Migration Shaping Media: Punjabi Popular Music in a Global Historical Perspective

Looking back over 75 years of Punjabi popular music, one can see the changing nature of the relationship between the individual and the "home" culture. In the pre-Independence era, "Punjabi" identity had yet to play a major role in recorded music, whose chief value had been entertainment. By the 1960s, music had acquired the function of forming a concise idea of Punjab with which its cosmopolitan audience could easily identify. By the 1990s, Punjabi identity, as espoused in its music industry, was marked by the idea that, by its very nature, to be Punjabi was to be global.