Growing up in California, Manpreet Toor recalls being exposed in her parents’ garage to bhangra – a lively Punjabi dance genre that is widespread in the Indian diaspora. “In Punjabi households, we used to have garage parties all the time,” Toor said. She heard music sounds like folk and pop artist Sardool Sikander, one of India’s most popular singers, who died of Covid-19 in February.
In March, Toor, a leading figure in the Bay Area’s vibrant South Asian dance scene, and her choreographer paid tribute to Preet Chahal Sikander. In a retro home movie-style YouTube video, Chahal leads a group of men freestyle bhangra moves to a mash-up of Sikander’s music in a garage that has been repurposed. Toor swirls into the scene in a festive lehenga (an elegant floor-length skirt) and rejects her male admirers with mock irritation – a recurring motif in her choreography – before leading the partygoers to dance.
“We wanted to bring the genre back to Sardool Sikander,” said Toor and the joy of Garage parties of their parents’ generation.
Toor and Chahal’s video reflects a new wave of Indian diaspora dance, a wave made possible by platforms like YouTube and TikTok and intensified with live performances during breaks during the pandemic. With her graceful, unique style – a mix of Bhangra, Bollywood, hip-hop and Giddha, another Punjabi folk dance – Toor embodies a meeting of genres that has found an enthusiastic global audience.
If you searched for bhangra on YouTube ten years ago, you found videos of rows of brightly costumed, neatly coordinated dancers lined up on the stages of colleges and national bhangra competitions. These young dancers, many of them first and second generation South Asians performing on competitive university teams, popularized the dance form and introduced bhangra to some of their American compatriots.
Today, artists like Toor, 31, are changing the way Bhangra and other Indian dance genres are viewed, creating dances to be consumed online in productions that are similar to professional music videos. While team-based performances emphasize the beauty of group syncing, videos created for YouTube can highlight an individual artist’s skills, facial expressions, fashion and makeup choices.
Toor has long helped define what it means to dance bhangra online. Her YouTube subscribers recently hit 1.25 million, and her videos consistently generate hundreds of thousands (and sometimes millions) of views with fans in North America, India, and beyond. “It’s my stage,” she said, and her potential reach is unlimited.
“Her nakhra is probably one of the best nakhras I’ve seen in a dancer – it’s so flawless,” said Chahal, using the Punjabi word to describe a dancer’s individual flair, joy and connection with a dancer’s audience.
Traditionally a male dance performed by dancers of all genders today, Bhangra is characterized by fast, ecstatic movements. Arms and legs are thrown high in the air and make the dancers appear tall and lively.
“It’s a very direct dance,” said Omer Mirza, a founder of the acclaimed Bhangra Empire bhangra team from the Bay Area. “It’s a kind of non-stop high energy, and that’s what makes it so attractive to everyone.”
Yet “there is an element of grace at the same time,” added Puneet Mirza, also a founder of the Bhangra empire and Omer Mirza’s wife.
“Bhangra is life,” continued Puneet Mirza. Punjab people “always do bhangra for every festival, every happy occasion”. It can also be a medium for political disagreement: bhangra dancers and musicians around the world have openly campaigned for the support of millions of Indian farmers and workers, including many Punjabi, who are protesting against the country’s agrarian reforms begun last year.
The genre is derived from folk dance forms in Punjab, a region in northern India and Pakistan. “These dances were mostly, but not exclusively, created by farmers,” says Rajinder Dudrah, professor of cultural studies and creative industries at Birmingham City University in England. “To chat and sometimes to break the monotony of the day, they sang songs or couplets together, clapped along and then did some of the movements, such as spreading seeds on the land with one hand and lifting the sickle in the other “- movements that underpin today’s Bhangra choreography. During Faslaan (“grain”) the dancers sway gently like wheat blowing in the wind. During the morchaal (“peacock walk”) they spread their arms like a peacock showing its feathers.
Toor mainly danced bhangra, a genre she describes as “very masculine” and not very lyrical. Her performances are characterized by their lightness: With her a move like Morchaal seems a bit more fluid, a bit less choppy than with other dancers.
Contemporary bhangra originated in the diaspora. “Britain was the cultural hub for bhangra, especially in the 1980s and 1990s,” said Dudrah. “It became fusion-based music that then began to draw on the experiences, stories and identities of South Asians in North America, the UK and elsewhere. Artists combined Punjabi texts and South Asian instruments, especially the dhol drum and the single-stringed tumbi, with pop, hip-hop, reggae and other genres.
The new bhangra music expressed a sense of Punjabi’s cultural pride and at the same time created a dialogue with broader culture – Jay-Z remixed the track “Mundian to Bach Ke” or “Beware of the Boys” by British-Indian artist Panjabi MC . It also changed the Indian music industry: “This music then caught the attention of people in India, not only in Punjab but also in Bollywood,” said Dudrah. “They also designed and created their own Native American Indian contemporary bhangra.”
The cross-fertilization of bhangra and “filmi” Bollywood dance – not a single genre, but an amalgamation of many – is evident in Toor’s choreography. She has always been drawn to gentle, expressive movements and grew up imitating the dances of Madhuri Dixit, 54, a Bollywood film star trained in the classic north Indian dance genre Kathak.
Toor took informal dance lessons as a child – “we used to go into a garage,” she said, “a mother taught us that” – but she is mostly self-taught. She became popular on the internet in the early 2010s when she performed with partner Naina Batra (now a successful YouTuber). The couple wowed audiences in person and online with their inventive Bollywood routines shown in competitions otherwise dominated by bhangra.
With the success of her YouTube channel, Toor decided in 2016 to drop out of college where she was studying nursing to study dance. “That was a pretty quick decision,” she says. At that time she fought her way to the song “Wonderland” in the viral hit “Bhangra vs. Bollywood”.
Toor is known for its versatility. She can switch from a vigorous bhangra routine to a delicate, romantic Bollywood oldies mash-up with echoes of Kathak. “She’s like a sponge,” said dancer and choreographer Saffatt Al-Mansoor, who recently collaborated with her on a hip-hop routine for the English-Punjabi R&B track “Hor Labna” (or “To Find Someone Else”) Has. “Everything looks good with her. It is every choreographer’s dream. “
An integral part of Toors’ channel is the comparison video, in which she compares different styles and shows her range. In the flirtatious “Aankh Marey” (“wink”) she slips and shakes her way through the new and old versions of a popular Bollywood song: faux leather leggings and crop top in one, lehenga and 90s dance moves in the other. In “Track Suit” Toor presents a modern variant of Giddha, traditionally a woman’s dance, which, as Dudrah said, “is the female counterpart to Bhangra”. She and her backup dancers perform Giddha’s signature clapping and foot-stamping, lighter and more reserved than those of Bhangra, but no less energetic. Preet Chahal and two male dancers in tracksuits conquer the scene with a competitive demeanor and rush through a carefree bhangra routine to the same song.
“When you think of Giddha through the body of someone like Manpreet Toor who is in a North American area, you can see that it’s not just the clapping and dancing of the female body in the traditional, traditional sense,” said Dudrah. “It’s also layered through new choreographies.”
Since their dances are part of music owned by record companies, YouTubers like Toor usually can’t make money from their videos. “If it’s from a big label, which is mostly like Sony or T-Series, we have to give up the rights so we don’t monetize,” she said. Dancers need to find other ways to make a living. Unlike a genre like ballet, Puneet Mirza said, where dancers can seek professional appearances, Bhangra doesn’t have a clear career path. “When you learn Bhangra, where are you going?”
For many dancers, including Toor, the answer is teaching classes. Toor has often recruited her students as backup dancers for her YouTube channel, including her most popular video, “Laung Laachi” (“Carnations and Cardamom”)., with more than 32 million views (the girls in this dance “look up to her since they were little children,” Chahal said).
Bhangra Empire, true to its name, has built a dance class business that Puneet and Omer Mirza estimate has reached 5,000 students in the Bay Area and other cities. “When we started we saw ourselves as actors, but now we see ourselves more as teachers trying to teach the next generation,” said Omer Mirza.
Toor also has bigger ambitions: she has headlined music videos for artists such as Punjabi singer Garry Sandhu and British PBN (Punjabi by Nature). She recently traveled to Mexico to make a music video with Harshdeep Kaur, a well-known Bollywood singer, and British artist Ezu.
Her YouTube career has earned her a place in the Punjabi entertainment industry, even from halfway across the world. After all, she wants to choreograph for Punjabi films. “Slowly but surely I’ll get there,” she said.
