Douglas, jotowa and douglarisation

The privileging of sonic douglarisation in the diaspora space in contemporary hybridity narratives is predicated on the elision of the stigmatisation of biological douglarisation in the social space. Similarly, the attribution of the absence of social and cultural integration between Indian and African communities to imperial segregation policies draws a veil on Indian ritual taboos against interracial mixing that had kept the communities apart on the African continent as well as on plantation colonies in the Caribbean.

In contrast to ancient Indian texts like the Rigveda which are quite explicit in making negative allusions to blackness,Footnote ⁴ modern Indian literatures maintain a careful silence with respect to the African people known as hubshis in Hindi and other Indian languages.Footnote ⁵ In the absence of allusions to blackness in Indian literatures, the imagining of blackness on the Indian subcontinent must, therefore, come refracted through imperial representations. Kipling's portrayal of a Sikh trooper's self-ascription in his story ‘A Sahib's War’ provides a fairly accurate picture of African Indian relations at the beginning of the 20th century. The Sikh narrator, Umr Singh, strongly objects to being herded with ‘these black Kaffirs’ as ‘a Sikh – a trooper of the State’ and to being appointed ‘to the command (what a command for me!) of certain woolly ones – Hubshis – whose touch and shadow are pollution’ (Kipling n.d.).Footnote ⁶ Similarly, the history of Indian African relations in the Caribbean may similarly be reconstructed through the media-hyped hostility between the two West Indian Nobel Laureates, V.S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott.Footnote ⁷ Although it is set in the US, Mira Nair's film Mississippi Masala (Reference Nair1991) addresses black brown racism by following South Asian migrants out of Africa through the relationship of a girl of Indian origin with an African-American male. While Nair's film has been critiqued for its simplistic resolution of race issues, Nair is the first to have engaged with the miscegenation taboo that opened up subsequent explorations of the brown desire of the black.

Yet, despite the mutual antipathy between Indian migrants and their African hosts and Indians and Africans in the Caribbean, the relations between the two communities appear to have been marked by a dialectic of desire. Hernandez-Ramdwar breaks the silence with respect to interracial mixing by contending that Indians and Africans, ‘despite having historically been kept apart as a matter of colonial divide and rule politics, nevertheless interacted with one another’, producing African/Indian mixed-race persons known as ‘dougla’ (a corruption of the Hindi ‘dogala’) (Hernandez-Ramdwar Reference Hernandez-Hernandez-Ramdwar1997). She explains that ‘dougla’, a non-hereditary identity, is ‘most often ascribed to individuals who are the offspring of one African and one Indian parent’ (Hernandez-Ramdwar Reference Hernandez-Hernandez-Ramdwar1997).

Hernandez-Ramdwar shows how douglas are both appropriated as signifiers of social harmony in the politics of ‘douglarisation’ and resisted in the construction of the discourses of African and Indian purity among more conservative and orthodox factions in the Caribbean. She makes the important point that despite the privileges that sometimes come attached to mixed-race identity and the contemporary valorisation of hybridity in the Caribbean, the etymology of ‘dougla’ is underwritten by the Hindu fear of miscegenation and contamination (Hernandez-Ramdwar 1992). She contends that despite the presence of mixed-race individuals, the negative connotations of the term, coupled with the stigma of illegitimacy, explains why it would seldom be used in self-identification and believes that the Indian fear of contamination and miscegenation and varna Footnote ⁸ caste endogamy would have led to douglas children being raised in Afro-Caribbean/creole rather than in Indian homes.Footnote ⁹

Walter P. Zenner, in Minorities in the Middle: A Cross Cultural Analysis, agrees that, while caste had considerably weakened in the large Indian settlements of Guyana and Trinidad despite the prevalence of ‘the idiom of caste’, it continues to be practised strictly among Sikhs and Gujaratis in Central and East Africa, particularly in the domain of marriage (Zenner Reference Zenner1991, pp. 89–90).Footnote ¹⁰ He argues that while religious puritanism governed sexual relations, strong caste exclusiveness governed social relations among Sikh migrants in Africa.Footnote ¹¹ However, despite the silence on or denial of the relationships between Sikh pioneers and African women by their descendants, evidence in the form of mixed-race children proves that puritanical ideologies or fear of miscegenation could not control the Sikh desire of the African other.Footnote ¹² In their recollections, some East African Sikh pioneers and their descendants grudgingly acknowledged the common practice of Sikh males cohabiting with African women during the early years of migration, which is confirmed by written records.Footnote ¹³ However, jotowas (meaning bastards), children of Indian African marriages in East Africa, were also regarded as outsiders by the Indian community like douglas were in the West Indies.Footnote ¹⁴ With the gradual thickening of caste boundaries among Sikhs in Africa as they were reunited with or accompanied by their wives and families, the jotowa narrative gradually came to be inscribed with illegitimacy as compared to the now privileged location of the dougla in the Caribbean.

Sonic douglarisation in the diaspora space

Despite the social stigmatisation of douglas in the Indo-Caribbean islands, sonic douglarisation appears to have begun in forms such as calypso and soca well before the emergence of contemporary chutney and Bhangra. According to Kim Johnson, in Unity of Dougla music: The Beat of a Different Drum, the crossover of African and Indian music began a long time ago with the African side making the first move in a calypso as early as 1920 that culminated in Killer's 1947 hit ‘Every time ah passin gal, you grindin massala’ (Johnson Reference Johnson2008). These sonic experiments, framed against the backdrop of ethnic absolutism and originary narratives of purity, occurred within the racialised discourse of miscegenation in which hybridity was perceived as contaminating rather than liberatory. According to Shalini Puri, douglarisation continues to be underwritten by the discourse of contamination in the Caribbean even today but she argues that ‘the very anxiety surrounding the figure of the dougla is a measure of its radical possibilities’ (Puri Reference Puri2004, p. 220). She suggests that ‘one might think of a douglas poetics as a means for articulating potentially progressive cultural products de-legitimised by both the Afro-Creole dominant culture and the Indian “Mother Culture”’ (Puri Reference Puri2004, p. 221).

Bhangra's hybridisation with reggae in Britain emerges, in contrast to douglas music in the Caribbean, from a narrative of caste hierarchies and ritual taboos practised on the Indian subcontinent as well as in Africa.Footnote ¹⁵ Therefore, Bhangra's fusion with African Caribbean sounds in Britain, framed in the dialectic of desire that binds the black with the brown, replies to the miscegenation taboo through which the figure of the dougla was bastardised in older theories of race. Rather than Swahili, the link language between Indians and Africans in Africa – a form of Jamaican patois peppered with Punjabi, rechristened Indian patois – is the new patois of exchange between direct and twice migrants and their African Caribbean neighbours. Yet new narratives of douglarisation or creolisation in which Bhangra is privileged might be a facile explanation of a more complex bridging of the racial divide in which the sporadic crossing of sonic boundaries in the carnivalesque space of youth culture could conceal deeper anxieties about racial mixing.

Peter Manuel (Reference Manuel1995, p. 228) has called attention to ‘the complex ways in which postmodern and modern/pre-modern forms of meaning interact and coexist’ in ‘the musical borrowing in the context of two subcultures: hip hop and South Asian diaspora communities’ to foreground some of these tensions (Manuel Reference Manuel1995, p. 227). Ben Rampton's fieldwork on language use among adolescents of Indian, Pakistani, African Caribbean and Anglo descent in Britain in 1987 has, similarly, brought to light a different understanding of creolisation from that in the Caribbean. Distinguishing ‘language crossing’ from ‘code-switching’, Rampton describes it as ‘the use of a language which isn't generally thought to “belong” to the speaker’ and points out that these crossings occur in spaces where normal social relations are relaxed (Rampton Reference Rampton1995, p. 291). While Rampton is largely speaking about language crossings, his findings are equally relevant to the understanding of sonic crossings. The privileging of sonic douglarisation in the postmodern aesthetic of pastiche, migrancy and hybridity is made to confront the stigmatisation of social douglarisation in modern segregationist as well as in pre-modern miscegenation theories. While sonic douglarisation might produce a transgressive musical culture, it may not necessarily lead to destigmatisation of social douglarisation because, as Rampton argues, crossing occurred only in ‘moments and activities in which constraints of ordinary social order were relaxed and normal social relations were not taken for granted’ (Rampton Reference Rampton1995, p. 291).Footnote ¹⁶ Recollections of Bhangra pioneers about their fascination with black culture unambiguously confirm ‘the sharply felt social and ethnic boundaries’ from both sides mentioned by Rampton that make the black brown encounter acquire particularly transgressive overtones.

African Indian Jugalbandi Footnote ¹⁷

The African Asian dialogue first received academic attention through the work of social anthropologist Les Back when he celebrated its Handsworth translation by the pioneer of the Bhangra reggae fusion, a Hindu Punjabi called Steve Kapur, aka Apache Indian (1995). Back's contention that Apache Indian's relationship to ragga music could not be separated from his broader involvement in multiracial peer groups and the wider black community brought Bhangra into the contentious politics of blackness under construction in the 1990s. Teasing out a Marleyian connection, Back traced Apache Indian's reggae leanings to his black friends in school and his induction into the Caribbean sound system and the dance hall scene by Sheldon and Wooligan, illustrating the kind of crossings mentioned by Rampton (Reference Rampton1995, pp. 335–6). Back's borrowing of Gilroy's metaphor of the crossroads to describe Apache Indian's music as a cultural crossroads at which the language and rhythms of four continents meet and his first-hand account of the Maxi Priest Apache Indian performance of ‘Fe Real’ in Make Way for the Indian (1993) marked it as a historic moment of black, white and brown boundary-crossing on the dance floor. In Jamaican patois peppered with Punjabi phrases, Apache invited all ethnic groups to participate in his new experiment with reggae, which had Priest speaking pure Punjabi:

Back's narrative strongly reverberated with the resonances of a similar moment in post-war Britain in Gilroy's own book There Ain't No Black in the Union Black, when the dance floor became the site for the interrogation of racial boundaries by young black males and white females (Gilroy Reference Gilroy2002). His deployment of the imagery of liminality in the production of an intermezzo culture foregrounded the transgressive potential of playful gestures that strike at the roots of cultural antagonism. His mention of ‘the race riots’ in Handsworth, far from accidental, also called attention to the symbolic significance of simple political acts in challenging hegemonic structures.Footnote ¹⁸

Despite the strong evidence of language and culture crossing among African Caribbean and Asian youth noted by Rampton, Apache Indian was criticised by his detractors for wanting to be ‘kaala’, or black. Although Apache Indian defended Priest's Punjabi lines in their Bhangra reggae collaboration ‘Fe Real’ as reflecting contemporary British reality, it was perceived as a curiosity rather than as emerging spontaneously from Apache's multi-ethnic, multiracial Birmingham or Rampton's Southall.Footnote ¹⁹

In attempting to celebrate the moment of African Asian fusion at the Priest Indian performance and other Indian shows, Back expresses his surprise at the African responses to Indian's Punjabi call overlooking the spontaneous crossing of Punjabi with Jamaican patois on streets and playgrounds that Rampton (Reference Rampton1995, p. 334) has revealed. If the children in Apache's neighbourhood could have started greeting him in Punjabi after the unprecedented success of his first album, his black collaborator's calling out to the audience in pure Punjabi to jump and shout should logically not have come as a surprise:

Although he saw reggae as a way ‘to unite people’ round the time of the riots in 1985, when racial harmony between blacks and Asians was at its lowest ebb, Apache Indian displays a deep awareness of the limits of the intercommunity dialogue.

Though scholars have deconstructed the last line in ‘Arranged Marriage’ to underline Apache's rejection of traditional in favour of a modern Western notion of relationships, they have overlooked the idea that he speaks of a symbolic rather than literal unity between the African Caribbean and Asian community. His ‘Arranged Marriage’, while serving as the site for wide-ranging discussions on the conflict between Asian and Western values, masculinity and the intermezzo reinvention of tradition, has not been framed within the miscegenation narratives undergirding the ‘dougla’ or ‘jotowa’ constructs of the dukawala Footnote ²⁰ in East Africa that Apache himself encounters in the Punjabi corner shop he enters, sporting dreadlocks.

As the offspring of Punjabi migrations to the UK from the 1950s to the 1970s, Bhangra's interrogation of boundaries acquires a symbolic significance in view of the strict taboos against mixing caste boundaries practised within the community. Similarly, his postmodern play on the concept of the arranged marriage and the idealised Indian bride who would cook for him and ‘seva kurre’ [serve] him was missed by feminist critics who viewed it as endorsing the worst form of patriarchy. But the theme of arranged marriage regulated by the rules of intervarna marriage that continues to serve as an idealised norm for choice of partners among South Asian migrants in Britain is a grim reminder of the pre-modern that still structures social relations among Asian communities. For Apache Indian, whose Sikh wife Harj's parents did not talk to the couple for a decade because of their objections to her marrying a Hindu, the playful postmodern reconstruction of the pre-modern invokes the taboos related to mixing only to overturn them (Apache 1993, p. 86). Instead of burying racial difference, Apache Indian humorously brings a highly sensitive subject into the open. Despite the possibilities of crossing of linguistic and sonic boundaries in multicultural Britain, the boundaries of religion, colour or race remain impermeable, and mixing is still framed within the purity fetish. Juxtaposing the utopian vision of sonic collaboration against the real issues that confront the community, Apache capitalises on his global visibility to address political subjects such as caste, arranged marriages, honour killings and so on.

With ‘Independent Girl’, Apache Indian and Malkit Singh confirmed the compatibility of Jamaican patois with pure Punjabi through constructing a new Punjabi praise song to the beloved in which Apache sang praises of ‘the Independent Girl’ in Jamaican patois:

Malkit echoed his sentiments in the pure Punjabi of folksong:

The collaboration between the Bhangra reggae pioneer and the Punjabi folksinger set the tone for further collaborations between British Asian, British Caribbean and Punjabi Bhangra practitioners within UK and India in which the Punjabi pre-modern was forced to encounter the Western postmodern.

Apache Indian's collaboration with Jazzy B in the album Romeo appears to be an apparently unproblematic integration of Jamaican patois in pure Punjabi. In the song ‘jine mera dil lutiya’, Apache sticks to Jamaican patois, leaving Jazzy B to sing the folksy Punjabi lines praising the fair and lovely girl who has stolen his heart:

Not only in its borrowing of formulaic lyrics fetishising whiteness, but also in its functioning within traditional Punjabi courtship codes, the Punjabi praise song has the beloved responding to her fetishisation through permissible conventions of rustic Punjabi culture. Apache's lines in Jamaican patois about wanting to hold her in his arms and the highly sexualised visual images of the music video relocate the purity fetish of the Punjabi village regulating gendered boundaries to the multicultural mixing of the urban cityscape. Jazzy B, singing in pure Punjabi, is made to embody a Punjabi tradition that is juxtaposed against the cultural values represented by Jamaican patois. Jazzy B, who ‘grew up in Canada listening to traditional music of Punjab’ but was ‘also exposed to rock, hip hop and reggae’ that he incorporated in his music, strongly believes in sonic hybridisation, because if Bhangra musicians ‘were to limit ourselves to traditional Bhangra then it will remain in the villages of Punjab’ (quoted in Chhibber Reference Chhibber2005). However, in his personal life, he remains, like several other Bhangra practitioners, deeply committed to traditional Punjabi values including the sanctity of marriage, respect for elders and religion.

The collaboration of Coventry-bred Tarsame Singh Jarnail (Taz) and Kendall Smith of Caribbean origin, in their album ‘Spirits of Rhythm’ in 1994, similarly reverberates with the subversive resistance of a forbidden liaison. Their renaming of their band Stereo Nation underlines the polemical nature of the Indian Caribbean collaboration that is aimed as a conscious intervention in the racial politics of Britain:

For Taz to invite the ‘hubshi’ [African] – ‘whose touch and shadow are pollution’ (Kipling n.d.) – to sing ‘Come Be My Lover’ alongside him is a declaration of the end of the segregational politics that had kept the two communities apart for centuries. Although the lyrics still sing of heterosexual love, the chasm between brown and white is visually communicated and bridged as Taz, clad in white, and Smith in black attire call out ‘Come be My Lover’ and affirm the brotherhood that Gurdial Singh Pandhal, the son of a Sikh pioneer who arrived in Kenya in 1892, mentions, through Taz and Kendall engaging in an homoerotic embrace.Footnote ²¹

Although the rhetoric and polemics of blackness have been shaped recently, the desire of the other that the song articulates is as long as the black brown contact. The visual translation of the spectroscopic economy of black and white in Stereo Nation's ‘Come be my Lover’ articulates the South Asian absence in the British nation, the Punjabi identification and disavowal of whiteness as Taz and Kendall, clad in white and black respectively, appear as mirror images of one another. The video stages the Indian desire of the black body with Taz and Kendall, mirroring one another's movements, drawing closer to one another until Kendall locks Taz in an affectionate embrace. A frame that reverses black and white in a negative of the image of Taz as black and Kendall as white is inserted briefly to interrogate the racialisation of bodies.

Yet, the celebrated Bhangra reggae collaboration between Taz and Kendall in ‘I've Been Waiting’ is undermined by anxieties about blackness reflected in its Punjabi text. The Punjabi lyrics of the song, composed in the formulaic style of the Punjabi folksong, borrow from Punjabi folksong its fetishisation of whiteness. Following Punjabi folksong convention, Taz eulogises his slim, fair-skinned beloved who can drive young men crazy even when she is fuming with anger:Footnote ²²

This fetishisation of the fair-skinned beloved continues in the album ‘Gallan Gorian’ in which he begs his beloved to let her fair cheeks turn even fairer but not break his heart:

Instead of interracial crossing, the woman's reply, sung by Taz's real-life wife, is a reiteration of sentiments of undying love usually expressed in the Punjabi women's song genres of māhīā and ḍholā.Footnote ²³ The insertion of the traditional Punjabi genre, articulating the longings of young wives waiting for decades for their beloveds' return from overseas, in the reggae album transports the boundaries of the home village to the new diasporic space. The retention of Punjabi rustic values in the private space in the adopted land, despite the compromises made in the professional space, makes boundary crossing other than in the sonic sphere difficult, if not altogether impossible.

Although the fetishisation of whiteness and recall of Punjabi cultural codes through Bhangra's Punjabi lyrics disrupts the positive narrative of black brown brotherhood, the black brown sonic collaborations in the diaspora space transform the Punjabi space. By the end of the millennium, black male bodies, complementing black sounds in the Bhangra video, are integrated not only in collaborations such as the Apache Indian Maxi Priest or Taz Kendall ones but also in Bhangra albums produced in India in which Punjabi munde [boys] produce a new street culture and modernity in relation to blackness. This happens as much by the integration of the black beloved as the object of the Punjabi Jat or peasant's desire as by the incorporation of the body of the black other through the Punjabi Vir or warrior's performance of the black male body.

The object of the Punjabi male desire: different shades of the Soorni Curi [beautiful girl]

The problematic appropriation of blackness in Bhangra's sonic regime is replicated in the visual economy of Bhangra through the incorporation of the black beloved as the object of the Punjabi male desire. Bhangra's journey exhibits a gradual transformation of the beloved from the from the archetypal light-skinned gori chitti sohni [milk-white beauty] to the dusky Hindustani [Uttar Pradesh] farmworker with large-scale in-migration of landworkers from Uttar Pradesh to Punjab and the new black beloved with Punjabi out-migration to Britain.Footnote ²⁴ Simultaneously, the casting of attractive dusky models in Bhangra videos alters the imagining of blackness in Punjab's scopic regime.

Punjabi folksong is conventionally structured by a certain ambivalence with respect to skin colour. Except in the isolated praise song to the male black beloved in the folksong kaala shah kaala [my black lord], Punjabi folksong fetishises whiteness epitomised by Sohni, the iconic heroine of the Punjabi legend Sohni Mahiwal. However, Sohni shares iconic space with the legendary Heer of Heer Ranjha, who is depicted, like the Persian Laila, as dark-skinned with big eyes, straight nose and full lips in the Punjabi poetry. This fetishisation of the exoticised dusky beauty in Punjabi folklore permits the gradual integration of the black object of the Punjabi male desire in contemporary Bhangra texts.Footnote ²⁵ Even so, the object of adoration in Bhangra continues to be represented as light-skinned until a new beloved enters the Punjabi space or Bhangra moves out of Punjab.

Although Bhangra lyrics continue to draw on traditional formulaic composition in praising the beloved, female beauty is gradually decoupled from the idealised gori chitti or milk white skin through a visual economy of representation offered by the music video. An unexpected insertion of dusky skin in Bhangra takes place through the Bhangra video featuring dark-skinned Mumbai models like Malaika Arora Khan who do not necessarily conform to the idealised sohni of Punjabi poetry. Since the dusky Arora Khan represented the Punjabi female love interest in the music video of Malkit Singh's gud nalon ishaq mitha produced by Bally Sagoo, dark-skinned beauties have been incorporated in the Punjabi spectroscopic imaginary. For instance, ‘the soorni curi’ or Punjabi beauty is represented as wearing a sari and performing bharat natyam moves in Apache Indian's ‘Arranged Marriage’ video, conforming to the image of the exoticised oriental female rather than to the Punjabi stereotype. Even the representative Sikh lass Preeti Kaur of mundian te bach ke raheen is not represented as ‘milk white’. Sukhbir's ishq tera tadpaye is equally interesting in its opening of a space for black and white bodies, though the beloved is still represented as light skinned as she is in Apache Indian's ‘Pyar Pyar Lovin’’. In Snap's ‘The Power of Bhangra’, the kudi or girl to whom the Punjabi munde or boys call out their praises is a dark-eyed plantation girl wrapped in a bright orange sari. The naturalisation of dusky or even black skin in the Bhangra text has transformed the Punjabi representational space opening up new identity positions so that the presence of black bodies in the Bhangra video circulating not only on national but also on regional television no longer seems shocking.

With Bhangra's travels outside Punjab, the Punjabi male desire shifts away from the quintessential Punjabi sohni to new objects of adoration such as the Gujarati lass for whom the Birmingham-based Punjabi folksinger Malkit Singh is believed to have composed his ‘Paro’. Even in albums where the beloved is represented as Punjabi, her transposition to a different space transforms the Punjabi stereotype of female beauty. Malkit Singh played a lead role in reinscribing the notion of female beauty through his collaboration with Apache Indian in ‘Independent Girl’ in which he called out ni sohniye [Oh beautiful one!] to the aaj kal di toon haigee Heer Saleti [Oh beautiful one! You are the modern Heer) of the Punjabi male's desire and claimed to be her Ranjha (Tera sadian da Ranjha main Jogi). Malkit Singh's incorporation of the modern dusky beauty as the ‘Heer saleti’ in the Punjabi legendary discourse of ‘Heer Ranjha’ relocates Bhangra's desire of the black to the dialectic of the light-skinned arya male's desire of the dark-skinned dasyu female on the subcontinent. Despite strong strictures against intervarna marriages in Hindu scriptures defined within the discourse of miscegenation, the desire of the light-skinned arya for the dark-skinned dasyu female has been the stuff of Indian poetry.

The Indian desire of the dark-skinned beloved has also been epitomised in Majnoon's obsessive love for the dusky Laila in Persian poetry.Footnote ²⁶ It is Stereo Nation who engage directly with the Laila figure in the album Laila:

However, the song slips into bambaiya [Bombay] in the Hindi (Indian Pop version) to exoticise the Laila beloved as the Goan Christian:

In the Spanish (DJ Kendall) version, she crosses into the Spanish other:

The insertion of a Swahili line in both versions of the songs is a reminder of the historic Indian African encounter with Swahili serving as the lingua franca of the trade between India and Africa across the Arab world:

Performing the black body

The Punjabi desire of the black body is articulated as much through the co-option of the dusky beloved in the aural and visual economy of the Bhangra text as through the Punjabi performance of the black body through the Punjabi Jat, mimicking its movements and gestures. The focus on sonic hybridisation in studies of Bhangra has concealed other kinesic features through which the Bhangra body, in addition to sound, identifies itself with blackness. Apart from its mixing with Jamaican patois, diasporic Bhangra might be separated from that produced in India in Bhangra performers' appropriation of black body language and movement. Bhangra illustrates the corporeality of identity as Punjabi youth perform blackness by mimicking black body language. Rupa Huq (Reference Huq, Sharma, Hutnyk and Sharma1996) has argued that British Bhangra turned Asian ‘Kool’ through the appropriation of black ‘Kool’. The appropriation of Black Kool extends beyond the semiotics of youth styles such as Apache Indian's celebrated dreadlocks to include a corporeal orientation through which the Punjabi body articulates its desire of the black body. In view of the significance of kes [hair] in the production of Sikh subjectivity and of dreadlocks in Rastafarian, Apache Indian's dreadlocks and Jazzy B's spiked hair underline the performative nature of identities and the symbolic deconstruction of essentialist notions of identities. The Punjabi performance of the black body – the head nod and shoulder shake, the slouch and the walk – in addition to ‘talking the talk’ – reinscribes the imperial Punjabi body of ‘the martial race’. No longer the body of the warrior or Vir constructed in Sikhism or imperialism, the Punjabi body performs the body of the black underclass in a gesture of solidarity to lay a claim to marginality.

Apache Indian's collaboration with Malkit Singh in ‘The Independent Girl’ deserves a special mention for its enactment and deconstruction of Punjabi identity through corporeal semiotics. Complementing the juxtaposition of pure Punjabi against Jamaican patois peppered with Punjabi are the conventional and hybridised images of Bhangra represented through sartorial style as well as bodily movements and signifiers. If the turbaned Sikh enacts the conventional representation of the kesdhari Sikh by donning the lungi kurta and jacket, Apache sports African Caribbean youth styles. In contrast to Malkit's pure Bhangra moves, Apache Indian sways and moves his body in imitation of dance hall and reggae. Although Malkit offers a frail version of the idealised Vir [warrior] body of Punjabi folksong as compared to the Punjab-based singers Gurdas and Harbhajan Mann, he enacts the discursive production of the body of the soldier in the imperialist army through which Sikh subjectivity has been traditionally constituted. Ears in a straight line with the shoulders, chest thrust out, direct gaze, lips parted in a smile, Singh leaps and jumps, enacting the agricultural movements of the Punjabi villager as well as the martial acrobatics of the Sikh soldier. Apache, on the other hand, affects a slight slouch, his head wagging from side to side, shoulders wiggling and arms raised forward, mimicking the languorous movements of the black plantation worker.

An equally interesting juxtaposition may be seen in the Jassi Sidhu Malkit Singh collaboration in ki kehne in which the two Sikhs, belonging to different generations, are seen singing praises of their beloveds. While the two kesdhari Footnote ²⁷ Sikhs with their turbans and beards appear like mirror images of one another singing in pure Punjabi, the difference in their body language marks the visible signifiers through which Sikh subjectivity is constituted in the present. Not only their turbans, one UK and the other Indian, but their movements, dress and singing styles mark the transition from tradition to modernity as they sing ki husn tere di sift kariye jihne moh laye ne dil sardaraan de [How do we praise the beauty of the one who has captivated the hearts of the son of sardars?]. As Jassi enters the frame with a ‘black’ British walk and Malkit follows, raising his hand in a Bhangra arm movement to the line put sardaran de [sons of sardars], it becomes quite evident that the body of the sardar or Sikh is open to continuous reinscription, despite being regulated by the discursive practices of Sikhism and imperialism. Even when they stand shoulder to shoulder in the nightclub, Malkit's preference for the traditional singing style with the arms and body bending and moving forward and Jassi's standing and swaying in one position foregrounds the reinvention of Sikh body in consonance with the African Caribbean body.

To appreciate the penetration of blackness in the Punjabi mindscape, one needs to mention the Canada-born Birmingham-based Jazzy B, whose hairstyle and sartorial preferences have ushered in a new trend in Punjabi youth styles and fashion, making him a youth icon. It is Jazzy B rather than Apache Indian who has facilitated the unproblematic integration of black sounds and bodies in the Punjabi visual and sonic space through his borrowing of black styles and body movements in his composition of the formulaic praise song. Jazzy B draws on both white and black youth styles to produce a quintessentially Punjabi youth grammar that reflects his sonic mixings. While Apache Indian's Jamaican patois that reverberated with the British Asian experience in the diaspora was too unfamiliar to make inroads into PunjabPunjab, Jazzy B's incorporation of black tunes and moves into the Punjabi cultural repertoire has reproduced Punjabi youth bodies in the homeland in the image of the diaspora.

With the ‘Jazzy B Apache Indian feat’, black brown collaborations, naturalised in the UK sonicscape since the 1990s, have become integrated in the Indian popular music space with the significations of Jamaican patois remaining symbolic and connoting an unspecified modernity rather than any particular musical style. It is the incorporation of the black figure in Indian popular cinema that replies to the perception of blackness in the Indian popular imaginary and the caveats against miscegenation. To this effect, the RDB, Snoop Dogg, Akshay Kumar feat in the Hindi film Singh is Kinng (Reference Dogg2008) is emblematic in its reinscription of black brown relations. Unlike music videos in which black and Punjabi tunes symbolically articulate modernity and rusticity, the verbal and visual significations of the ‘Singh is Kingg’ number dehierarchise blackness. The sartorial semiotics, with both the Hindi film star Akshay Kumar and Snoop Dogg resplendent in ethnic Sikh wear, position black and brown in a position of equality that is reaffirmed by the song's lyrics.

Apparently, it was Snoop's desire to wear a turban similar to that worn by the film's hero that determined the sartorial decision. But the powerful image of an African American rapper clad in ethnic Sikh attire, instead of sporting hip hop fashions, has done more to naturalise blackness in Indian popular culture than the British Asian music video.

The black brown equality, playfully suggested in ‘Singh is Kinng’ through Snoop Dogg's rapping on the Punjabi lyrics, is further explored as brotherhood, not in a Hindi, but in a regional Punjabi, film called Yaariyan (2008). Since Hazra Singh Ramta's Punjabi song ‘Ramta Africa vich’, which is a hilarious account of a tumbi Footnote ²⁸ player's experience in various African cities such as Nairobi and Kampala, the film is probably the first direct engagement with the Punjabi African encounter. While Ramta's song plays in a humorous fashion on the dark complexion of the tumbi player that leads to his being mistaken for an African dignitary, the film explicitly engages with the relations between Africans and Punjabis in East Africa through including a black Kenyan character called Venky Odumba. The film begins with an accidental meeting between the Punjabi protagonist Jassa Singh and Venky at a bus stop where Venky responds to Jassa's exclamation in pure Punjabi, leading to their becoming friends and Jassa's inducting him into the Punjabi fraternity purely on the basis of his fluency in Punjabi. The film proceeds to explore the fraternity between the African and Punjabi migrants that enables them to survive in Canada, which is aptly captured in the image of the Bhangra the three perform in the title song.

Limits of douglarisation

Pointing out that music could function both as symbol and as simulacrum, Manuel (Reference Manuel1995) identified shades of both in South Asian diasporic productions and made a distinction between referential and embodied meanings of music. According to him, ‘referential’ meaning, or referential aspects of musical meaning, would comprise the senses in which music's significance is tied to its more overtly extra-musical associations with such entities as rituals, religion, nationalism, specific occasions, personal memories and the like’ (Manuel Reference Manuel1995, p. 230). ‘Embodied’ meaning, on the other hand, ‘is more abstract, residing in such matters as the tensions and aesthetics in subcultural popular musics resolutions created by the ebb and flow of melody, rhythm, harmony, timbre and their interrelationships’ (Manuel Reference Manuel1995, p. 231). While the majority of music producers in Britain appear to be deeply entrenched in the black music culture, the referential associations of reggae, rap or hip hop subsume their generic difference and the referential appropriation of black rhythms can enable sonic douglarisation without disturbing normal social relations. In addition to its appeal as a musical genre, reggae's referential signification as ‘Kool’ music in the British imaginary plays an equally crucial role in its appropriation by South Asian producers.Footnote ²⁹ Although the music producers might be aware of the finer distinctions between reggae, dance hall, rap or hip hop, these distinctive musical genres might signify interchangeable signifiers to an average Bhangra fan, one of whom defines Bhangrarap as ‘anything that is danceable’ (Katrak Reference Katrak2002, p. 79). Jamaican patois in Bhangra albums suggests no more than a foreignness that must be juxtaposed against Punjabi. If reggae signifies modernity and ‘Kool’, Punjabi folk song comes to signify rustic authenticity. The disconnect between the Punjabi and Jamaican lyrics strengthens the referential significations of the two languages and musics.

In ‘Bhangra Remixes’, I have argued that ‘the diaspora space’ enables the black brown sonic contact ‘through accentuating rather than dissolving cultural difference in the performance of new Punjabi/Indian/Asian ethnicities’ (Roy Reference Roy and Hawley2008, p. 95). I have demonstrated that despite the crossing of racial barriers in the ‘dancing’ public sphere, the purity of sacred spaces is protected from alien encroachments and that while ‘brown bodies might freely w(rap) with black and white on the dance floor, the self's hidden spaces remain impermeable’ (Roy Reference Roy and Hawley2008, p. 107). ‘Despite the declaration of black brown brotherhood voiced through the sonic collaborations and patois’, I concluded, ‘the hybrid Bhangra cordons off a secret space locked in Punjabi language and the Punjabi female's veiled body to protect it from the stranger's profane gaze, including the urban Indian's’ (Roy Reference Roy and Hawley2008, p. 107).