"Bombay, U.K., Yuba City": Bhangra Music and the Engendering of Diaspora

Diaspora 4:3 1995 "Bombay, U.K., Yuba City": Bhangra Music and the Engendering of Diaspora Gayatri Gopinath Columbia University We must return to the point from which we started . . . Not a return to the longing for origins, to some immutable state ofBeing, but a return to the point of entanglement from which we were forcefully turned away. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse [PJopular culture, commodified and stereotyped as it often is ... is an arena that is profoundly mythic. . . . It is where we discover and play with the identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined, where we are represented, not only to the audiences out there who do not get the message, but to ourselves for the first time. Stuart Hall, "What Is This 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?" In his 1992 song, "Mera Laung Gawacha," British Indian deejay and record producer Bally Sagoo mixes the voice of Rama, a female, British-based Indian folksinger, with that of Cheshire Cat, a male dance-hall rapper who (judging by his appearance on the compactdisc jacket) reads visually as white. Rama sings a traditional folk song from the North Western Indian state ofPunjab, while Cheshire Cat provides the song with its raggamuffin beat, making it eminently danceable. The voices—one in Punjabi, the other in Jamaican patois—together narrate a multilingual, interracial tale of heterosexual desire. Yet the song eludes an easy reading as a Utopian narrative of cultural, racial, and sexual harmony: it remains unclear whether the male and female voices are actually singing to each other, an ambiguity underscored by the song's video, in which Rama and the rapper never share the same frame. Indeed, the video depicts Cheshire Cat as a black man with dreadlocks, which suggests that it is not entirely acceptable for a (presumably) white man to do raggamuffin, particularly when it is a South Asian (Sagoo) who is employing him. The separate framing of the two singers also implies that it is not entirely acceptable to have the black man explicitly address sexually suggestive lyrics to an older South Asian woman. In addition, Rama appears sedately dressed in traditional 303 Diaspora 4:3 1995 Punjabi attire, while the Cheshire Cat stand-in provides all the movement in the video and acts as its visual focus. I offer this cursory reading of "Mera Laung Gawacha" here because the song seems to exemplify the complex negotiation of race, nation, gender, and sexuality undertaken by the South Asian popular music known as bhangra. Through a reading of bhangra as a particular diasporic cultural formation, I would like, in this essay, to examine both the potentialities and limits of diaspora as a theoretical framework. What does diaspora reveal, hide, or privilege? What are the possibilities it opens up or precludes? How do gender and sexuality play out in diasporic articulations of community, culture , and ethnicity? Tracing the dynamic and dialogic movement of bhangra between India and Britain (as well as North America and the Caribbean) enables a critical engagement with these questions, while simultaneously challenging the linear narrative of exile and return that has dominated conventional diasporic thinking. Reading bhangra as a diasporic text allows for a far more complicated understanding of diaspora, in that it demands a radical reworking of the hierarchical relation between diaspora and the nation . Bhangra, a transnational performance of culture and community , reveals the processes by which multiple diasporas intersect both with one another and with the national spaces that they are continuously negotiating and challenging. The diasporic web of "affiliation and affect" (Gilroy, Black Atlantic 16) that bhangra calls into being within and across various national contexts displaces the "home" country from its privileged position as originary site and redeploys it as but one of many diasporic locations. Similarly, bhangra 's incorporation into the nation in its transformed and transformative state refigures, to a certain extent, the very terms by which the nation is constituted. In this sense, an analysis of bhangra demands not only that diaspora be seen as part of the nation but that the nation be rethought as part of the diaspora as well. Clearly, diasporic popular cultural forms such as bhangra are always many texts at once; they are never...