Bhangra Bands of Years Past

LP album cover of the Birmingham-based Bhujhangy Group

Despite my obsession with bhangra, particularly British bhangra and its history as a twentieth-century phenomenon in the wake of Panjabi immigrants settling in Britain, I must admit that I do not know much about some of these groups, that what I know is mostly gleaned from the Internet and that there is much that hasn't made its way online, since people are inevitably more than a paragraph on a laptop screen. Still, I feel that a collection of images and videos here is a worthy mosaic to convey some audio-visual sense of what some bhangra bands were like in the past (particularly in the 80s and 90s). Here are some videos and some images depicting some famous (and not-so-famous) bhangra bands of the past.

Indian English, Indian Misspellings

Encountering Indian English as an American English speaker is partly about being accustomed to a form of English that you don't hear in the mouths of your family; it's exotic but wonderful, despite how many complaints you hear from American English speakers about how Indians in general need to brush up on their English (And many of those who complain wouldn't do badly for a lesson themselves). Despite the frequency of misspellings, many of them humorous, I find Indian English as legitimate a form of English as American or British English, just with a different pace and its own syntax. Simply because a form of English does not follow the standard of the former British Empire does not mean that it should be discounted.

What distinguishes Indian English from "standard" English are not simply its vocabulary (words derived from desi vocabulary, such as pandal, mandir, samosa, masala, etc.), but also its nuances, some of which are reflections of the native desi language of the speaker. Take, for example, this dose of Indian English: "My all friends they are coming soon-soon." To a native English speaker, this sounds strange: we don't say "my all friends", but "all (of) my friends", and we don't generally repeat words like "soon-soon"; we'd sooner say "soon." But take the same sentence, translated into Hindi: Mere saare dost jaldi jaldi se aa rahe hain. In Hindi, it's common to say "mere saare dost" for the former phrase, which translates to, literally, "my all friends." And in Hindi, along with other desi languages, words are often repeated for effect, so to repeat jaldi means that they are coming quite quickly. Other examples follow patterns of English that we make exceptions to: we say "housing", so desis often say things such as "fooding". Past tenses we don't hear in America we might hear from the mouth of a desi : "I accidented my car." Some add "isn't it?" to the end of a question in the same way that one would add "hai na?" at the end of a qustion in Hindi ("You went to her house, isn't it?"). There are crores of examples, but you see that Indian English is often reflective of the desi speaker's native language.

One other thing that you might notice in Indian English (or English in general) are misspellings. I'm not sure exactly why these occur, but many examples come to mind. Picking up Bollywood DVDs, I frequently see the names of actors misspelled. My CD of Kishore Kumar's Greatest Hits has his name spelled on the disc as KISHOE KUAR. Is this a symptom of forgetfulness, poor education in English, or a result of the many spelling exceptions and difficulties of English? Hard to say, though in this Kishore Kumar case, it is probably forgetfulness. Misspellings find their way in many facets, particularly through signs, some of them confusing. Others are humorous, misspelling words but also inventing new ones. I give you with this final example below, a summary in Indian English on the back of a copy of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas I bought several years ago:

"Davdas is a sage of a man, who loved, and jusy loved. Devdas is Shah Rukh Khan shared a manetic childhood with his lovely playmate Paro Ashwarya Rai ) where superme love was feh before it was even understood. When youth beckoned, the love intersified but also an fateful moment on the parat of Devdas created a permanent wall of separtion between them unable to bear the agony of life without Paro Devdas made alchol his constant companion Even in the unflarching devotion of a beautiful courten Chandarmukhi (Madhuri Dixit) did not case the headchae of loving Paro. It was only when his eyes closed to parmanent sleep did the pain begin to fade. he left behind a testomous of ture love that wase pure chast, undenading and the immpted. indeed love was his life...love make him live on...A love is immporailsed. even as it dies... A union is cleebrated even as it breaks... A hero is born even as he is deteated...

I would like to see some of these words defined in the next edition of the OED. I think the English language has room for definitions of "unflarching", "headchae", and "deteated."And if not in English, then at least in our desi-born, masala-fied version of it?

Our Perso-Arabic Roots--Part I

Part of the beauty of a language is its background, and Urdu/Hindi is no exception to this. Like English, which has gathered a worldwide vocabulary like a magnet, Urdu/Hindi is rich in word choice and composition, deriving words from various sources. Other than the influences of Sanskrit and, today, English, a vast multitude of words comes from the past influences of Arabic and Persian (Farsi), words we use every day, regardless of religion or status.
What I have often been fascinated by is the extent to which Arabic and Persian words have permeated these "sister languages" over the years, to the point where nearly half of the words in my Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary are of Perso-Arab origin. Words like haal and musaafir and khairat and ta'aluqaat (all Arabic loanwords) along with sakht and gulaab and baagh and khushbu (all Persian loanwords) are thrown around in daily conversations, mixing in with our local flares of speech, giving our Urdu/Hindi a masala-like consistency: everything jumbled around like a bunch of spices thrown into a bowl. And when we add English words, we can absorb it with our chalta-hai (anything goes) attitude, getting our points across on the pragmatic stilts of language.

Nowhere was the influence of Arabic on Urdu/Hindi more evident to me than when I was taking first-level and second-level Arabic this past year. My teacher was always giving us more vocabulary words, and when she wrote them down in Arabic script on the whiteboard, I noticed words that I knew, most of which had the same meaning in Urdu as they had in Arabic. Fursah meant fursat, muHaafiD meant the same as muhaafiz, hawaa meant the same as hawaa (She told me, towards the end of the last class, that I was exactly like an Italian trying to learn French). I would also write down Urdu words in nastaliq on paper and ask my teacher if she recognized them as Arabic (which she did, about 90% of the time), and of course, when we went together to a masjid, the Islamic terms I'd heard from Pakistani Muslim friends were exactly the same, pronounced a little bit differently ( In Urdu we pronounce the Arabic letters  D, DH, and z  all as "z", whereas they have their own sounds in Arabic). When I played tabla at school for an event earlier this year one of the Saudi students asked the name of my instrument and smiled when he heard it was called "tabla": This is too an Arabic word, Tabla, which means, of course, drum.

As for Persian influences, what can we say? Last week, watching the Persian film Leila, I was stunned to see hear how many words I knew from Urdu reflected in the Farsi I heard onscreen. Words like mamnun and gol and khastegar and shabaash reverberated in my ears, their meanings already garnered from the Urdu vocabulary I'd gotten earlier. The Persians gave us the charbaagh design, the measurement system of nastaliq script (which you can see in the Taj Mahal, where the Islamic calligraphy on the walls is measured so that when you look at it from below it does not look distorted from  the effects of perspective), great poetry (Saadi's Golestan and our Persian-influenced Ghalib), and so much more that this post is titled "Part I". What do we say to our Persian forefathers? "Mamnun (Thank you)". 

Desi-Pardesi Amalgams

In a world that pigeonholes people into every possible category, it is comforting to know that there are others like myself who cannot fully classify themselves as part of one culture or another. For myself, I know it is impossible to completely describe me as "American"  due to my focus on desi culture and language, but at the same time, I cannot completely describe myself as strictly "Desi", due to my upbringing and where I have lived all my life. But I am happy that I am not the only one stuck in between Western and Desi culture. The above documentary, "I'm British But..." by Gurinder Chadha, is an excellent depiction of British desis around 1989 describing their perspectives on their lives and identities as British-brought-up South Asians. The film and the music, of both worlds, casts a light on the dual natures of the interviewees, showing how they are, as Vindu Goel in Vijay Prashad's book The Karma of Brown Folk put it, "in the end, [after much soul searching] you realize...you are simply yourself, an amalgam of cultural contradictions."

About the music: If anybody knows where I can find a copy of DCS's song "Rule Britannia/Bhangra Lovers", please inform me. I have not been able to find anything of it on the Internet.

Diamonds from Heera

In the past year, my awareness of bhangra has expanded from the modern musical scene to the backdrop tunes of yesteryear. And one of the lodestones of the bhangra industry (based in the British cities of Manchester, Birmingham, and London) is the group Heera.  For those who don't know about Heera, you should know that they were one of the earliest bhangra bands to form, around the time of Alaap and Apna Sangeet, who formed in the late 1970s, and made a massive name for themselves in India and abroad.

I got introduced to Heera in early 2011 while listening to a weekend bhangra show on the radio. One of the listeners called in to complain good-naturedly to the DJ that they didn't play any old school bhangra anymore, that he played only the new stuff ("old school" in bhangra terms seems to refer to anything made before the turn of the millenium). After mentioning this to everybody, the DJ put on a song by Heera, Dowain Jaaniya, and suddenly I was surrounded by the sounds of a tune redolent of 80s-style pop music, sung in Panjabi . I had never heard any oldie bhangra tunes, much less heard of any group other than Alaap, and while I sat there in the wake of a blast from the past, I was thinking, what did the DJ say the name of this group was? At the end of the song he mentioned it again, and at the end of the show I was scouring the Internet for who Heera was. I found some of their recordings, some of their MTV-inspired music videos, and opened myself up to the world of old bhangra.

Heera is notable for their myriad musical experiments. The Panjabi tunes they've done have flirted with practically every genre while keeping their distinctive desi sound. Latino piano and conga  influences resound in the classic Maar Charappa and in Naach Patalo, while techno swerves verve around with dholki bravado and keyboard in Sharaabi Teri Akhiyaan Ne. And don't forget the disco-sounds of Dowain Jaaniya. Of course they like to do more traditional bhangra (without the dhol, unlike Apna Sangeet), as in Milna De Naal Aaye Mitro, but despite this they should be counted as innovators, as the diamonds of the era.

Achchi Si Shayari...For Everyone







Kolaveri Di-- Phenomenon in Pan-Indian Identity



Aishwarya Dhanush singing Kolaveri Di

 This past month I was amazed—and vastly proud—to hear that one of the songs from the Tamil film 3 (Moonu) had made it as a vastly popular song in the subcontinent as well as in my local community. Generally, I don’t pay much attention to South Indian cinema, since my knowledge of Tamil and Malayalam is practically limited to how to read and a few words here and there, but this song has apparently taken the attention of desi communities worldwide. According to Khabar Magazine, where I originally heard of the song, if I hadn’t heard of this song yet, I must be in a coma. After reading that line, I remarked that no, I was not in a coma, but lived with a white family who wouldn’t know anything about this song anyway unless Dhanush himself appeared on American television to sing Kolaveri Di. But the song appeared to me in another way when I visited one of my desi friends, who asked if I had heard of Kolaveri Di; when he began to play a clip of the song for me, his sister mentioned, with slight annoyance, that in the past month she had heard this song over a thousand times. I decided, since I’d heard about it twice in that past week, to find out why it was so popular. My inspection began shortly at YouTube. When I viewed the video, I noticed that it had over 33 million views, and that in the span that I was watching it, four more comments had been submitted to the site.

While I was watching it, I wondered what there was in this song that would make it so popular in the desi world. Of course it is new, and filled with combinations of desi and Western influences (the nadaswaram oboe and tavil of the Deccan collaborating with the modern sounds of saxophone and piano), but I knew that there was something else to all of this. It didn’t take long for me to consider that perhaps one of the factors is that is sung in Indian English, that masala-filled dialect of English that makes Westerners’ heads spin.

            This is that one interesting fact about Kolaveri Di then, that it has gathered the attention of the desi communities not by the use of a local desi language (Gujarati, Tamil, Bangla), but by the use of the common bond of English, the language of the British Raj and the lingua franca of the modern world. And mind you, this is not the English that most Westerners are used to, but a singsong version sung in a South Indian accent (hence the “-u” at the consonantal ends of English words), with grammar that most English speakers would frown at trying to understand. But despite this, I find it has appeal, and mostly because of the rawness of the way that the English is used; it is not the English of the refined university student in India brought up drenched in Anglophilia, but the English of the common man, the English of the rickshaw-puller, the bania, and the local paanwallah. This allows it, from my perspective, to be more accessible to the desi populace, so that it can cross the language barriers between Panjabis and Marathis and come out as something that holds appeal to almost everyone who knows a little bit of English. Along with the popular theme of the heartbroken man leaning over his “glass-u scotch-u, eyes full-u tear-u”, I believe that the past integration of English into India has allowed for this song to become one of the most popular songs recently.