A music and dance genre of the Punjab. The term is also used for loosely related modern popular music styles based in South Asia and Great Britain. Traditional bhangra (bhāgrā), associated in particular with the vernal Vaiśākhī festival, features vigorous male dancing accompanied by dhol (barrel drum) and occasional sung verses (boliyā). In India the term bhangra also came to denote syncretic popular Punjabi songs disseminated initially via films, but subsequently on cassettes, fusing traditional Punjabi modes, melodies, and rhythms with modern Western-influenced ones. In the mid-1980s bhangra emerged as a parallel popular music and dance phenomenon among South Asians, especially people of Punjabi descent, in Great Britain. Stylistically UK-based bhangra de-emphasizes lyrics and often reflects a greater degree of syncretization. It combines characteristically Punjabi elements with sampling techniques, drum machines and influences drawn from electronic dance music and, most prominently, Jamaican dance-hall reggae. By the early 1990s the innovative bhangra-informed music of Bally Sagoo and the more reggae-oriented Apache Indian (Steve Kapur) had extended its popularity to urban Indian audiences and, to a lesser extent, to aficionados of world music genres.
See also India, §IX, 3(iii).
S. Banerji and G. Baumann: ‘Bhangra 1984–8: Fusion and Professionalisation in a Genre of South Asian Dance Music’, Black Music in Britain: Essays on the Afro-Asian Contribution to Popular Music, ed. P. Oliver (Milton Keynes, 1990), 137–52
G. Baumann: ‘The Re-invention of Bhangra: Social Change and Aesthetic Shifts in a Punjabi Music in Britain’, World of Music, xxxii/2 (1990), 81–95
S. Sharma, J. Hutnyk and A. Sharma: Dis-Orienting Rhythms: the Politics of the New Asian Dance Music (London, 1996)
PETER MANUEL