Few would deny that the most significant weapon in India's cultural and artistic armory is its avowedly commercial cinema, now known as Bollywood. This anthology aims to portray the soft power of Bollywood, which makes it a unique and powerful disseminator of Indian culture and values abroad. The essays in the book examine Bollywoods popularity within and outside South Asia, focusing on its role in international relations and diplomacy.

The geography of Punjab, a land-locked region divided between India and Pakistan, makes it an unlikely player in oceanic sojourns. But imperial interventions in Punjab in the middle of the 19th century triggered movements from Punjab that inserted this region in the littoral narrative of the Indian Ocean. Unlike the movements of lascars and traders, who have been central to the revisionist histories of the Indian Ocean, those from Punjab have not featured in oceanic dialogues. The absence of Sikhs in Indian Ocean studies is largely due to the silence of Sikh soldiers, skilled craftsmen and cultivators with largely rural roots who were uprooted to strange lands. The confusion of Sikhs with Hindus, Muslims and, even Afghans, in the colonial era, as well as the classification of Punjabi Muslims as Pakistani in the post-colonial, further problematizes the Sikh migration narrative. Drawing on a wide range of official and unofficial historical sources, this essay argues that twin developments in Punjab, namely the construction of Sikhs as ‘a martial race’ and their integration into the imperial capitalist economy, connects the movements of soldiers and policemen to Shanghai, Hong Kong, the Straits Settlements and Kenya with those of skilled artisans to Mombasa and Uganda. Keywords: Sikhs, Indian Ocean, labour migration, cultural identity

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The bonding between black and brown immigrants in Britain has resulted in the emergence of a new musical genre called Bhangra, which hybridises Punjabi dhol rhythms with those of reggae, rap and hip hop. Bhangra's appropriation of Black sounds that are considered ‘Kool’ in the West has not only given Asian youth a new, distinctive voice in the form of ‘Asian dance music’ but has also led to the reinvention of Punjabi folk tradition in consonance with the lived realities of multicultural Britain. This essay examines various aspects of sonic hybridisation in ‘the diaspora space’ by British Asian music producers through tracing the history of Bhangra's ‘douglarisation’, beginning in the 1990s with Apache Indian's experiments with reggae. It covers all forms of mixings that came in between, including active collaborations, rappings, remixings, samplings and so on that made Punjabi and Jamaican patois dialogue in the global popular cultural space. The essay explores the possibilities of a ‘douglas poetics’ for Bhangra by juxtaposing the celebration of sonic douglarisation in postmodern narratives of migrancy and hybridity against the stigmatisation of biological douglarisation in miscegenation theories and ancient Indian pollution taboos.

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