By Jennifer Chan

All interpretations of India are ultimately autobiographical.

—Ashis Nandy (cited in Taylor 1997:147)

Over the past few years, the concept of globalization has become ubiquitous in theories about culture. Through the increased global flows of capital, information, and people, grouped under the header of 'globalization', the perception of all cultures throughout the world have been affected. The very idea of separate cultures has simultaneously begun to be questioned, as previously distant and discrete nations are placed in juxtaposition through immigration and the market dissemination of pop culture. In this essay, I would like to examine cultures of Indian youth in diaspora, a case that has often been celebrated as the shape of global forms to come.

As a blending of Indian musical instrumentation and western styles, bhangra music can be seen as a model of people in diaspora expressing their old and new cultures, and simultaneously creating new subjective spaces and identities for its participants.

Focusing on the varying expressions of bhangra in different sites of the Indian diaspora, I want to further demonstrate that the content and meanings of bhangra depend ultimately upon their context. Furthermore, utilizing theories about youth subcultures, I hope to show that bhangra represents the power and flexibility of popular culture in creating and expressing new identities in the globalizing world.

Early theories about globalization predicted that all cultures would become homogenized and Americanized as a result of the exportation of US-based pop culture (Holton 1998: 166-167). However, since the development of those theories, it has become clear that while altered by the forces of globalization, local cultures continue to persist. The concept of hybridization is now popular in the field of cultural studies as a means of understanding cultural globalization. With an emphasis on cross-cultural borrowings and intercultural fusion, hybrid cultures grow out of local and global influences. Moving beyond the dichotomy of local and global, hybridity acknowledges that sources of identity can come from any direction. The importance of origins disappears as all is transformed into a hybrid whole.

Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha argues that hybrid identities constitute a 'third space' in which culture is located. He argues that

What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These 'in-between' spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself. (1994: 1-2)

Instead of focusing on the twin poles of the 'local' and 'global', Bhabha argues that our attention should be focused on the processes whereby new, hybrid identities are created. In its most radical form, hybridity innovates a new definition of identity which sees it not as the combination, accumulation and synthesis of various components, but rather as a collected field of different forces, where elements encounter and transform themselves in this third space. In this model, identity is not innately given but negotiated through difference (Papastergiadis 1997: 258).

As I would like to argue, by combining Indian music and instruments with western forms of expression, bhangra is an ideal example of a hybrid culture. By examining the differing expressions of bhangra in different sites of the diaspora, I would like to show how bhangra is not just a combined expression of India and the west, but its expression depends ultimately upon its context. Many theories about hybridity see an innate political potential to hybrid cultures, however by examining these cases I would like to demonstrate that its politicization also depends upon the context.

In its original form, Punjabi peasants played bhangra to celebrate harvests, marriages and other joyous occasions (Deshpande 2000: 50). Transported to England by immigrants, in its second-generation form bhangra is a combination of Punjabi and English forms. British-born musician Apache Indian's style is referred to as 'bhangramuffin', as it combines bhangra with reggae in a musical hybrid. Similarly, members of the Indian-British band Asian Dub Foundation cite their musical inspirations as reggae, jungle MCs, dub, as well as their "father's classical Indian records" (Shoker's ADF Interview website). Living as immigrants in the United Kingdom, their influences come from Indian culture in their homes, as well as the youth culture of England. It is notable that in this case, the Indian music is combined with the music of other immigrants, especially Jamaican reggae. I will return to this issue shortly, to compare it with other variants of bhangra in the United States.

As an articulation of conflicting cultures and sources of belonging, for its participants bhangra helps to affirm their hybrid identities. As the lead singer of East London group Cobra states,

I can remember going to college discos a long time ago, when all you heard was Reggae, Reggae, Reggae. Asians were lost, they weren't accepted by whites, so they drifted into black culture, dressing like black, talking like them, and listening to Reggae. But Bhangra has given them their music and made them feel that they do have an identity. No matter if they are Gujaratis, Punjabis or whatever — Bhangra is Asian music for Asians. (quoted in Sharma 1996: 35)

Largely second-generation immigrants, born in Britain, bhangra musicians are in the increasingly common situation of identifying with a country where they do not reside. Though most never lived in India, they carry the nostalgia of their parents, which is expressed in their music and culture (Maira 1999: 51). By creating a space uniquely suited to their situation, bhangra serves to affirm that their hybrid identities are valid, and they do not have to fit into white or black molds. Bhangra, therefore, creates a new way of being ethnically Indian, for youth in the diaspora.

As a commodity to listen to at home or to participate in at a club, in a way the power of bhangra is mostly symbolic. In their theories about youth subcultures, John Clarke et al. argued that subcultures were a way for young people to symbolically resolve the contradictions and problems in their lives, without solving them on a material level (Clarke et al. 1975/1997: 104). By creating hybrid forms in bhangra culture, Indian youth of the diaspora create space for themselves to live both as Indians and also as members of their home country; closing the gap between the cultures by juxtaposing them together. While participating in bhangra events, people can simultaneously be Indian, as well as American, or British, and so on. In a sense, bhangra events are carnivalesque in their transgression of the boundaries between cultures. In bhangra events at New York nightclubs, women were dressed in typical club clothes (tight top and hip-hugging pants), wearing a bindi, mehndi, and nose ring (traditional Indian decorations) dancing to bhangra using moves adapted from traditional folk dances (Maira 1999: 32). Semiotically transgressing all the boundaries between Indian and western cultures, Indian youth can perform their hybridized identities through bhangra. However, contrary to the theories about subcultures and the carnivalesque, I believe that bhangra provides more than a momentary, symbolic blending of Indian and western part of diasporic identities. The diasporic youth may only be able to perform their hybrid identities in the nightclubs at bhangra events, but after they go home, the validation and affirmation of those identities remain. By demonstrating that one can simultaneously identify with both India and their place of residence, bhangra affirms that Indian-American, or Indian-British, and Indian-
Canadian identities can exist.

As I would like to argue next, this 'new way of being Indian' varies in content, depending on the local context in which bhangra occurs. My examples thus far are mostly from England, where Indian immigrants faced a specific set of experiences, which are expressed in their music. However, the expressions of bhangra vary according to the local cultures in which it develops. In England, bhangra is often influenced by reggae, as many Indian youth participated in the local reggae subcultures. In different sites of the diaspora, Indian youth gain their influences from their local subcultures. In New York, bhangra includes more remixes with rap, in Chicago, with house music, and in Toronto, there are reggae and R&B influences (Maira 1999: 32-33). In each of these examples, Indian bhangra is combined with locally popular musical forms to create different variants of hybrid bhangra. Therefore bhangra is not just a fusion of Indian and western musics, but it is a hybrid in the full sense of the word, combining musical influences of other diasporic groups (such as reggae, rap and R&B) and the west, along with Indian styles.

By observing that the musical style of bhangra varies according to its context, the meanings of the musical subculture differ as well. In England, bhangra is closely associated with anti-racist politics. For example, Asian Dub Foundation not only writes songs with titles such as 'Real Great Britain', 'Colour Line' and 'Rebel Warrior'; its members also are involved in racial harassment and police monitoring groups, raise funds for political campaigns, and teach in community music education groups (Asian Dub Foundation website). However, to understand the logic behind the politics of British bhangra, it must be viewed in context of the Indian diaspora in England.

In the 1970s, the United Kingdom opened itself to multinational production, leading to a mass migration of labour from the former colonies, including the Caribbean, East Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India (Hall 1997: 55). Because of the racism these immigrants faced in British society, identity politics emerged as an issue that constituted a defensive collective identity by those who shared the common social experience of racism. The category of 'Black' began to be adopted by an increasing number of people as a political identity through which to define themselves in this new context, including many of the colonial immigrants from different corners of the former empire (Hall 1997: 52-53). By strategically aligning themselves together, Indian and Caribbean immigrants allied themselves against the common experience of racism. As a consequence, many Indian youth participated in the local Jamaican reggae scene, which continues to be an influence upon bhangra sounds. As seen in the statements from the lead singer in Cobra, quoted above, reggae was the dominant form of popular culture for Indian youth. However, as the Indian diaspora continued to grow and develop, bhangra emerged as an expression of the situated experiences of its youth. As another musician states, bhangra "was important in that it gave us something that we could be nationalistic about — because I never had this as a teenager.... It consolidated the debate about whether we are Black, British or Asian" (quoted in Sharma 1996: 32).

As Virinder Kalra et al. write, anti-racist bhangra is the latest in a line of revolutionary Asian politics that began with the Indian Workers Association in the 1960s. Using cultural performance as an organizing and mobilizing tool, the IWA wrote songs to advocate their anti-racist, anti-imperialist message (Kalra et al. 1997: 129). Combined with the tradition of 'Rock Against Racism' carnivals, which were organized by the Socialist Workers Party and the Anti-Nazi League, as well as the anti-racist tendencies of punk, the new political Asian bhangra emerges from a tradition of political music culture (Kalra et al. 1996: 137-145).

In comparison to the United Kingdom, bhangra in New York City is relatively apolitical. Although it draws many of its influences from black hip hop culture and rap music, themselves highly political forms (see Rose 1994 on rap), in an ethnography of the New York bhangra scene, Sunaina Maira found that it was fairly apolitical in content (Maira 1999). For her subjects, the adoption of urban black and Latino youth culture was not a position of solidarity with other youth of colour, or a statement of resistance to a system of economic and racial stratification. On the contrary, most seemed "bent on succeeding within that system" (Maira 1999: 41). Her subjects were mostly middle-class, as college-aged children of Indian immigrants who came to the US in the mid-1960s and 1970s as highly educated professionals and graduate students. They therefore used bhangra as a means of articulating their Indian-American identity, but not as a political statement against racism and economic stratification. Contrasting the overt politics of British bhangra with the apolitical nature of New York bhangra demonstrates that, contrary to the tendencies of hybrid theorists, diasporic culture is not inherently subversive. In reality, bhangra's meanings and degree of politicization depend on the historical, economic, and national contexts of the immigrant community in question.

Thus far, I have tried to demonstrate that bhangra is a means by which members of the Indian diaspora have generated hybrid identities that simultaneously express their identification with local and Indian cultures. However, bhangra's development in different sites of the Indian diaspora also testifies to the flexibility of popular culture in creating and expressing new identities. By briefly discussing another type of diasporic music, hip hop, I would argue that popular culture can be viewed as an amalgamation of different types of culture that were all generated out of new social, political and cultural situations. While theorist on the globalization of culture have predicted dramatic shifts, either through homogenization or hybridization, in a sense, the world has always been interconnected through global flows (see Gupta and Ferguson 1992). With new situations, new types of pop culture are needed and generated.

In certain ways, hip hop and bhangra have a number of things in common. Like bhangra, hip hop was developed by people in diaspora, drawing upon Afro-Caribbean rhythmic and oral poetic traditions in the form of rap (Rose 1994: 62-64). Early innovators in hip hop, such as Afrika Bambaataa, emphasized a black diasporic history through his name and that of the 'Zulu Nation', a group organized in the early 1970s to channel youth away from gang fighting and into music, dance and graffiti (Lipsitz 1998: 25-26). In another example, in 1989 Queen Latifah presented herself in a music video, alongside images of other female leaders in the black diaspora, including Angela Davis, Sojourner Truth, and newsreels of women against apartheid in South Africa (Lipsitz 1998: 25). Through these names, images, and the utilization of African oral and rhythmic forms, hip hop musicians highlighted their membership in the African diaspora. Like with bhangra, hip hop served as an empowering form of culture for its diasporic participants. And again, also like with bhangra, the level of politicization in hip hop depends on the artist and the context of its production. While certain artists and scenes have anti-racist and/or anti-capitalist messages, others are said to promote gender discrimination. Again, it must not be assumed that diasporic or hybrid forms are inherently political. While they affirm the identities of people who had previously been ignored, this does not mean that these forms of culture will all be calls to revolution. Because of its greater popularity and longer history, hip hop likely is perceived as a rightful form of culture in itself, rather than a hybrid diasporic development. However as its history proves, for both the case of hip hop and bhangra, using popular culture, diasporic groups can build and grow spaces for themselves to express their identities in their adopted places of residence.

As I quoted in my epigraph, I believe that all interpretations of India, and indeed, of all cultures, are ultimately autobiographical. As globalization marches on, and the global flows in culture and people continue to reach new corners of the world, our ideas about national cultures and ethnicities must change. As I have tried to show through the case of bhangra, people in diaspora are reinterpreting and expressing these new forms of culture and ethnicity. By creating hybrid forms of culture, they are articulating their subjective experiences as people in diaspora, which, I have shown, varies quite significantly in relation to their place of residence. While we must not over-read the political potential of diasporas, nevertheless they represent new forms of culture, which we must seek to understand further, in order to understand the changing nature of the globalizing world.

References Cited

Asian Dub Foundation website. (no date). Accessed April 10, 2001, on the World Wide Web: http://www.asiandubfoundation.com.

Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. London: Routledge.

Clarke, J. et al. (1975/1997). Subcultures, cultures and class. In K. Gelder & S. Thornton (eds), The subcultures reader, London: Routledge: 100-111.

Deshpande, S. (2000). Grannie doesn't skip a bhangra beat. The Unesco Courier, July/August 2000: 49-50.

Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson. (1992). Beyond 'culture': space, identity, and the politics of difference. Cultural Anthropology 7 (1): 6-22.

Hall, S. (1997). Old and new identities, old and new ethnicities. In A. King (ed), Culture, globalization and the world system: contemporary conditions for the representation of identity (revised ed.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 41-68.

Holton, R. (1998). Globalization and the nation-state. London: Macmillan.

Kalra, V., J. Hutnyk and S. Sharma. (1996). Resounding (anti)racism, or concordant politics? Revolutionary Antecedents. In S. Sharma, J. Hutnyk and A. Sharma (eds), Dis-orienting rhythms: The politics of the new Asian dance music, London: Zed Books: 127-155.

Lipsitz, G. (1994). Dangerous crossroads: Popular music, postmodernism and the poetics of place. London: Verso.

Maira, S. (1999). Identity dub: the paradoxes of an Indian American Youth Subculture (New York mix). Cultural Anthropology 14 (1): 29-60.

Papasteriadis, N. (1997). Tracing hybridity in theory. In P. Werbner & T. Modood (eds), Debating cultural hybridity: multicultural identities and the politics of anti- racism, London: Zed Books: 257-281.

Rose, T. (1994). Black noise: Rap music and black culture in contemporary America. London: Wesleyan UP.

Sharma, S. (1996). Noisy Asians or 'Asian Noise'? In S. Sharma, J. Hutnyk and A. Sharma (eds), Dis-orienting rhythms: The politics of the new Asian dance music, London: Zed Books: 32-57.

Shoker's ADF Interview. (no date). Retrieved March 26, 2001, from the World Wide Web: http://www.asiandubfoundation.com/shoker.htm

Taylor, T. (1997). Global pop: World music, world markets. New York: Routledge.