On a sunny Saturday morning in Los Angeles, 22-year-old Aran Singh Multani drives into the lively heart of the University of Southern California Village. The playlist running through his speakers was a perfect mix of American pop and the beats of Punjabi music. Dressed in a layered outfit, Multani’s right wrist glinted with a Kara — an iron bracelet, known as one of five articles of Sikh faith — decorated with Punjabi language script and proudly visible.
For most of his childhood, growing up as the only Sikh kid at his primary school in Los Angeles, that bracelet stayed hidden. His identity was expressed privately, at home and at the Gurdwara — the Sikh place of worship, not in public. But the shift came at USC where he is currently pursuing a master’s program in pathology.
“I started hearing the themes inside [Punjabi] music — pride in language, resilience, and history, which helps to reconnect with my identity,” Multani said while sitting in USC Village, where some students were enjoying their breakfast at Cafe Dulce.
Multani’s experience is not unique. Across the United States, a generation of young Americans of Indian and Pakistani origin — the children and grandchildren of immigrants — are using Punjabi music as a bridge back to their cultures. It is reconnecting them with their identity — they were once shy, taught to speak languages, understand histories, and importantly find common ground with their grandparents.
Punjabi music has always dominated the South Asian diaspora in the United States, on the television, humming from car stereos, mainly stayed inside those domestic spaces to private life that rarely entered into the mainstream.
Harinder Singh is a co-founder of the U.S.-based Sikh Research Institute (SikhRI) who spent four decades observing the South Asian diaspora and Punjabi identity taking root on the U.S. soil. In the 1980s and ‘90s, Punjabi music and traditional Bhangra dance reached the U.S. diaspora communities largely through the United Kingdom. In the U.S., it was basement music, confined to community halls and family celebrations. “The difference now is that Punjabi music has moved outside those walls,” said Singh, who traces its arc from basements to arenas.
Manvir Singh, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, said that Bhangra music entered the American mainstream in the mid-2000s, when American rapper Jay Z remixed an iconic Punjabi song, “Beware of Boys.”
Diljit Dosanjh — the globe’s most prominent Punjabi star, with 21 million monthly Spotify listeners, became the first Punjabi artist to perform at Coachella in 2023, where he took the stage in a turban and white traditional dress. Last year, he appeared at the Met Gala in New York. Fellow Indo-Canadian singer Karan Aujla also performed on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” in September 2025, where Dosanjh had performed in June 2024.
Singh sees a direct line between the visibility of Punjabi artists and the awareness of their culture among young people in the U.S. “Your acceptance of your own native identity comes when you see acceptance in music and sports,” Singh said. “What we are seeing in the last 10-15 years, which we didn’t see earlier from a Punjabi-Sikh perspective, is Punjabi music’s acceptance in show business and popular culture in the U.S.”
In recent years, this generation’s relationship with Punjabi music was shaped more profoundly by Punjabi rapper and singer Sidhu Moose Wala. Inspired by rap icon Tupac Shakur, turbaned Sidhu built his global following by fusing Punjabi songs with the aesthetic of American hip-hop.
Like Tupac, he was also assassinated young — shot at 28 in India on May 29, 2022, by the gangsters, according to Indian police. But, similar to Tupac, his music did not die with him. His parents have continued to release his songs posthumously. Two murals of his face look out from the walls of a restaurant in Artesia, the small city near Los Angeles, having a significant South Asian population, where tourists stop to photograph themselves in front of his image.
Singh elaborates on the connection young people felt to hip-hop’s deeper tradition. “Hip-hop has become the global language of resistance — the musical form through which the dispossessed and disenfranchised articulate grievance and assert dignity,” Singh said. “What Sidhu Moose Wala was doing was feeling the pain of his people and bringing it into the show business format.”
Yuvraj Gill, a pre-medical student, studies human biology at USC. He grew up speaking Punjabi at home before English. He once watched Sidhu Moose Wala’s impact from very close. At his boxing gym, he played one of the late rapper’s tracks during his training, then the other fighters immediately responded to it. “You take the example of rapper Bad Bunny — an artist whose lyrics most American listeners don’t understand but whose music has nonetheless become ubiquitous,” Gill said. “Punjabi music is on a similar trajectory.”
The pull of Punjabi music is inseparable from the pull of identity itself for many South Asian Americans, especially an identity that was suppressed, or simply never explored during childhood years in predominantly white American spaces.
A 21 year-old pre-nursing student at USC, Reet Buttar spent most of her adolescence actively hiding her Indian and Punjabi identity. She grew up in predominantly white neighborhoods of Marin County in California with no Punjabi friends nearby. Buttar threw herself into school, extracurriculars, the gym, and stopped going to the Gurdwara; even Indian food fell away. “I would actively do everything in my power to go against every classic stereotype of what an Indian person is,” Buttar said. “I denied it for a really long time.”
It wasn’t until college that she joined the Sikh Students Assn. (SSA) at USC, began listening to Punjabi artists like Dosanjh and Jasmine Sandles — a lead female Punjabi singer — and found her way back. She returned to the Gurdwara — after a decade away — she describes as overwhelming.
“I felt like I was being rude to God, in a way — like I had neglected my religion,” Buttar said. “But as I got older and was actually able to learn what the religion was preaching, I made my own decision that I agree with a lot of it.”
Buttar now wears a Kara bracelet that she never wore before. She has started wearing her hair naturally curly. “Punjabi women have curly hair,” Buttar said. “I am trying to embrace more of those aspects.” Buttar credited a generation shift in Punjabi music itself for making that reconnection easier. “The genre — hip-hop and pop, really changed in a way that adapted to young people,” Buttar said. “That made a really big difference.”
Multani also found a particular connection in Raf Sappera, a U.K.-based Punjabi rapper of Pakistani origin who straddles the same cultural junctions. “It makes me proud. My culture is being appreciated by other people, not just myself,” he said.
One of the more interesting dimensions of Punjabi music’s impact in the United States is that it has crossed the religious and national divide between Indian and Pakistan — a divide that in South Asia itself carries the pain of partition, war, and generations of enmity.
Adam Saqib, 19, from Roseville — a city 400 miles from Los Angeles in North California — whose parents emigrated from the Punjab province of Pakistan, grew up without Punjabi culture in the U.S.. Three years ago, he did not know the Punjabi language or what happened during the India and Pakistan partition in 1947 after British rule ended. Now, he does. Saqib wears a locket shaped like a map of pre-partition Punjab around his neck and plans to visit Lahore.
“I joined Bhangra classes with my trainer, Preet Chahal, and listened to Punjabi music to help me with my Punjabi language and identity,” Saqib said. “I like to show my friends because Punjabi music is so versatile.”
Chahal, founder of Dream Dance Studios based in Northern California, teaches Bhangra and works in entertainment production and artist management in Punjabi music. He witnesses Punjabi music giving South Asian youth a sense of identity and pride, with Bhangra offering a modern, confident form of expression.
“We now see participation in Bhangra from other Indian ethnicities like Gujarati — an influential community from India — or South Indian, Pakistani, and even non-South Asian backgrounds in the U.S,” Chahal said. “The potential for cross-cultural expansion is enormous.”
In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s swearing-in ceremony also became a moment of Punjabi spirit when Canadian born Punjabi singer Babbu Singh — known as Babbulicious, performed. He sang his modified anthem song — Gaddi Red Challenger— about a Punjabi boy living in New York. It was a direct nod to Mamdani himself, whose mother, Mira Nair, is a Punjabi Hindu woman from India.
Perhaps one of the most profound effects of Punjabi music on this generation is how it has refined relationships with their elders.
Saqib’s only living maternal grandmother now lives in London. For years, the distance within their worlds was not just geographical. Two years ago, Saqib visited her. They talked — really talked — in Punjabi, for the first time. “I came home to the U.S. and now kept sending her my videos of dancing Bhangra,” Saqib said. “She watches them. She writes back.”
Manvir Singh sees that Punjabi music has always been bound up with family, culture, and community. “So, from my earliest memories, Bhangra music was deeply intertwined with communal celebration and community pride,” Singh said. “And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s a music form engineered to make people dance: It’s as if one of the best technologies of social cohesion and bonding is also one imprinted with cultural heritage.”
Gagneet Sidhu, president of the Sikh Students Assn. at USC, has watched Punjabi music function as a gateway on campus again and again. He shares how students arrive culturally adrift, disconnected from their Punjabi or Indian heritage, and a single song can open a door.
“I had Punjabi music playing on my laptop once, and a Sikh student who didn’t know much about culture heard it and said, “This is really nice — who is this artist?” Sidhu said. “It was Karan Aujla. From there, on his own, he started learning about other Punjabi artists and it brought him closer to his religion as well. He is now going to a Dosanjh concern.”
Sidhu sees the pattern repeatedly. Music opens a door. Community follows. “If Punjabi music wasn’t in my life, I don’t think I would be this close with my community,” Sidhu said.
Gill gravitates toward old Punjabi music — the folk songs and ballads of artists like Kuldeep Manak and Yamla Jatt, whose music carries within it the myths, legends, and rural views of Punjab. Nonetheless, he watched with pride as Dosanjh sold out arenas in the United States.
“Seeing that he sold it out and had a second show really shows how our culture has spread rapidly across America,” Gill said. “Now people who don’t know our culture are going to go out and Google him, search him up.”
Singh carefully notes modern Punjabi music has reproduced sexist tropes and reinforced traditional norms around gender. “We need more voices — feminist perspectives, stories from marginalized communities, an honest reckoning with colorism and the hierarchies embedded in South Asian culture,” Singh said.
Buttar agrees. She acknowledges the growing prevalence of sexist lyrics in modern Punjabi rap even as she sings along to it. “The respect factor should be a normal thing,” Buttar said. “Sexism is something that should be changed.”
On a sunny Sunday in Artesia, Multani, Sidhu and Gill took photographs in front of Sidhu Moose Wala murals, then Multani, Sidhu and Gill drove together to their respective destinations.
“We have our own culture and language. Modern Punjabi music is inspired by American culture, and American music can be inspired by Punjabi music,” Multani said. “We share values through music. Music is a shared emotion.”
The playlist is still running in his car — the two sounds, the two worlds, no longer competing.
Gagandeep Singh is an investigative journalist based in Sacramento. He holds a master’s degree in politics and global affairs from Columbia Journalism School. As a recipient of the Alfred Friendly Press Partners fellowship from the Missouri School of Journalism, he focuses his reporting on migration, education, crime and justice, and the South Asian diaspora in the Americas.
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