My father taught me to dance.
I couldn’t have been older than three when I first imitated his shoulder shrugs. His endless bouncing. The hop steps. I was learning bhangra, the traditional folk dance of Punjab.
Papa was once a collegiate bhangra dancer at New Delhi’s Pusa Polytechnic, before moving to America with a wave of Indian immigrants in the 1990s and starting our family. From the beginning, this country brought with it the hope of prosperity and peace, a top-tier education for my brother and me.
The pair of us were born and bred in America. But my memories of frolicking around the living room during Diwali celebrations — bhangra music playing, the smell of jira mingling in the air — were my earliest introductions to my Indian heritage and Sikh faith.
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Even today, bhangra is synonymous with joy for me. It signifies love. I am always at home, back in the Chicago suburb where I grew up, in the rhythm and the movement.
Bhangra started with male farmers celebrating the arrival of spring in 14th century Punjab. The dance of vigorous kicks and bends of the body is a celebration — set to an unmistakable rhythm, repetitive and unpredictable at the same time.
With bhangra, I am never an outsider.
Boston has seldom made that kind of space for me. Four years ago, I moved to the city to attend Emerson College, knowing full well that South Asian people would be few and far between in my orbit. As a result of my environment or my unwillingness to venture out, my friends are mostly white, as are the majority of my colleagues at the Globe.
Less than 10 percent of Boston residents are Asian, according to 2020 Census data. That number gets even smaller when referencing South Asians, then Indians, then Punjabis.
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It’s rare to find a place here where I am the norm, rather than the exception. A place where no one questions the hair I have never cut, the steel kara that graces my right wrist, or the pronunciation of my name (dhih-tee).
I began to listen to bhangra more during sophomore year — in my apartment and on my walks to work — to recapture what the music evokes: the comfort of being understood.
Some nights, bhangra transports me to long-ago New Years’ gatherings that doubled as dance parties and Indian potlucks overflowing with rich daals and butter chicken. It reminds me of conversations with my dad about his hours-long rehearsals at 19 and the strict bhangra instructor from Khalsa College.
Despite all that, I felt I never had time to join a bhangra team before graduating this spring, even though Boston University, Northeastern, Tufts, and MIT all have groups that practice and perform competitively. Or worse, I felt I didn’t belong in one. I worried that the dancers would perceive the rift between me and my culture, that it would be easier to honor my brownness in conversations with friends or by watching Bollywood movies than to sign up and be so seen.
Until this April. Boston University’s bhangra team put out an open-call to a workshop for prospective members, regardless of whether they’re students. I thought this could be my chance to reclaim the art form.
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And so in a musty gym, I danced. I waved my arms above my head. I learned how to do jhumars and patakas. The music pulsed through my core and bare feet, coated in a thin layer of sweat that stuck to the floor. For the first time since living in Boston, I felt spectacularly and perfectly at home.
“Why is dancing bhangra a privilege?” captain Nirmal Patel asked. “Because it’s a privilege to share this joy, our joy, with the world.”
Today, dozens of universities nationwide are home to bhangra teams composed of children of immigrants, international students, and a sprinkling of white people. They are all seeking community in a world that feels increasingly fragmented, where Black and brown folks are constantly bombarded with prejudice. Before COVID struck, many competed against one another in fierce competitions that gathered teams from multiple states.
Though bhangra was originally reserved for men, most collegiate groups have gone co-ed.
In my family though, bhangra has always belonged to us all.
My parents rally me and my cousins to dance to our standard Bhangra playlist at birthday parties, even when we refuse. Family and friends blare the music on Lohri or Holi celebrations, where we schmooze around a firepit or throw colored powders around to usher in springtime warmth.
I know I am just a small sliver of bhangra’s story. Because today, “bhangra is its own monster,” said Hasan Khan, a Tufts dancer. “It’s an economy. It’s a movement.”
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Still, I am grateful.
Immigrants brought bhangra first to the British Midlands, then to Canada and the States, where it spread like the spores of a tree drifting from one neighborhood to the next. The genre transforms as my lineage strays further from India.
Younger generations married the music of the dhol, a double-sided barrel drum, with electronica and hip-hop. In the past half-century, the dance morphed well beyond its rural roots and instead proliferated into nightclubs; graced the Golden State Warriors court; infiltrated the Broadway stage; and enamored even Jay-Z, who sang a verse on a 2003 Panjabi MC track. Bhangra now trends on TikTok, where dancers bounce around in parking garages and backyards.
“What bhangra looks like today is simultaneously about preservation and creation,” said Rajiv Menon, who co-authored a 2012 paper on the link between bhangra and Indian-American identity. “It’s about honoring what the dance was, what it’s become, and what it will be in the future.”
So for millions of young people bound to India but not born there — myself included — bhangra is the symbol of our experience. It represents the diaspora with which it has blossomed.
Bhangra is a tangible timeline of our immigrant bloodline.
It is a marker of what today’s generation of Indian-Americans are doing: Thriving somewhere between the country where we claim our ancestry and the one we call home.
Diti Kohli can be reached at diti.kohli@globe.com. Follow her @ditikohli_.