The Punjab Peasant and Digital Culture

Media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan, Mark Poster, Arjun Appadurai (McLuhan 1967, Manuel 2001; Poster 1995; Appadurai 1996) and others have challenged the Frankfurt School’s denunciation of the electronic media as instruments of control by demonstrating that the digital media and satellite technologies can be democratizing, through increasing connectivity and accessibility across geographical boundaries. The debates on the new media in the new millennium have largely focused on concerns about the growing digital divide that excludes a large proportion of the global population in constructing the new mediascapes that connect global, cosmopolitan peoples. However, an increasing number of studies, such as those of Peter Manuel (2001) on Cassette Culture and Mark Poster (1995) on the Internet have successfully demonstrated how the new digital technologies can, in fact, lead to sonic democratization and to the expansion of the public sphere to include local peoples in addition to cosmopolitans. The global flows of Bhangra, a hybrid British music derived from a Punjabi harvest dance of the same name, and the convergence of multiple ethnic, caste, gendered, and sectarian subjectivities in the musical production of the Jat cultivator caste and the performing caste of mirasis, offers a classic case of the appropriation of new media and technologies by non-cosmopolitan players. Bhangra’s production, circulation, and consumption serves as the textbook example of the impact of digital technologies on the politics of culture and their role in altering relations of power between and within nations, classes, castes, ethnicities, and regions.