ABSTRACT
Bhangra, the loudest Asian sound in global pop, is in so many places today that it cannot be ignored. Bhangra has been examined in British sociology, anthropology and culture studies to celebrate cultural difference in the production of hybrid youth subcultures and ethnic identities in multicultural Britain. Despite the critiques of essentialist definitions of Indian culture that have emerged in the recent past, the Indian cultural tradition continues to be represented as homogeneous through the privileging of a particular cultural strand in India's multi-layered history in nationalist discourse. Gibb Schreffler, an American ethnomusicologist, has uncovered the history of the appropriation of "bhangra", a genre marginalized to the more popular jhummar, after the partition of Panjab in 1947 in the production of post-independence Panjabi cultural identity. Bhangra's global dispersal by Panjabi migrations to different parts of the world could easily be explained through the "wandering melodies" thesis.
