Folk's Kool Turn
Anjali Gera

        Folklore's inherent dynamism, its capacity to adapt itself to an eternally changing environment, ensures its survival across time and place. Though writing is commonly believed to silence sound, orature continued to flourish in chirographic and print cultures. This happened due to its rapid adaptation to a written format, which helped its migration across time and place. The information age signals another phase in folklore's life. McLuhan's optimism about the electronic media seems to be borne out by the new lease of life new communication technologies have given folklore. Walter J Ong distinguishes electronic orality from the primary orality of face-to-face cultures and names it secondary orality. The electronic media, to give McLuhan his due, have restored both the performativity and 'the integrated sensibility' of 'oral aural' cultures. But secondary orality can at best retribalize; it cannot return old tribes. Having made this distinction, one can regard the new orality as either the death or the survival of orality. Measured against an essentialist definition of folklore, the new orality appears degraded and inauthentic. But its transmutation, viewed as an affect of the media and the milieu, can also be seen as celebrating folklore's resilience.

      The transmutation of folklore in the electronic age is best illustrated by the Bhangra resurgence of the last two decades. Bhangra, packaged as World Music, has undoubtedly acquired an international status as it resounds from New York to New Delhi. But the contemporary Bhangra rage should make us alert to which aspects of the folk genre - the harvest ritual, the mating dance or the celebratory beat - have been carried over into the new mutants. This paper will trace Bhangra's journey from Punjabi harvest ritual to World Music to explore if the present Bhangra mutations can be regarded as variants of the folk genre or a new hybrid form.

      Bhangra is a Punjabi performance tradition, originating in harvest rituals, which is now associated with all birth related ceremonies. Bhangra performance contexts vary from the rural to the urban, the metropolitan to the diasporic, from the newly harvested field to the local Punjabi Association's club grounds, the teens dance party to the wedding procession. Twelve forms, employing the Bhangra beat, have been traced along the Doab region in Punjab spanning India and Pakistan. 2 Though the origins of Bhangra go back to 400 BC, the present forms developed in the last five hundred years or so. These forms are split along gender, sectarian, regional and generic lines rather than national boundaries. Old Bhangra is part of a linguistic rather than national heritage with gender, sect and genre introducing their particular inflections. Females perform certain Bhangra forms exclusively in closed family settings. Others follow sectarian boundaries. The genre - lyrical, narrative or musical - also alters the content and the performance. Some others carry nuances of their places of origin. Though these twelve forms are named pure, they have been significantly hybridized through their absorption of other cultural traditions. Bhangra's latest hybridization, therefore, might be located in a dynamic history of eternal transmutation.

      Bhangra history unfolds several mutations of the original harvest ritual, beginning with its transposition from rural to urban settings. Urbanization and migration distanced it from its worksong origins by even though it retained its ritual inflections. Even today, Bhangra is an indispensable ingredient of ceremonies of birth such as wedding sangeets and baraats (wedding procession), childbirth, mundans (tonsure ceremony). Though conditions of literacy normally enforce a transition from the primary oral context, urban Bhangra retains the spontaneity, interactivity and immediacy of a participatory oral context. Literacy does not split Bhangra along Ong's primary secondary divide because literates switch over to the non-literate mode when performing Bhangra. For this reason, whether performed in a rural or urban setting, by literates or non-literates Bhangra performance enacts primary orality in Punjabi settings. Bhangra ritual performance reverberates with a residual orality reverberating with all the features Ong associates with primary orality. Embedded in the lifeworld of a face-to-face community, it performs the collective memory of a group that shared the initial experience. The closed group of family and friends is linguistically homogeneous. Performer audience identity essentially creates a participatory moment through which the group affirms it identity. The lyrics improvised on the spot in response to the situational context build on traditional formulae. Traditional Bhangra formulae boliyaan literally translate as call and response. Used by rival groups as oblique messages, they illustrate the agonistic feature Ong associates with orality.

      Staged Bhangra offers a unique case of primary orality enclosed within a secondary setting. The circle of performers on stage appears to be formed by the psychodynamics of orality reflected in the spontaneity, improvisations, repartee and rapport among members. Though the staged Bhangra ceases to be participative, it retains the call and response poetics of orature. A true performer adapts to the mood and needs of the audience. In a replay of folk dynamics, Bhangra audience frequently attempts to breach the performer audience gap by clapping, and by joining in the singing and the dancing. While interactivity still holds the key to a successful performance, the old face-to-face contact essential for the creation of a "we" feeling cannot be resurrected. The performers and audience are bound to the objectified performance rather than in a social relation. The community thus formed is no different than those constructed in relation to other mass cultural products like film, theatre or cricket.

      The stage reduces a participative ritual to a spectacle, which culminates in the female body held up for inspection in the music video. The staged Bhangra begins the process of the decontextualization of the form that ironically helps it transmute into World Music. The stage introduces a performer audience divide by breaking the circle of performers through a demarcated space where the performance takes place. Ritual Bhangra does not require a bounded place. Its fluid, shifting spatiality invites infinite play surrounding and sacralizing the most mundane setting. As the spatial division of the elevated stage severely restricts participation, the rest are converted into audience. Space and spatial arrangement are crucial in determining the gaze in performance. Strangely, ritual Bhangra is shielded from a voyeuristic gaze even when performed in the most public place. It is virtually impossible for participants to see others. The performer, on the other hand, becomes an object of the audience's gaze. The stage displaces the mutuality of the gaze in a participatory ritual with an asymmetry of gaze between the performer and audience. The gaze plays a crucial role in transforming the ritual to a spectacle through the separation of space. When observed from a point outside the inclusive circle does the ritual degrade into a spectacle. The group of performers is too self absorbed to see others. Bhangra is governed by extremely complicated rules about what is fit and unfit for display, where and under which situations. While adult males are goaded to 'make a spectacle' of themselves in full public view dancing in a wedding procession, virgins are permitted to execute sensuous giddha rhythms only when enclosed in a exclusively female circle within the confines of the home.

       The stage disembeds the ritual form its lifeworld and facilitates its deterritorialization for it may be moved to any space on earth and forms an autonomous universe. As the form moves from the family home, the village field or the community hall to a theatre, the folk genre is disembedded from its ritual role. No more is the Bhangra performance an improvised response to day-to-day situations permitting room for endless play. This did not happen when Bhangra moved from the village to the city. Even though it was performed in non-agrarian contexts entailing a change in subject matter and themes, the performance was still embedded in the community's lifeworld. Nor did the acquisition of literacy affect the formulaic style or improvised lyrics of the performance. In true folklore fashion, new urban themes were fitted into the old boliyaan format. Bhangra participants were still enfolded in a social space with the talented few taking the lead. This primary orality of Bhangra still survives in Punjabi settings and enables both living-in-place and displaced Punjabi speakers to perform their place memory.

      The stage also signals the birth of the professional performer who is willing to transport the Bhangra ambience to any setting for a heterogeneous audience in return for a fee. Paid performance is sold on originality. The paid performer violates the concept of oral authorship by claiming to be original and by stressing individual authorship. While performers still draw on the formulaic repertoire, they take pride in writing their lyrics. Written lyrics inhibit improvised play and end up fixing the text. The dynamics of textuality enter Bhangra through the economics of performance not through literacy. Irrespective of the shape performers come in, practitioners of pure folk or experimentalists, the professional is bound in a capitalist relation with the audience through his production. The substitution of use value with exchange value commodifies the performance and the performer. The performer's body and voice become saleable commodities forcing participants and audience into a system of commercialized relations.

      The professional performer and audience participate in a relation of commodity exchange as producers and consumers. Professional performance brings in electronic gadgetry, stage effects and other factors that enhance the spectacular effect. Bhangra's 'fetishization' began not with the marketing blitz surrounding the sale of a music album but with its reification on stage. The performer's body and voice is objectified through the division created through light, spatial arrangement or seating. The spectator's gaze is directed to view the performance from an angle and a light that transforms the performer's body into an object of the spectator's pleasure. A seamless transition from audience to consumer occurs when the performance is sold for the price of a ticket. Decontextualized from its setting and function, the Bhangra floats about the stage as an entertaining signifier. As the economic aspect is implicated with the cultural, the harvest ritual is delinked from ceremonies surrounding birth.

      Techno determinism does not explain the differences in Bhangra forms. The switch to a new technology does not automatically imply a shift to a new mode of consciousness as Ong suggested. Though media are 'translators', other factors are more important in altering Bhangra content, form, audience and functions For example, the stage, rather than literacy, sets the tone for capitalist exchange in Bhangra performance. Bhangra contexts and functions rather than media, forms, settings or performers differentiate the ritual from the spectacle. Taking the argument further, technological shift does not split Bhangra along Ong's primary secondary divide. If writing technologies left primary Bhangra contexts unaffected, electronic technologies have turned the primary secondary distinction upside down. McLuhan's transformation theory may be applied to Bhangra's mutation keeping in mind that techno determinism works together with several other factors engendering distinctive Bhangra mutants.

      Electronic media impact Bhangra in myriad ways, which question Ong's distinction between primary and secondary orality. The distinction between live and recorded performance is blurred as professional live performances increasingly employ electronic mediation. Electronically technologies can be used to both enhance and record a live performance. In an age of media interdependency, professional artists invariably time live concerts with the release of new albums to boost sales. This apart, they perform live at music fests, social events, and stage shows. But the live performance is a transformed into a spectacle with state of the art gadgets employed to move bodies into a virtual space. The line is further blurred through the simultaneous presence of studio recordings as well as live transmissions. Live performance, though electronically mediated, might no longer belong to primary orality. Recorded performance, on the other hand, may reconstruct primary settings. The electronic media often perform a primarily orality when recorded music is played in ritual contexts. Bhangra players alternate between recorded and live music to mark the same ritual moment. Thus, the context and the function rather than media determine Bhangra mutants.

      The great imbalance created by the visual dominance of literacy has been detrimental to the life of performance traditions. Folklore collections take great pains to give the reader a feel of the complete sensory involvement in folk performance. The electronic media answers the synesthetic longing of English poetry and folklore scholars. Television ends 'the rigorous separation and specialization of senses that led to the split between the visual and the vocal and verbal in Bhangra. Language fragments; dance and music unite. Whether the 'civilized visual way' can return 'preliterate ways' is an altogether different matter.

      A brief look at the impact of sound recording technologies in the past can provide a comparative perspective on present sonic representation. Audio recording has two possibilities, one following the other. In the first stage, studio recordings of professional singers are made available through the regional broadcasting centers. Many folk singers in the 60's and 70's became household names as All India Radio relayed their music to different parts of Punjab. But the emphasis on voice and words in sound recording technologies privileges the folksong over the performance though some folksongs employ Bhangra formulae. One must remember that short wave transmission restricts Bhangra listeners to the Punjab region. The entry of the audio-cassette makes recordings of Bhangra available to diasporic Punjabi speakers as well enormously expanding their choice. The role of the audio cassette in identity formation among diasporic Punjabi communities has been researched in the recent years and requires detailed analysis not possible here.

      Going back to the 50's and the 60's might provide a clue as to how far the radio functioned as McLuhan's 'tribal drum' articulating the tribal beat. The radio as a 'hot' medium with 'a high-level definition', intensifies the aural sensorium over others. The restriction of recording to sound privileges a certain expression of Bhangra. As a beat or rhythm, Bhangra assumes diverse narrative, lyrical or expressive forms mixing sound, voice and body movement in different combinations. The radio, privileging sound and voice over the body, popularizes the folk song rather the dance. Their golden voice is the asset of the singers of the 60s' like Surinder Kaur, Asha Singh Mastana and others. A premium on lyrical content and originality is also a direct fall out of the vocal and verbal emphasis. Much greater attention is paid to the lyrics reducing the dependence on traditional formulae and nonsense verse. The radio artists, descendants of the professional stage performer, continue the trend of claiming individual authorship. Though they might have had a strong folk musical base, these singers set the trend for patenting music contradicting the notion of authorial anonymity and collective ownership in folk culture.

      The radio's status as a tribal drum fostering a depth involvement among people by converting 'the psyche and society into a simple echo chamber' is reinforced through a novel trend. Individual artists' compositions are inducted into the communal repertoire(327). The radio artists' absorption into the folk canon is related to the 'subliminal depths of radio' being charged with 'the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums'.(327) The chords that the radio artists struck in the hearts of Punjabi speakers of that generation is due to the hot impact of the radio. Inhabiting the 'subliminal depths of radio', they perform the function of resounding Punjabi tribal dhol beats. Notwithstanding the artists' participation in commodity exchange, the radio helps "in reviving the ancient experience of kinship webs of deep tribal involvement". McLuhan's association of the radio with 'archaic tribal ghosts' neutralizing nationalism is pertinent to the affirmation of tribal links among Punjabi speakers forged through musical broadcasts on regional radio stations. The radio, as sound and voice based medium, affirms a linguistic rather than a national identity. The decentralizing power of the radio explains why Bhangra constituency was confined to the region of Punjab and Punjabi speakers prior to the 70s.

      Video recording and the mass media of television signals another phase in the life of the Bhangra. In contrast to the radio, the television is a visual medium that creates its impact through the integration of image with sound. Video technologies and television had the effect of integrating the visual over the verbal and the local. Sound, voice, lyrics and music take a back seat to a strong visual impact. But television's correcting the imbalance in favour of the visual alters Bhangra's content. Dance, movement and spectacle dominate song and voice. Certain aspects of present Bhangra forms are directly determined by the visual focus of television, particularly of the music video. The Bhangra artist must have a telegenic presence and mastery over body movement in addition to a good voice. The reason for the immense popularity of two folk singers in the 80's, Gurdas and Harbhajan Mann was that both possessed these qualities in large amounts.

       If radio as a hot medium sharpened the aural sense to the exclusion of others, television restored the 'unified sensorium' of the tribal person. Television and video technologies recover the synthesthetic wholeness of Bhangra performance in comparison with its aural intensification by the radio. Naming television as medium that heightens the tactile, McLuhan defines 'tactility as the interplay of the senses' rather than of touch alone. Television's cool medium demands and elicits a degree of sensuous participation and exerts 'a unifying synesthetic force on the sense life" of 'literate populations'. At the grossest level, television, like other communication technologies brought different Indian groups together from their ethnic place to a new public sphere. Its intra-sensuous impact contributed to this by bringing those who did not understand the language into the Bhangra fold. Its being a low definition medium also aided non-Punjabi participation. While listener response required a more intense involvement through a particular sensorioum with the sound and the lyrics, the viewer responded more completely to the total Bhangra experience. Unlike radio artists who had a regional listenership, the television stars acquire national celebrity status. Viewers across the nation respond enthusiastically to the beat and the music even though the words register no meaning. Television initiates the process through which other linguistic areas gradually adopt the music of a particular linguistic group. This entails Bhangra's deterritorialization as traditional Bhangra constituency stretches beyond the neighbourhoods of Punjab to national and transnational sites. The Bhangra's popularity with both Punjabi and non-Punjabi audience, within and without the nation, points to the construction of new intra and inter national communities.

       The satellite technologies of the 90's are intertwined with too many other factors to reduce Bhangra mutants to a form of techno determinism. Satellite technologies amplify sonic exchange to an unimaginable degree aided by transnational media and popular cultural flows and are responsible for musical globalization. The music industry plays a key role in integrating new technologies with new forms of dissemination with the objective of infinite marketplace expansion. Bhangra's packaging as World music by the music industry is a cause for both celebration and anxiety. The music video has a distinct advantage over the other media as it embeds Bhangra performance in specific contexts, for example, Bally Sagoo's Gud naal Ishq mittha in a Punjabi wadding sequence. But Bhangra is recontextualized with glamorized Bollywood glitz. 3 The music video also builds in a narrative into the performance by embedding the performance in fictionalized settings. But it diminishes audience participation of the 'cool' media by filling in the gaps. The music album may be classified like the film as a hot medium. It intensifies the visual sensorium over all others by using the camera to direct the spectator's gaze. A comparison of the home video with the professional album shows how the camera can covert a participatory ritual into a spectacle. The music album is a visual treat in its organization of moving images and orchestration of bodily movements. But all the visual kinesthetics is geared to the exoticisation and commodification of ethnicity. None is spared the 'othering' and 'exoticising' gaze of the music album - the performer, the setting, the group surrounding the performer, particularly the female body. Ethnicity is packaged in such an attractive manner that the familiar turns unrecognizably exotic. The best-produced albums click through calculated preservation of ethnicity and its fusion with other traditions in which even negative attributes become positively inflected.

     Two features of the music album that have hurt purist sensibilities are the objectification of the female body and the mixing of genres. While both allegations true to a certain extent, they need to be put into perspective. As Bhangra movements are a characteristically sensuous, the female body is primarily objectified through its undraping or draping in skimpy Western attire that plays up Bhangra's sensuality. The camera does the rest by undraping even the fully clothed body by lingering on certain bodily parts from certain angles and arresting the dance's sensuous rhythms.

      The music album creates the universe of sonic virtuality where the everyday transforms into a media image that is simultaneously available throughout the globe. If the hot radio medium intensified sound, the hot music video isolates the image. The non verbal language of the music album steers the folk genre form its embeddedness in a linguistic region and opens it out to the global community. Regression to nonsense formulae serves the music album admirably because the voice now merely s called upon to provide danceable background sounds and hummable tunes. Minimalist lyrics help cross linguistic barriers with remarkable ease and may be repeated by non-Punjabi speakers with little loss of meaning. The absence of linguistic play of the boliyaan is compensated by tonal variation. The relationship between sound and meaning is valorized over that between word and meaning.

      Along with improved telecommunication and duplication technologies, the privatization of the skies and the entry of transnational music channels, and the booming music industry contribute equally to the Bhangra revival of the 1990s. Bhangra now belongs to the mediascape constructed by new satellite technologies that transmit the same images to different sites across the globe and create a diasporic space in which virtual communities are formed. The transnational dispersion of Bhangra artists and audience makes it difficult to assign the genre an originary site. The speed and frequency with which developments in one site influence another is evident from the way emergence of Bhangra pop in India coincided with the hybridization of Bhangra by its Br-Asian exponents.

      The 90s resurgence is a case of implosion when a return to roots movement among the Punjabi diaspora had a fall out in the sending area. Apache Indian, a British born Sikh Indian who is today the most celebrated icon of Br-Asian ethno-cultural identity, almost singlehanded set off the Bhangra fever in UK. 4 Though Bhangra bands had always been active in wedding and festival circuits, Apache Indian broke new grounds in several ways. He introduced English lyrics and African rhythms to the Bhangra beat. This hybrid version of Bhangra had black artists collaborating happily with Br-Asian Bhangra performers to construct a unique signifier of Br-Asian identity. Apache Indian's historic collaboration with Maxi Priest, often cited as an example of interracial solidarity, underlines the role Bhangra plays in black racist discourse. Appropriated by working class Indian community to articulate its resistance to white High Culture, Bhangra ironically recovers its worksong origins. Apache Indian is at pains to explain that his drawing on black traditions is as much interracial as working class bonding forged in conditions that foster such relations. This Bhangra mutant that I name Vilayetibhangra (British Bhangra) has a truly working class resistivity that draws on ethnic difference to challenge white High Culture's hegemony. Today Bhangra is the most visible signifier of Asian ethnocultural identity cutting across barriers of language, religion, nation and even race. Diasporic Bhangra practitioners hybridized Bhangra with black sounds to affirm ethnic difference in the constitution of marginal identities. The return to roots movement of Bhangra also returns it back home. The privileging of ethnicity also sets off a reverse movement in which pure folk is valorized and folk artists from Punjab receive international patronage. The British Bhangra brigade is proud to acknowledge its debt to folk singers and has taken the initiative to bring them international recognition.

       In its return back home, Bhangra loses its working class resistivity. The hybrid version of Bhangra in India, Desibhangra, is dubbed pop and is hailed as Punjab's latest export. What Apache Indian did to Bhangra in Britain, Daler Mehdi did to Indian Bhangra. The irrepressible Sikh, a trained classical singer takes Bhangra to unprecedented heights. Daler's insouciance, near manic energy and blithe spirit give him a charismatic presence that supplements his golden voice. Daler himself is amazed when two lakhs copies of his alum sell in Chennai. This break of a Punjabi language music into the Southern heartland is a musical coup leaving the music industry in a daze. Daler goes one to sell I million copies in Kerala in the deep South. The credit for creating a taste for Punjabi Bhangra among non-Punjabis in India goes to the happy go luck Sikh. What makes The Daler magic capture an entire nation apart from his overpowering physical presence and voice. Daler Mehdi's Bhangra numbers subordinate lyrics to the voice, sound and visual effects to cross the language barrier. Nonsense syllables are eminently hummable and Daler has the nation dancing to his tune. Despite his girth, he prances about the stage in outlandish outfits exuding mirth and energy. The music industry, notwithstanding the Sikh's undeniable charisma, does not want to take chances. Another element is incorporated to add to the visual appeal, namely, the inclusion of female dancers in the group. Typically Bhangra themes deal with love and courtship but the strict gender demarcation prevents mixing. The draping of young presentable girls in scanty Western outfits undrapes the sinuous Bhangra movements for the male consumer's gaze. The music video transforms the Punjabi ritual dance into Western dance music and mating dance. The coupling in Bhangra is restricted to married partners while singles use it as a teasing game of courtship. A dissonance between the traditional lyrics and the modernized dance movements also occurs. The Bhangra constituency shifts from the confines of Punjab and Punjabi community to metropolitan working and middle class youth.

      The nineties Bhangra rage is created by a variety of complex factors that cannot be explained as a pure folk revival. The most important is its packaging as World Music. World Music was a term with benevolent beginnings in the Western academy But now, as Steven Feld argues, the phrase signifies "a global industry" "focused on marketing danceable ethnicity and exotic alterity on the world pleasure and commodity map"(151). While World music truly represents a triumph of the global market, the commodification of Bhangra began on the stage with the birth of the professional performer. The difference between the commodification is not a difference of degree but also the aspect converted into an object. While the paid performance commodified the performer and the performance, World Music others and commodifies ethnicity. World Music, as an example of 'global musical industrialization' reflects more dangerous trends in the way it 'banalizes difference'. World Music's nostalgia for tribal sounds free of technological intervention creates an authenticity cult around cultural forms and products that are perceived to be unhybridized and excises those displaying intercultural influence. Folklorists unwittingly participate in this discourse of authenticity by using purity as an evaluative criteria.

      Today such a wide variety of Bhangra forms circulate through the various sites of Transl-Asia with a level of intercultural collaboration that it is difficult to isolate a pure Bhangra essence. This is so because pure Bhangra forms are also in a state of ferment due to the permeable boundaries of the new global. The authenticity question is intertwined with many other issues such as the folk's complicity in its exoticization or the political stakes in preserving purity.

      It would be more fruitful to look at the annexation of the global by different Bhangra sites in Transl-Asia. 5 The reception and resistance strategies are inflected with the particular needs of specific neighbourhoods as demonstrated in the resistance strategies evolved by Br-Asian and Indian Bhangra. Bhangra pop occupies the multicultural space in the diaspora drawing on ethnic difference to contest white cultural hegemony. The Bhangra created by its British exponents like Apache India works in the oppositional resistivity of popular culture as it resists dominant high British culture from a space outside. The sounds it mixes most frequently are Afro rhythms accentuating its affinity to black cultural nationalism. Houston Baker Jr's definition of rap as an "international hybrid" that refuses to "sing anthems of white male hegemony" might fit the Bhangra pop as employed by its British exponents(54). In India, however, Bhangra pop enters the contestational zone of Arjun Appadurai's public culture in which the folk and popular intersect at national and transnational sites to refute a simplistic opposition of the High and the low. The Bhangra pop's tactic in India is to resist both national and global cultural hegemony not from a position outside but from within. This space permits different forms of appropriation. Middle class youth subculture's appropriation of Bhangra pop in resolving generational conflict constitutes, at best, only a germ of resistance. Urban working class youth cultures, on the other hand, can adapt it as a more conscious opposition to the valorization of the classical just as rural and urban Punjabis can use it to contest the national regional imbalance.

      Given the connivance of Punjabi folk artists in the commodification of ethnic difference, Punjabibhangra , like Desibhangra , cannot be equipped with conscious resistance. Instead of following the current fashion for looking for resistance in the most unlikely places, one might fruitfully pursue an alternative path in understanding Punjabibhangra's negotiation of diasporic and national appropriations. While Punjabibhangra participates in its own commodification by opening itself to global forces, it is inscribed with a multiple coding that invites different forms of involvement. This signification system permits Punjabi speakers a level of involvement that might not be possible for those not embedded in the Punjabi socio-cultural context. The essence of Bhangra lies in the performative aspect of interactions between the performer and the crowd that produce a peculiar form of identification and recognition. When performed as a celebratory ritual to mark an auspicious moment in the life of the community, it is shielded from the profane space of the global commodity market.

2 Jhumar, kikli,luddi, sammi,giddha,gatka,julli, dhamal,dankara are some of the forms.

3 Bally Sagoo is best known in India for his remixes of Hindu film music and internationally as a crossover artist. But white speaking of his new album Star Crazy 2 he speaks of going "home" to the Punjab to record the album. He also presses home the point that, unlike the previous two, this one was clearly aimed at the Punjab. Shirin House and Mukhtar Dar talk to Bally Sagoo and Radical Sista in "Re-Mixing Identities: 'On the Turn Table", Dis-Orienting Rhythms, p 82

4 Born Steve Kapur to Indian parents in Handsworth, Birmingham in 1967, Apache Indian truly arrived in 1993 when he jumped to the top of the charts. Suffusing the ever popular Ragga style with the extremely influential UK Bhangra beat, Apache Indian's sound was typical of the flavour of the thriving Handsworth musical scene. Apache Indian has been cited as the first true International Asian pop artist. Though not as visible today, he has also achieved an emblematic status as the best known signifier of Br-Asian identity almost as well known as vindaloo.

http://www.karmasound.com/artists/apache/pressreleases/bestof.htm , 15.00 hrs, 28 th April 2001.

5 Kaur and Kalra coin the term Transl-Asia in Raminder Kaur and Virinder S Kalra, "New Paths for South Asian Identity and Musical Creativity", Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music (ed), Sanjay Sharma, John Hutnyk and Ashwani Sharma(London: Zed Books) 1996.

Works Cited

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: The Cultural Dimensions of Modernity . Delhi: OUP. 1996

Baker, Houston "Hybridity, the Rap Race and Pedagogy for the 1990s", Postmodern Practices

Feld, Steven. "A Sweet Lullaby for World Music', Public Culture , 12, 1, 145-71

Martin, Randy. Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press. 1998

McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media . London: Routledge. 1964, 2001

Ong Walter J, Orality and Literacy: Technologizing of the World . London: Methuen. 1982

Sharma, Sanjay, John Hutnyk and Ashwani Sharma. Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music (ed). London: Zed Books. 1996.