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A Map With a Line Through It
Where is Punjab? The answer is the first test of whether someone has really learned the culture.
The land of five rivers
The name Punjab is usually explained as "five waters", from the rivers that run through the region. It is a large, fertile plain, one of the great agricultural areas of South Asia, and it has a long and layered history of kingdoms, empires and migrations.
Until 1947, Punjab was a single province of British India. Then the British left, and the subcontinent was partitioned into India and Pakistan. The border was drawn straight through Punjab. One part of the region went to India and the other to Pakistan, and millions of people, Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, moved or were forced to move in one of the largest and most violent migrations of the twentieth century.
Why "North India" is the wrong answer
You will often hear bhangra described as coming from "north India". It is an easy phrase, and an understandable one, but it is wrong in two ways.
First, it forgets Pakistan. The Punjab region today lies in both countries, and the places credited in published accounts with the earliest forms of the dance include districts that are now in Pakistan. Describing bhangra as "Indian" and leaving it there erases that half of the map.
Second, it flattens the cultural picture. Northern India contains many regions, languages and traditions. x
The better phrase is simple: "bhangra comes from the Punjab region, which today spans India and Pakistan."
A shared inheritance
The partition left an uncomfortable fact in the story. A dance that was a shared celebration of a shared land now lives under two flags. In the decades that followed, bhangra flourished in the Indian part of Punjab, while in the Pakistani part it was, according to published accounts, suppressed or faded in public life. It has since been rediscovered by some people there, and older related traditions such as jhumar have enjoyed revivals.
You do not have to resolve any politics to teach this respectfully. You only have to avoid pretending that the line on the map was not drawn through the middle of your subject. Say "Punjab" and say "both sides of the border", and you will already be ahead of most of the internet.
Carrying the culture
The people who left Punjab, whether through partition, economic migration or the later waves of movement to Britain, Canada, North America, East Africa and beyond, took the dance with them. They carried it in memory, in cassette tapes and in the rhythm of a dhol at a wedding. The next part of the book follows that journey. For now, keep the map in mind. Wherever bhangra goes, it started somewhere, and the somewhere is Punjab.