Bhangra as a village dance came from the western Punjab districts, Sialkot, Gujranwala, Sheikhupura, danced by men at harvest to the dhol.
What is performed today as bhangra is a composite made after 1947. Choreographers in Indian Punjab, working for state functions and for Republic Day, assembled steps from bhangra, jhummar, luddi, dhamal and sammi into a stage form with costumes, formations and a fixed running order. That work was largely done from the 1950s onward at Patiala and Amritsar.
It became the folk form of a state that had lost the districts the dance came from, and it did the job.
In Britain from the late 1970s Punjabi bands in Southall and Birmingham put dhol and tumbi over drum machines and disco, and daytimer gigs let Punjabi teenagers who could not go out at night dance at lunchtime. That music went back to Punjab and reshaped its popular music entirely.
Bhangra is now a global dance-competition circuit with judged teams on three continents. Almost none of it is danced at a harvest.
The village form was a harvest dance done by men in a circle to a dhol, with its own steps and its own boliyan, and it belonged to a particular tract of west Punjab.
What is now called bhangra was assembled after 1947 for stage performance, drawing steps from several separate folk forms and setting them to a fixed routine, and it was promoted by the state as a Punjabi emblem.
The British version, made in the 1980s by second generation musicians mixing the dhol with western production, went back to Punjab as an import and is now what the word means to most people.