traditional festivities and rituals, the reinvention of the traditional mujra (courtesan dance)among the urban elite, and the birth of a new Bollywood-centred space called the dance bar in which scantily clad female dancers perform Bollywood song and dance for the pleasure of predominantly urban, working-class males, all signal a major dance return on the subcontinent (Patil 2005).18 Yet, the imposition of the Licensing and Controlling of Public Entertainment (Bangalore City) Order in July 2005 in India’s software capital of Bangalore (Bellman 2005), along with censoring of Bollywood style dancing in college fests—as in Kanpur in 2009—confirms the continuing construction of dance as immoral (Kumar 2005).19

Basement Bhangra and Bollywood Disco

In diasporic spaces, however, such dance forms acquire entirely different meanings when performed by South Asian youth in clubs at nights dedicated to bhangra or Bollywood dancing. Inspired by British Asian bhangra expert DJ Ritu, young South Asian DJs set the trend of bhangra and Bollywood nights in New York City, Toronto and Melbourne in the 1990s. Beginning as a DJ in 1986, Ritu—“resident at the UK’s first ever weekly bhangra, R&B, and drum & bass night, Bombay Jun- gle”—became “a bedrock of London’s club scene by the nineties” and began “touring abroad in 1991, often the first DJ to introduce Indian sounds in many countries” (Ritu 2010). In 1997, DJ Rekha launched a monthly event called Basement

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Bhangra in New York, which has “forced New York to sit up and take notice of bhangra, rapidly making the outsider art form an essential part of the NYC club scene” (Rekha 2008). At the forefront of the South Asian music scene in Canada is DJ Amita, who spins “the newest Bollywood chart stoppers, retro bhangra, UK fusion and old skool Hindi classics” at Besharam, which “has grown to be Canada’s largest Bollywood party” (Besharam Nights: 2007). Australia’s bhangra and Bolly- wood invasion followed with the launch of Oorja Events in 2004. The music played is crucial to the way the club nights have been envisioned by their organiz- ers. Club Kali, the oldest among those organized by Ritu, is advertised as “the world’s biggest Asian-music based LGBT club” with “Bollywood, bhangra, Ara- bic, R&B and dance classics spiced up by DJ Ritu and DJ Dilz” (DJ Ritu 2010). She also hosts Kuch Kuch, “UK’s original and leading Bollywood club experience,” for “discerning Bollywood lovers, celebrities and beautiful people who love to party” (DJ Ritu 2010). Oorja Nights, showcased as “Australia’s leading Indian nites” is marketed as “an electro funky Desi dance party with a tinge of hip-hop and orient mixtures” (Oorja Nights 2007). While the majority of these nights reveal a juxtaposition of bhangra with Bollywood as well as other “oriental” sounds, DJ Rekha’s Basement Bhangra is unique in its distinct differentiation between the two dominant South Asian sounds in the diaspora; Rekha, whose wholehearted belief “in the bhangra movement” leads her to steer clear of “Bollywood stuff ” at Basement Bhangra, often deejays at a Bollywood-themed dance night at The Vault at Element nightclub on the Lower East Side in Manhattan (DJ Rekha, interview by the author, May 2008).

These forms and the physical spaces in which they are performed possess a sym- bolic significance corresponding to metaphoric claims to the dominant national space. DJ Rekha’s Basement Bhangra, organized every Thursday at SOB’s near the West Village in the heart of New York City, is a metaphorical and literal marking of a distinctively South Asian space in exclusionary white, American club culture. In other spaces, such as the annual Masala! Mehndi! Masti! festival held in Toronto or the Diwali Mela in Sydney, the official production of multiculturalism and diversity is literally superscripted on the spatial signifiers of national identity, such as the ANZ Stadium in Sydney or the Canadian National Exhibition grounds in Toronto. Cramped rooms in residence halls or more polished venues for desi parties in the U.S. might suffice for the performance of homeland memories through the conflation of culinary and sonic delights (Maira 2002), whereas school or college grounds might be temporarily licensed to tolerate excess in elite Indian institutions. If space is to be regarded as physical and social, and identities are to be viewed as a function of mutual exclusions and distinctions, the struggle over space—both physical and symbolic—is more crucial to the production of subjec- tivities. It was, after all, their exclusion from white spaces of consumption that led South Asian youth to converge in physical spaces in which they could perform their ethnic identities through music and dance.

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Despite the symbolic significance that concrete spaces—nightclubs, college grounds, farmhouses—might acquire in the diaspora, identities are not always expressed through a claim to actual spaces. Rather, it is the performance of the social positions of participants in relation to others through inclusions and exclu- sions that produces the social space. In view of the historical production of the dominant space of the nation through exclusions and occlusions of ethnic minori- ties in North America, Europe and Australia, and of certain castes and regions within South Asia, the performance of bhangra and Bollywood dance in the mega-city might itself serve as a space-making gesture. Playing bhangra full blast in London and Toronto, for example, constitutes a symbolic claim to South Asian identity in Britain or Canada in the same way as dancing to Bollywood music in an upscale club in Bangalore or Kolkata signifies Punjabi and Hindi popular cul- tural contestation of high Carnatic or Bengali music (DJ Shrey, interview by the author, November 2006; Pardeep Nagra, interview by the author, July 2007). The symbolic significance of Malkit Singh’s song “Aj Gorean de Disco Naheen Jana/ Aj Bhangra Paan Nun Ji Karda Ai”(“I Have No Desire to Visit the Clubs of Whites/ I Feel Like Dancing the Bhangra Today”) exceeds its literal meaning in Britain, where the inclusion of visible minorities in the spaces of production was traditionally matched by their exclusion in those of consumption (Gilroy 2002). Bollywood and bhangra dancing on crowded city streets, such as in Mumbai after the victorious return of the T20-World Cup winning Indian cricket team, also offers a striking example of a non-English speaking, working-class, urban, mar- ginalized population’s claim to public spaces that are denied to them (Cricket World Cup 20–20 India Victory Parade 2007).

Basement Bhangra and Bollywood Disco in New York City, Besharam Nights in Toronto and Oorja Nights in Melbourne engage with both dominant white and (non-)dominant South Asian hierarchical structures in their negotiation of race, class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality.20 While the image of a female dhol player on the Basement Bhangra poster speaks to the gendered sonic roles defined by (non-)dominant Punjabi patriarchy in the U.S., the event’s small, token cover charge—as opposed to the large cover charges required to attend other events in the vicinity—is calculated against the reproduction of economic hierarchies through which certain classes have been traditionally excluded from mainstream cultural production. In addition, the performance of Indian and Punjabi music on Varick street in Soho—the lower Manhattan neighborhood associated with the gay rights movement—connects ethno-linguistic and ethno-cultural exclusions of South Asian youth from white spaces with those of sexual exclusion.

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Fig. 1. Basement Bhangra poster

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As “a mixed gay and heterosexual, as well anti-racist event,” Besharam Nights is equally explicit in defining itself in opposition to all forms of discrimination (DJ Amita 2008).

On the other hand, bhangra nights and Bollywood nights held in the lounge bar Zero G on Residency Road in Bangalore are unburdened by the explicit anti-racist or anti-sexist political agendas that accompany similar nights in New York and Toronto; these nights interrogate Bangalore’s claim to be a global city, expressed by its self-production as the kannadiga capital namma Bengaluru (our Bangalore), a concept whose exclusionary spaces occlude regional and linguistic Others. The anxi- eties about places such as these “corrupting the minds of the young” led “the city fathers of this conservative part of India’s Hindu heartland” to dust off “old morality codes that effectively outlaw dancing,” which carried strong echoes of the nationalist reform movement of the 1920s (Bellman 2005).21

The Body of Dance

In addition to the physical spaces through which mutual exclusions by whites and non-whites are staged, bhangra and Bollywood dancing in India and the diaspora foreground the body in performing the inclusions and exclusions that structure the self ’s relations with others. Given the corporeality through which difference—of race, caste and gender—has been constituted throughout history, the body, partic- ularly the body in motion, mirrors the fissures in the body of the nation.22 For example, the Sikh body was constructed by Sikhism, British imperialism and Indian nationalism as the body of the warrior or that of a martial race, and the body of the dancing girl was fetishized as an exotic body in both orientalist and nationalist discourses (Sundar 1995: 244). If contemporary bhangra performance in India replies to the imperial production of Punjabis, particularly Sikhs, as a mar- tial race, Bollywood dancing invokes the exoticized body of the tawaif or the devadasi. Both bhangra and Bollywood dancing also disrupt the stigmatization of singing and dancing as attached to the body of the hijra (the third sex). The hyper- masculine, ethnicized body of bhangra dance has traditionally been produced in opposition to the feminine or androgynous bodies of national classical dance and has remained unaltered by its Bollywood inscription.23 The bhangra body is essen- tially the body of the soldier produced through its disciplining in the army, which carries a trace of the body of the Sikh warrior; bhangra steps are inscribed by the way the Sikh men “use their bodies” (Mauss 2004: 50). The body of dance nor- malized as feminine in Indian cinema, on the other hand, could be read as the body

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Fig. 2. DJ Amita

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of the nation. In opposition to the unambiguous masculinity of bhangra that is appropriated in a regionalized, hypermasculine identity narrative of Punjabiyat, the non-transgressive visual coding of homoeroticism in the Bollywood film lends itself to transgressive readings in the diaspora (Gopinath 2005).

Bhangra and Bollywood nights in the diaspora also exhibit the construction of a space within the dominant social space, in which the body in motion inscribes the corporeal performance of subjectivity and difference through dressing, moving and dancing in a particular way. Notions of corporeality and identity are most visible in the significations of the beard and the turban in assertions of male Sikh identity, and of the hijab in the female Muslim. But other sartorial adornments such as the bindi, henna, the nose ring or the anklet can also function as what John Fiske identifies as symbolic identity assertions (Fiske 1989). The proud display of ethno-cultural sig- nifiers by youth sporting ethnic outfits or Bollywood-style glitter at bhangra and Bollywood nights presents an undisguised deployment of style and fashion in the performance of identity. In New York or Toronto, Singapore or Sydney, Punjabi youth perform a transnational Punjabiyat through a sartorial style in which hip- hop attire and hairstyles are unproblematically amalgamated into Sikh symbols such as the kada (iron bracelet) or the khanda (sword). Similarly, young women with kohl-lined eyes, streaked hair and dangling earrings offer mirror images of popular Bollywood stars and starlets in unlikely corners of the world. The body of dance offers the possibility of literally performing identities through the repetition of sounds and movements of home.

Fissures in the Body of Dance

The imagining of a homogenous South Asian space produced through bhangra and Bollywood dancing in the diaspora has been interrogated for its subsumption of internal hierarchies and dissolution of conflicting and often contradictory agen- das. Critics argue that performed sexuality, class and region can also foreground the reiteration of dominant and hierarchical patterns through which youth nego- tiate identities in the space of dance; specifically, they argue that bhangra becomes complicit in the celebration of Jat Sikh patriarchies (Gera Roy 2010), or that Bol- lywood dancing reinforces heteronormative sexualities. The contradictory nature of identity narratives is apparent in regionalized, gendered and sexualized re - sponses to the hypermasculinity associated with bhangra. While outlining how bhangra became the locus of diasporic youth culture in an early essay, Gayatri Gopinath showed how bhangra’s performance of masculine identity in diasporic spaces was complicit with Indian nationalism’s patrilinear narratives (Gopinath 1995). In her subsequent work, she has focused on queer diasporic cultural prac- tices to critique both “the racism of dominant U.S. culture” and “the heteronorma- tivity of hegemonic diasporic and nationalist formations” (Gopinath 2005: 30). Although the uniformity of style, music and movement obscures differences of

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class and region, Maira reinforces Gopinath’s view, positing that the party scene is underwritten by fissures and tensions (Maira 2002). Similarly, Sangita Shreshtova has raised important questions about the relationship between the film dances as song visualizations and their reception and reinterpretation as exotica in per- formed venues (Shreshtova: 2008: 245).

Despite the production of a homogenous South Asian space in club nights through an eclectic amalgamation of bhangra with Bollywood and other South Asian dances, tensions along lines of language, religion, class, gender and even caste are visible in the encounter of heterogeneous bodies on the dance floor. These differences get passively or actively articulated in actual practices, overrul- ing ideological commitments to the identity politics of blackness, Asianness or Punjabiyat. The overwhelming Punjabi presence at bhangra nights often leads other South Asian ethnic groups such as Tamilians to view them as exclusive “Punj” spaces (Kalpana Ram, interview by the author, November 2004). The gen- dered and ethnic spaces of bhangra became sharply defined through the predom- inantly female presence at the performance of the female British Asian singer Hard Kaur at Singapore’s Indo Chine Club in October 2009, particularly when Tamil club-goers refused to respond to her spirited calls to Punjabiyat. Several phenomena I observed in my research—such as the conspicuous absence of Tamil-speaking Singaporeans at bhangra or Bollywood nights in Singapore; non- Punjabi desis’ preference for retro Bollywood music over bhangra in Toronto or Melbourne; the absence of Bengalis in Tantra Kolkata, of males at the Hard Kaur night or of Muslim Punjabis in the Diwali Mela in Sydney; and the class dynam- ics between rustic Punjabi cabdrivers and Sikh members of Bhangra teams from North American universities at Basement Bhangra or the Vancouver Interna- tional Bhangra Festival—reveal multiple contestations of the politics of Asian- ness or Punjabiyat. Even the homogeneous Punjabi spaces of the nights appear to reveal fault lines, not only along lines of gender and sexuality but also sect, class and caste (Gera Roy: 2010).

In addition to the explicit contestation of received notions of gender and sexuality at Basement Bhangra and Besharam Nights, I noticed that unarticulated prefer- ences for certain performers, music and spaces foregrounded tensions in South Asian spaces represented as unified. Maira’s observations—on the strength of the regional identifications manifested in the strong emotions generated for Sikh youth by bhangra dancing, but not shared by others—were corroborated by DJ Amita and DJ Rekha (DJ Amita, interview by the author, July 2007; DJ Rekha, interview by the author, May 2008). The DJs reported that bhangra lovers leave the floor when they start playing Bollywood music, making room for desis from India to move on to the dance floor (DJ Amita, interview by the author, July 2007; DJ Rekha, inter- view by the author, May 2008). Canadian Sikhs at the Masala! Masti! Mehndi! Party distanced themselves from recently arrived desis by demonstrating complex

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bhangra moves to impress girlfriends before retreating to the growing circle of onlookers. At Basement Bhangra, second-generation Indian American members of university teams forced to rub shoulders with “fresh-off-the-boat” cabdrivers from Nawanshahar reaffirmed their commitment to Punjabiyat through visible signifiers like the turban and immaculate bhangra steps, but carefully avoided eye contact with the cab drivers.

Conclusion

In contrast to the dance culture of the 1970s and 1980s that grew around the Western genre of disco, albeit without its sexual inflections, the 1990s return of dance on the Indian subcontinent converged on bhangra, a regional folk form, and Bollywood, a national popular cultural genre, following their appropriations in South Asian diasporic spaces. Such a return undermines the nationalist coopting of the folk and classical dance forms prior to and in the early phases of independ- ence and decolonization. The ever-increasing acceptance of bhangrapop and Bol- lywood dancing in India, facilitated as it is by the authorizing signature of the West, overlooks the vexed history of dance forms in India and their relationship to the state. Yet the consumption of these dance forms in India—primarily for pleas- ure—also results in obscuring from Indian consumers the identity politics attached to them in diasporic spaces, politics that necessitated the production of this music in spaces perceived as unified South Asian performance arenas.

Notes 1. This essay was prepared during my tenure as a Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (2008–09).

2. It entailed personal interviews with music producers including DJs (see list of personal interviews), organizers and consumers of this music, and personal observation at a num- ber of events (see list of sites of observation). The majority of consumers at these events were South Asian youths and young urban professionals aged eighteen to thirty-five, but they also included members of white, black and other ethnic groups.

3. Dutta and Neville argue that despite the passing of the first legislation against the devadasi system in 1929, dance continued to be performed at private events and in the homes of the rich.

4. Modern Indian dance was allegedly invented in response to Anna Pavalova’s question “Where is your dance?” during her visit to India (Sundar 1995: 249).

5. In addition to the historical evidence of the figure of the dancing girl belonging to the Harappan civilization, dance practitioners’ tracing the origins of classical dances, includ- ing Kathak, in the worship of the Hindu deities Nataraja or Krishna establishes their antiquity ( Jitendra Maharaj quoted in Shukla 2011: 111).

6. Nachars and mirasis are hereditary performers who sing and dance, in addition to offering other forms of entertainment. Mela and chind refer to fairs.

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7. The Canadian Sikh writer Navtej Bharti informed me that bhangra was an urban dance taught in schools and colleges after independence and was virtually unknown in rural Punjab until 1947 (Navtej Bharti, interview by the author, May 2011).

8. Film studies have brilliantly brought out the implication of Bombay commercial cinema in the nationalist project (Chakravarty 1993; Prasad 1998).

9. In a conversation with me in Mysore, the Indian writer Raja Rao told me that he refused to participate in Western coupled dance as he did not consider it innocent (Raja Rao, pers. comm.).

10. During the 1960s, the inimitable Usha Iyer (now Uthup) could be seen belting out Broadway tunes and pop standards in nightclubs in Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai wearing her signature kancheepuram saris and large bindis (Fernandes 2011).

11. The oldest nightclubs in Delhi were located in hotels like Gaylord. The Cellar in Connaught Place, Delhi, has existed since the mid 1960s. Ghungroo, the discotheque at Welcomgroup Maurya Sheraton in New Delhi, closed on July 29, 1998. Himanshu Verma’s essay “It’s the Time to Disco: Contexts of Disco across Cultures,” which covers the history of disco in India and unpacks its disengagement from disco’s same-sex significations in the West, has been removed from his Web site.

12. David Stuart Ryan reported disco dancing as a vogue among young Indians (Ryan: 1983). A decade later, M. N. Srinivas reported a trend of discodancing among Bangalore teenagers (Srivinas 2005). While the popularity of Mithun Chakravarty’s film Disco Dancer might have begun the trend of lumpen youth imitating his pelvic gyrations in the streets, public dancing was still frowned upon by middle-class viewers.

13. I recall being invited to dandiya nights as a guest between 1977 and 1982 in Housing Societies in Andheri, Vile Parle and Juhu in Mumbai that were commercialized (includ- ing hiring of public spaces, specially designed costumes and presence of professional singers) in the early 1980s. Unlike in metro cities, working classes danced all night at Navaratri celebrations in small towns in Gujarat such as Anand (Harini Srinvasan, pers. comm.).

14. Gurdas Mann is largely credited for the elevation of bhangra from a regional tradition to one that draws audiences from all across South Asia.

15. Sangeet is a specifically Punjabi wedding ritual in which women sing and dance in secluded places but now includes males and is performed at weddings other than Punjabi. Mata di chowki is a sacral ritual where devotees sing and dance in praise of mother god- desses, particularly Vaishno Devi, an incarnation of female power.

16. Notwithstanding the unprecedented popularity of Bollywood films in the wedding genre, the contexts of public dancing in South India continue to be degraded even in the present.

17. Sharrel Cook, an expatriate married to an Indian DJ who played in the Leopald Café in Mumbai in the 1990s, recalls that a number of world-class clubs, like Athena in Mumbai and the Tantra in Kolkata, emerged within a decade (2009). DJ Shrey ruefully confessed that most of the music played at Tantra in the Park was Bollywood music, which catered to the wealthy Marwari youth clientele (DJ Shrey, interview by the author, November 2006).

18. The “moral policing” of clubs began with the Maharashtra government banning the dance bars in 2005 (Patil 2005). This was followed by the order passed in July 2005 in Bangalore that “doesn’t actually ban dancing, but it introduces tough licensing require- ments that make it nearly impossible to have a business that has both drinking and dancing” (Bellman 2005).

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19. Bellman pointed out that “under the new order, discos are treated like bars promoting prostitution” (Bellman 2005). For this reason, the owner of Hard Rock Café permitted only couples to enter, placed prominent signs warning against dancing and closed down sharply at 11:00 p.m. during the Jay Sean Tour on August 21, 2011.

20. See DJ Rekha’s Basement Bhangra Web site (DJ Rekha: 2008).

21. A month after I conducted my fieldwork in Zero G, the legislation passed by the Karnataka Government closed what appeared to be an emancipating space (Bellman 2005).

22. Imperialism drew on corporeal difference between different ethnic groups in its con- struction of native bodies, such as the Sikhs as a martial race and Bengalis as effeminate (Gera Roy 2010).

23. The late actor Nargis Dutt’s comment “pehli baar mardonwalla naach dekha” (“this is the first time that I watched a ‘manly’ dance”) on watching the first bhangra team perform at the first Republic Day parade confirms its masculine character (Pammi Bai, interview by the author, March 2006). However, dance in Punjab, as in other parts of India, was considered a feminine pursuit.

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Srinivasan, Amrit. 1985. Reform and Revival: The Devadasi and Her Dance. Economic and Political Weekly 20(44), 1869–1876.

Srinivasan, Priya. 2004. Dancing Modern, Dancing Indian… Dancing in America, Ballet Dance Magazine, April. http://www.ballet-dance.com/200404/articles/asiandance.html.

Sukhija, Sheetal. 2011. Police Want Dance Bars Sans Women. Mid Day, 8 June. http://www.mid-day.com/news/2011/jun/080611-news-bangalore-dance-bars-Police -oral-warnings.htm.

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Filmography Disco Dancer. 1982. Directed by Subhash Babbar. Mumbai: B. Subhash Movie Unit.

Hum Aapke Hain Kaun. 1994. Directed by Sooraj Barjatya. Mumbai: Rajshri Productions.

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. 1995. Directed by Aditya Chopra. Mumbai: Yash Raj Films.

Personal Interviews Amar (DJ). 2004. Interview by the author. Melbourne. November.

Bai, Pammi. 2006. Interview by the author. Patiala. March.

Bapat, Jayant. 2004. Interview by the author. Melbourne. November.

BilZ. 2007. Interview by the author. Toronto. July.

Bharti, Navtej. 2011, Interview by the author. London, Ontario. 15 May.

Dhami, H. 2009. Interview by the author. Indo-Chine Club, Singapore. November.

Handa, Amita (DJ). 2007. Interview by the author. Toronto. 27 July.

Juneja, Raul (DJ). 2007. Interview by the author. Toronto. July.

Kaur, Hard. 2006. Interview by the author. Kolkata. February.

Madan, Richi (DJ). 2004. Interview by the author. Melbourne. November.

Magon, Rup. 2007. Interview by the author. Toronto. July.

Malhotra, Rekha (DJ). 2008. Interview by the author. New York. May.

Nagra, Pardeep. 2007. Interview by the author. Toronto. 25 July.

Parthasarthy, D. 2008. Interview by the author. Singapore. October.

Ram, Kalpana. 2004. Interview by the author. Sydney. November.

RDB. 2006. Interview by the author. Delhi. February.

Rich, Rishi. 2009. Interview by the author. Indo-Chine Club, Singapore. November.

Sagoo, Bally. 2002. Interview by the author. Bangalore. January.

———. 2003. Interview by the author. Bangalore. January.

Sami (DJ). 2006. Interview by the author. The Park, Kolkata. November.

Shergill, Rabbi. 2005. Interview by the author. Bangalore. January.

Shrey (DJ). 2006. Interview by the author. The Park, Kolkata. November.

Statts, Eddie (DJ). 2008. Interview by the author. New York. May.

Veronica. 2009. Interview by the author. Indo-Chine Club, Singapore. November.

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Sites of Observation Bally Sagoo Night. 2002. Bangalore. January.

Basement Bhangra. 2008. New York City. May.

Diwali Mela. 2004. Sydney. November.

Diwali Mela. 2004. Canberra. November.

ETC Channel Awards. 2006. Chandigarh. March.

Jay Sean Tour, Hard Rock Café. 2011. Bangalore. 21 August.

Masala! Masti! Mehndi! Party. 2007. Toronto. July.

RDB Night, Elevate. 2006. Delhi.

Tantra, The Park. 2005–06. Kolkata. August–April.

Vancouver International Bhangra Festival. 2010. Vancouver. May.

Zero G. 2005. Bangalore. January–June.

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