Through their production and consumption of bhangra and Asian Underground music in the late 1990s, British Asian youth constructed masculinities and femininities with profoundly uneven implications for ethnic, racial, and national belonging.

Asian Underground music—a fusion of South Asian genres with western breakbeats created for the dance club scene by DJs and musicians of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi descent—went mainstream in the U.K. in the late 1990s. Its success was unprecedented: British bhangra, a blend of Punjabi folk music with hip-hop musical elements, was enormously popular among South Asian communities but had yet to become mainstream. For many, the widespread attention to Asian Underground music signaled the emergence of a supposedly new, tolerant, and multicultural Britain that could finally accept South Asians. Interweaving ethnography and theory, Falu Bakrania examines the social life of British Asian musical culture to reveal a more complex and contradictory story of South Asian belonging in Britain. Analyzing the production of bhangra and Asian Underground music by male artists and its consumption by female club-goers, Bakrania shows that gender, sexuality, and class intersected in ways that profoundly shaped how young people interpreted “British” and “Asian” identity and negotiated, sometimes violently, contests about ethnic authenticity, sexual morality, individual expression, and political empowerment.

"A welcome addition to the ethnographic literature dealing with music practices in Britain, and her sophisticated analysis considerably expands our knowledge of these musical forms and their attendant social and cultural conventions."  - Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

"“...[O]ne of the only good books ever written about the influential Bhangra subculture. Bakrania opens the book recalling her cousins playing Bally Sagoo’s ‘Star Megamix,’ following all the strands that made up that moment in history until she has assembled a rich portrait of a unique movement in British culture.”" - Dazed and Confused

"Bhangra and Asian Underground is a rich ethnography of British Asian youth that will be of particular interest to scholars of popular culture and immigrant and diaspora formations." - Ethnomusicology

"“Few book-length monographs have been devoted to these music genres, especially Asian underground, and Bhangra and Asian Underground is a welcome addition to the literature. The book should be of value to ethnomusicologists, scholars of popular music and of Asian Studies, since it addresses bhangra and Asian underground both as music forms and as musical subcultures in the British Asian community.”" - Journal of World Popular Music

"“Bhangra and Asian Underground gives readers a window into the South Asian diaspora in London, as well as an opportunity to discover some terrific music. . . . [It] will appeal to a wide academic audience from fields including ethnomusicology, anthropology, women’s studies, and diaspora studies, as well as to any scholars interested in the complexities of identity and belonging.”" - Popular Music and Society

"“Bhangra and Asian Underground is an important book that makes significant contributions to the study of youth culture, popular music, and social identity. The author’s ethnographic research gives the reader an up close look at how young British Asians negotiate their identities by engaging with the contradictory demands of race, class, and gender.”" - American Journal of Sociology