What Happened to Punjabi Music When It Moved Abroad

Diaspora communities did not preserve the music unchanged, and the changes turned out to be the interesting part.

When Punjabi families settled in Britain, Canada and Australia, they brought the wedding repertoire with them and immediately ran into a technical problem: the venues were different. An indoor hall with a sound system rewards different music from an open courtyard. Recorded backing arrived, then drum machines, then the bass heavy production styles of whatever local dance music happened to be dominant. The dhol pattern survived all of it, because the pattern was the thing people recognised, and everything else was negotiable.

The result is a genuinely hybrid music, and it flowed both ways. Styles worked out in diaspora clubs travelled back and reshaped popular music in Punjab itself, which then travelled out again. Language followed the same path, so that verses mix Punjabi and English without any sense of transgression, in the same way the speakers themselves do. Purists have objected in every decade, and the objection is understandable, but folk music has always absorbed whatever instrument arrived in the village that year.

For younger listeners in Australia, this music often does something the older repertoire cannot: it makes Punjabi audible in a contemporary register, alongside everything else in their playlist rather than in a separate cultural compartment. Several of the language teachers we would expect to disapprove are instead using it, on the grounds that a teenager who learns twenty words from a chorus has learned twenty words. The old songs are still there, still sung at weddings, and still, on the evidence, in no danger at all.