The playback Punjab

Punjabi music entered Indian popular culture largely through Hindi cinema, and the people who put it there were Punjabis: Mohammed Rafi, Sahir Ludhinavi, Shamshad Begum, Surinder Kaur, and composers and lyricists from Lahore, Amritsar and Ludhiana.

The Hindi film wedding song, the dhol, the bhangra sequence and the Punjabi phrase dropped into a Hindi lyric are all consequences of that migration.

By the 2000s the direction had reversed: Punjabi popular music became large enough to stand on its own and Hindi cinema began importing Punjabi singers rather than the other way round.

In Pakistan the same thing happened at Lahore, where the film industry was Punjabi-based and produced its own body of song.

A regional language's music became the default sound of national popular culture in two countries, and in neither country is that language the medium of instruction in its own province.

The music directors, lyricists and singers who built the Hindi film song in the 1940s and 1950s came in large numbers out of Lahore and the Punjab, and the form carries that.

Bhangra as it is heard now was assembled in Britain in the 1980s out of Punjabi folk rhythm and western production, and it came back to Punjab as an import.

The Punjabi music industry is now larger than the Punjabi film industry and is one of very few Punjabi cultural products with a global market that does not run through India.

What we don't know

  • Nothing central.

Where to check this

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Film music records for both industries.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 62 accounts in What the Voice Carried, the chapter of this site covering the poetry, the music and the oral tradition.