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?