Tutak tutak tuthian de balle balle!

Taking a cursorily nostalgic rearview glance at popular Hindi film songs clearly something uniquely earthshaking seems to have happened for Punjabi and Bollywood music in 1990 Although I suspect its epicentre lay squarely in Birmingham rather than anywhere between Bombay and BhatindaOne Malkit Singh MBE apparently first Punjabi artiste to be honoured by the Queen had released a globish Bhangra albumtrack that year with a title that was plain gibberishmdashTutak Tutak Tuthian TTKmdashsounding more like gaalis than a gaana Before this Doordarshan would probably play Gurdas Manns Dil Da Mamla type Punjabi stuff on a cardboardset as nationalintegration entertainment on New Years EveTTK stormed into the scene in North India in particular Delhi where you simply couldnt escape itmdashwhether with the bandbaaja at a wedding that otherwise played Bollywood tracks Or at a poshschool houseparty where you essentially went in for western rockpop gradually descending into slowdance over gentle ballads with traffic lights on the side of the dancefloor and lightlyvile rumpunch flowing through the nightThe young urbane lot in these happy halls usually considered Bollywood as intrinsically infradig apart from a stray 10yearold RD Burman song like Jahan Teri Yeh Nazar Hai Cant blame them that new decade had only just emerged from the uniformly ridiculous assault of the 80sEither way even if TTK sounded far too desifolksy to seamlessly merge with Vogue Madonna Hold On Wilson Philips It Must Have Been Love Roxette Nothing Compares To You Sinead OConnor or Another Day In Paradise Phil Collins another Malkit Singh number from the following year was certain to segue into the phenomenally phirangi playlistThat was Gud Naal Ishq Mitha The video of which made model Malaika Arora a drawingroom sensation But it wasnt exactly a Malkit song It was a robust remix of an old Punjabi number Who was the producerDJ behind it Another boy from BirminghamOne Balwinder Bally Singh Sagoo Whats Bally Sagoos strongest contribution to Hindi pop I reckon he almost singlehandedly made Bollywood retro a thing of metropolitan cool remixing relatively bhulebisre tracks to stunning effect within the westernfusion space His album Bollywood Flashback with the H of the Hollywood sign turned into B on the cover would make it to practically every carddeckstereosystemAnd this would be as true for North India as the desi Diaspora in the USUKmdasha sizeable number of whom both Indians and Pakistanis are also Punjabi by origin The latter also became a huge overseas market for Hindi films ever since the biggest blockbuster of em all Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge 1995 decidedly a Punjabi film albeit with Hindi dialoguesDDLJ spawned a genre of sorts not just to appeal to NRIs as the new audience but also to offer the rest of India the current template to celebratemdashright from the starting of a familymdashthe wedding horse sangeet loud music nightclub dance performancesAnd inevitably the Punjabi songmdashat present in every other Hindi movie and practically at every party in town between Kashmir and Keralamdashwith words like Dil Diya Gallan Dil Shagna Da Dolna Patola that absolutely no one has any clue what they mean but can hum nonethelessBut why such Punjabi influence in Bollywood Besides that the community itself has dominated the Mumbai film industry and its starsystem postPartition in the same way that Maharashtrians Gujaratis Parsees and Bengalis controlled the studiosystem before IndependenceFrankly there is also no community as deeply extroverted funloving good drinkers dancers and unabashedly boisterouscolourfulglitzy in their orientation to be more naturally suited to embrace and pass on masspopgroup entertainment acrossThat said Im not sure one acknowledges enough the contribution of Punjabi songs to global music itself whether through Nusrat or Abida in Pakistan down to just to give you one instance three performers as diverse as Mohamed Rafi Wadali Brothers and Sukhvinder Singh who hail from the same district Amritsar having grown up at best a few miles from each otherTheres something in the air although Punjabis often joke about how they have no culture only agriculture This is in reference to popular entertainment being seen as loud and lowbrow What that harvesting inevitably produces though are perfect earwormsLike the song Lambaedgini by The Doorbeem featuring Ragini Google its originalmdashsung by Jagjit and Chitra Singh Takes something to discoPunjabify an altogether sober Punjabi ghazal The auto playlist thereafter takes you through an allnight long discography of the best Punjabi tracks from latest Mumbai films if not popular remixes of old Hindi film songsWhich like any other mainstream banyan tree is how Bollywood began to lean towards stuff gaining public traction in the organic alternative space making Punjabi tracks and Hindi retro remixes the continuing everlasting trend Yup think it started with Malkit and Bally Okay I cant think Anymore That Lamborghini still racing through my frickin headMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture He tweets mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomCatch up on all the latest Crime National International and Hatke news here Also download the new midday Android and iOS apps to get latest updates