Bringing bhangra to the masses

At the request of my friend and her birthday party, where the theme was to come dressed as rock stars, I donned a turban and became her favourite Indian pop star. My friend is American. The pop star is Indian. They met on YouTube. Even though she cannot understand a word of what he says, she finds him entertaining and hilarious, and, she loves his music. He is a bhangra artist.

Bhangra is a catchy folk music genre from the plains of Punjab, which lends itself to equally energetic dancing – which is why, partly, it has gone mainstream in the past decade.

However, it wasn’t YouTube that introduced him to the world (although that has helped immensely). In fact, it was a group of Indo-British musicians growing up in England such as Bally Sagoo, Punjabi MC and Nitin Sawhney who experimented with fusion and introduced it when working as a DJ at day jams, a phenomenon that took North America and Europe by storm in the early Nineties, when children of Indian parents would go to a club in the afternoon rather than sneak out at night to discotheques.

While Sagoo and Sawhney sampled bits of Indian music, weaving them with beats and creating an entirely new genre of music, Punjabi MC mixed bhangra with rap.

Some of their samples came from artists such as Daler Mehndi (my friend’s YouTube discovery). Mehndi comes from a Punjabi village and a family of lorry drivers. He sings in Punjabi and is the kind of jovial character that, during his live performances – whether in India or abroad – can have an entire stadium packed with people shaking their shoulders and raising their hands in the air, or as my friend says, “screwing the light bulb”.

After Indian cuisine and Bollywood, Indian pop culture has slowly but inevitably entered the mainstream. To his credit, Mehndi did not start in Bollywood singing playback songs.

Instead, he grew out of his village and onto stage shows and into music videos when MTV and Channel V were launched in India in the early Nineties, when Indians got their first taste of cable television.

And as the popularity of YouTube grew, well-meaning fans started uploading his videos for friends and family abroad, who still wanted a slice of modern India but had few avenues to find it. Of course, all this – cable TV in India and the day jams in England – were happening at the same time, which led to the inevitable tipping point: Mehndi is now one of the best known faces of Indian pop.

At my friend’s party, after I imitated his dance moves, quite a few of our American and British friends immediately recognised my costume.

They called the costume out by name, saying simply: “Hey, look, you’re dressed like Daler Mehndi.”