Anokha emerging: The Asian Underground,new ethnicities,and diversity conservatism

Abstract

This article tracks the relationship between Britain’s ‘Asian Underground’ music scene and reconfigurations of Britishness in the mid- to late-1990s, through to the more contemporary tightening of border regimes and draconian policies around immigration in the United Kingdom. It examines the role that a small, British-Asian weekly London club night, Anokha, played in the precipitation of an ‘emergent structure of feeling’ that would ultimately shift national conversations about what Britishness signified at the turn of the last millennium. The article places British-Asian club and music aesthetics in a broader terrain of avant-garde cultural production and representational politics that helped to incorporate Britain’s second generation of South Asians inside the national narrative and polity. The article goes on to speculate on the role this proliferation has played in facilitating forms of political closure with respect to migration, race and bordering that have emerged from a generation of conservative British South Asian (and second-generation immigrant) politicians enabled by these forms of incorporation.

On 1 November 2020, the user ‘1krecords’ posted a 37-minute video to the YouTube video sharing platform. The video comprises rare footage shot on the closing night of Anokha, a weekly, Monday evening club night that ran at the Blue Note in Hoxton Square, East London, and was the brainchild of musician Talvin Singh and his then business partner Sweety Kapoor. The grainy, dark and shakily shot visual document begins with a close-up of headphone clad German musician and DJ, Lelonek, who two decades later had adopted the YouTube username ‘1krecords’. He is playing a synthesizer and is flanked by a drum machine as he stands on stage and raises a hand saluting an as-yet out of shot audience facing him. The camera pans right to reveal an oversized visual projection on a white sheet hung at the back of the stage. Black letters in a stylized Sanskritic script depict the word ‘Anokha’, which roughly translates as unique, or rare. As the camera jerkily pans across the stage, it reveals the silhouettes of a couple of figures standing to the side of the stage: other musicians. They are chatting above the brief break in the music. A high-hat cymbal rolls, bass drum kicks in and the beat and melody begin again: a swift and hypnotic 164 beats per minute. Club lights distort the sepia picture before the camera pans back to Lelonek, the shot now revealing a shifting sequence of visuals on the screen behind him, all still overlaid by the word ‘Anokha’. The scene cuts to a packed and eclectically-composed dance floor comprising white, black and brown bodies, heads turned to the stage, nodding, dancing, grooving. As the video proceeds, more musicians on the stage are revealed, including at the front a young, spiky-haired Talvin Singh, clad in headphones and surrounded by a rig that suspends an incongruous juxtaposition of mixer and tabla drums. He riffs and improvises on his tablas, distorting and bending bass sounds from his baya (bass tabla), while his right hand plays a rhythm on the dayan (treble drum) at an improbable speed. An enthralled audience cheers him on as Cleveland Watkiss MCs, orchestrating and toasting both crowd and musicians alike. Dancers sway, entrained by the music, oblivious to the camera. Melodies, beats and basslines proliferate. The set syncopates sound, causing beats to break and bodies to stutter on the dancefloor as the eager crowd absorbs and precipitates something new, something spontaneous taking place in this ephemeral space.

This fragment of video footage captures a moment, a vibe, a groove that has since become synonymous with a music scene that became known as The Asian Underground. It is, in a sense, an archival document that opens onto a particular historical conjuncture that this article insists on taking seriously with respect to the dynamic trajectory of the very definition of Britishness in the late 20th century, and as I suggest in this article, also with respect to the political present in British multiculturalism. Accompanying the video, 1krecords, or DJ Lelonek, has posted the following:

And it’s here! An absolute treat for all Asian Underground fans. The first-ever video released of the legendary Anokha Night, the much talked about sessions at the hip, Blue Note club, East London. Anokha hosted some of the most amazing line up of Asian underground artists. Talvin Singh, Lelonek, Earthtribe, and many more. ¹

I begin with this video not just to illustrate a scene, but also to highlight a key methodological theme that underpins this article, which is a concern with what Raymond Williams (1977) has referred to as an ‘emergent structure of feeling’ (pp. 121–135). In this case, one synonymous with the club night Anokha and the British-Asian dance music scene it helped precipitate, and was a seminal part of, in the mid- to late-1990s. The article writes a history of this brief period and its affective proliferation, pointing to its resonance and relevance for our contemporary moment with respect to British political discourse around the politics of nationhood, migration and race. In what follows, I insist on the importance of conceiving the short period on which I focus as a historical conjuncture that is taken seriously as such. To do so, the article brings together an archive of ephemera, that is to say, an emergent archive of materials variously comprising fragments of video on social media, film, newspaper sources and the music review press, as well as music’s material culture.

In what follows, I argue that a proper and contextual understanding of the progressive and convivial structure of feeling precipitated by the emergence of this British-Asian music scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s sheds valuable light on the trajectory of Britishness conceived as a dynamic signifier; one that in the late 1990s was torn open in ways that created space for British South Asian belonging and visibility. If the first four sections of this article develop this historical narrative and argument, in the closing section, I stress that understanding that particular conjuncture also goes some way to shedding light on the institutional racism and draconian bordering practices so associated with late modern party politics in contemporary Britain, particularly with respect to the visible optics of ‘diversity’ that has characterized a progressively more brutal border regime in a broadly conservative political context.

The scene this article maps was a predominantly London-based British-Asian music scene, one that emerged between around 1996 and 2002 and became known as the ‘Asian Underground’, or the ‘New Asian Kool’ (for an ethnography of this London-based scene, see Murthy, 2017), and in so doing had a quite profound effect on the fabric of British public culture. The artists central within this scene include the musicians Nitin Sawhney, the Asian Dub Foundation (ADF), Susheela Raman, DJ Ritu, Joi, and a handful of others including Talvin Singh. These were musicians all born in the UK to parents who had emigrated from somewhere in South Asia, mostly India, either directly or via East Africa. As such, this ‘second generation’ group of British-Asian musicians variously produced club and dance music, hip-hop, and drum and bass, which had a distinctive South Asian aesthetics, instrumentation, or other kind of influence. In other words, they all chose to reference their own double consciousness through their music, and were thus making music, and a nascent scene, born from their own experience of growing up in familial backgrounds steeped in various forms of South Asian cultural expression. One of the challenges that these musicians thus confronted head on was how to bring themselves into representation in British public life on their own terms; how to publicly speak their own artistic language, and how to ultimately be ‘cool’ in a context where, through the 1980s and early 1990s, being brown in Britain not only came with its own safety risks given the pervasive racism in society, but also carried little by way of cultural capital in British society. ²

From the 1970s and 1980s, with only a few exceptions, South Asians were largely invisible in the British media landscape, and when they were visible, it was usually as an exoticized object, or object of ridicule. We might point, for example, to the racialized (and racist) stereotypes of the hapless migrant language students in the television sit-com ‘Mind Your Language’ (1977–1979, and 1985–1986), or ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’s (1974–1981) nostalgic satirization of imperial power relations between a Second World War Royal Artillery regiment and their Wallahs in the British Indian (Burmese) jungle. Representations of South Asian figures in popular British culture were few and far between in the 1970s and 80s, and where they did occur, South Asian immigrants were made to embody racial difference and non-Englishness, more often than not, risibly so (see Malik, 2002: 91–107; Saha, 2020: 9).

In the factories and on the streets, however, the late 1970s saw the beginning of a sustained period of political organization and activism among Britain’s South Asian immigrant communities. Industrial disputes at Mansfield Hosiery (1972), Imperial Typewriters in Leicester (1974), and the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories in northwest London (1976–1978), saw a first generation of immigrant South Asian men and women collectively take stands against employment conditions and opportunities that had effectively embedded racist oppression (see Brah, 1996: 35). And later in the 1970s, the second generation of South Asian immigrant communities began to collectively organize and explicitly assert their position as British-born South Asians in response to the sharp increase in racist attacks and murders in the wake of Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. The ‘Asian Youth Movements’ in Southall, Newham, and Sheffield and Bradford were all instrumental in the anti-racist uprisings in Brick Lane (1978), Southall (1979), and Bradford (1981). And in Southall, on the basis of their position as women, the Southall Black Sisters formed in 1979 to organize against the intersections of classism, racism and patriarchy (Brah, 1996: 43–44). ³ This far too truncated sketch of a period in the 70s and 80s involving the leftist and anticolonial organization of South Asian immigrant communities in Britain is an important context for the historical story this article tells about The Asian Underground scene.

The first wave of existing scholarship on The Asian Underground was more-or-less contemporaneous with the music’s emergence. It signalled a valuable Marxist critique of the commodification of British-Asian dance music that pointed to the scene’s subsumption as a site of exotica and neo-Orientalism (see Hutnyk, 2000; Kalra and Hutnyk, 1998; Sharma et al., 1996). This work was quick, and in some senses right, to distinguish between the explicitly political forms of expression in the music of bands like the Asian Dub Foundation and Fun > Da > Mental, and the club-facing dance music scene at sites like Anokha, the likes of which made no explicit political claims beyond the materialization and visibilization of its foundational hybridity. While bands like the ADF were described by Virinder Kalra and John Hutnyk as ‘cultural workers who use music to express the frustrations and experiences of young Asian males’ (Kalra and Hutnyk, 1998: 351), Anokha as a club space was pejoratively relegated in this literature to an exotic site of ‘Feel-good one-worldlism’ (Bannerjea, 2000: 65). If that scholarship has helped to tease out the contours of a scene riven by the challenge of asserting a South Asian identity in ways that avoid essentialization and exoticization through the commodification process, then this article takes a slightly different approach. In his own attempt to map a ‘third space’ between liberation and commodification in the British-Asian dance music scene, Anamik Saha’s (2011) conversations with British-Asian independent record label managers point to another kind of politics that circulates around the more subtle registers of visibility and presence, aesthetics and a politics of representation that is at once concerned with the scene’s political economy. Although my own approach in what follows is less concerned with the economics of the industry, the politics of presence and visibility are key to this article’s argument about an emergent structure of feeling that The Asian Underground played a leading role in precipitating, and its subsequent effects.

Emergent feelings, emergent archives

A key part of the work of this article is to track the transmission, dispersion and diffusion of Anokha’s aesthetics, its vibe, beyond the weekly ephemeral space of the Blue Note club in East London, and into the mainstream of the late 1990s/early 2000s British popular culture. In this sense, the article is concerned historically with the world-making capacities and work of British-Asian dance music. I use the notion of ‘vibe’ as something of a shorthand for the musical production of affect, or what Luis-Manuel Garcia (2020) refers to as the ‘ethnomusicology of sonic affect’ (p. 22). However, beyond the more individualizing tendencies of some strands of affect theory that would want to place affect beyond or before culture (see Thrift, 2008), my use of ‘vibe’ means to attend to feeling that is congruent with the production of culture, as well as social and spatial newness. To this extent, Raymond Williams’ notion of structures of feeling, most fully elaborated in his 1977 book Marxism and Literature, offers a valuable motif for tracking that relationship between Asian Underground music and (re)productions of the social (and spatial) in modern and postcolonial Britain, and indeed for understanding the production of elements of the political present in contemporary Britain. Williams’ concerted attempt to think at the intersection of Marxism and literary theory is useful in any attempt to consider the achievements, enaction, and social and spatial effects of any form of cultural production, including music. As its title suggests, his book is no attempt to eschew Marxist materialism, but instead to extend its analysis of material processes and productive labour to include the realm of art and ideas, aesthetics and ideology. In a move that turned out to be foundational to British cultural studies, these he stresses are ‘elements of a whole material social process’ (Williams, 1977: 94). As such, Williams insists that we treat the real world not as object per se, but instead as mediation. This shift from materialities to material practices positions mediation as ontological insofar as it is conceived as a productive process with respect to social reality. That is to say, mediation is not just a term that denotes the (re)signification of space and society, it is also their dynamic (re)production through material practice. In the case of music conceived as a material practice, this is also to mobilize what Christopher Small (1998) has referred to as ‘musicking’, where music is conceived not as a thing per se, but an activity with productive effects. As Tia de Nora has written, this kind of approach to engaging with the nexus of popular music and society, their imbrication, has underpinned a body of work in cultural and music studies that examines music’s role in relation to the production of the social (de Nora, 2000: 5; see Frith, 1978, 1981; Willis, 1978 as well).

The theory of cultural materialism that Williams develops is quite explicit about the crucial role that material culture and practice play in thinking, imagining and, importantly, feeling. As he puts it, ‘. . .‘thinking’ and ‘imagining’ are from the beginning social processes (of course including that capacity for ‘internalization’ which is a necessary part of any social process between actual individuals) and . . . they become accessible only in unarguably physical and material ways: in voices, in sounds made by instruments, in penned or printed writing, in arranged pigments on canvas or plaster, in worked marble or stone’ (Williams, 1977: 62). The point here is not just to implicate the materiality of culture in the emergence of the real world conceived as social process, as mediation, but also to stress the role of feeling, and feeling in common, in that emergence. Material culture and material practices are therefore conceptually inseparable from the ongoing formation, distension and transformation of the social, at different scales and through different spaces.

Williams thus underscores the importance of meanings and values as they are actively, and collectively, lived and felt for understanding social change (Williams, 1977: 132). He orients his theory of cultural materialism towards what we might now refer to as a theory of affect and its precipitation. ‘Structures of feeling’ therefore denotes a methodological imperative to understand, identify and read particular articulations of feeling as thought, and thought as feeling. Williams prefers the word ‘feeling’ to ‘experience’ because of the latter’s past-tenseness, yet he also stresses the generational, or periodic, emergence of new structures of feeling amid their dominant (hegemonic) and residual (traditional/archaic) counterparts. In other words, the production of the social is a constant interplay of emergent experiences, or what we could simply refer to as new affective registers in common, and their gradual proliferation amid a hegemony that contains residues of some notion of the past, the putatively archaic, or the ‘it-has-always-been-that-way’.

Arguably, the spatial dimensions of the methodological imperative of structures of feeling are undeveloped in Williams’ own writing. To this extent, the work of this article is a kind of tracking of the transmission, dispersion and diffusion of Anokha’s aesthetics, its vibe, from the contained and ephemeral space of the club out into public and national culture. To be more precise, by focusing on a particular historical conjuncture, and building an archive capable of tracking the emergence of the feeling-in-common precipitated by the Asian Underground scene as it rapidly moved overground, this is an article that attempts to tell a spatial story. That story is both one of the production of space at different scales – from the club dance floor through the mainstream music market and eventually to the reified space of party politics and the expansive symbolism of the nation itself – and a story about the role that established and institutional spaces play in the emergence of (new) structures of feeling. However, if one of the implications of Williams’ work, and that of early iterations of British cultural studies, tended towards a kind of unstated imputation of the nation or the national, then this is an article that routes the historical geography of an emergent structure of feeling through the analytic lens of diasporization. In other words, I am interested here in the emergence and proliferation of a compound culture from spatially disparate sources, which are ‘reaccentuated in Britain’ (Gilroy, 1993b: 15).

In the context of ‘race’ and ethnicity, Stuart Hall has famously theorized emergent forms of cultural production – in his case the Black Audio Film Collective’s work in the United Kingdom in the 1980s – as constitutive of what he referred to as ‘new ethnicities’. Hall’s ‘New Ethnicities’ essay, first published in 1989, usefully suggested how culture, and its machineries and regimes of representation, are integral to the ongoing reformulation of Black politics, of identity. As he put it, this understanding of popular Black culture as emergent, ‘gives questions of culture and ideology, and the scenarios of representation – subjectivity, identity, politics – a formative, not merely an expressive place in the constitution of social and political life’. Set against what Hall (1996 (1989)) refers to as a ‘closed, exclusive and regressive form of English national identity’, then, are the recombinations, hybridizations and unsettling of past certainties precipitated by culture, which in turn produce new understandings of the Black subject, of identity (p.446).

In terms that echo both Williams and Hall, I suggest in this article that the Asian Underground scene was part of a broader field of emergent South Asian cultural production in the 1990s and early 2000s that ultimately helped to reconfigure what it meant to be British; helping to open that signifier to its constitutive South Asian outsides such that through the late 1990s the very notion of being ‘British Asian’ ceased to be oxymoronic. The Asian Underground, I argue below, helped open what Paul Gilroy (1993a: 62) has referred to as a self-consciously postcolonial space in which the affirmation of difference pointed to a more pluralistic conception of nationality. However, I also show that historically tracking the conditions of this emergent structure of feeling, this new articulation of diasporized Britishness, reveals not only late 20th century openings in postcolonial conceptions of nationality, but also helps to explain more contemporary political closures. In particular, I argue that the current eddies of exclusion that characterize contemporary discourses around immigration and asylum, particularly as they are voiced in the politics of ‘diversity conservatism’, have something of an unlikely seed of origin in the late 1990s’ emergent structures of feeling that are the focus of this article. Ultimately therefore, this is an article that attempts to map the ways that this music came to have such a profound effect on the national narrative.

Anokha

To tell this story, I return to Anokha. The video footage with which this article began was shot on 3 November 1997, on the occasion of the closing night of Anokha. The club night ran for just over a year at the Blue Note club in Hoxton Square, having moved from a Sunday afternoon session at The Rocket Club on Holloway Road in North London. In its brief existence, Anokha achieved something approaching legendary status as the epicentre of an emergent club scene inspired by Talvin Singh and Sweety Kapoor’s British-Asian influences. Monday nights at Anokha were consistently far more cosmopolitan and eclectic than just a celebration of British-Asian avant-garde style. As Kapoor herself put it back in 1997, ‘Anokha style borrows from many cultures . . . It is international rather than just a combination of Asian and British’ (Kapoor in Sherwood, 1997: 3). However, largely because Singh and Kapoor were authors of this space, it became known as ground-zero for British-Asian Kool. There were a handful of other Asian Underground club nights in London, including Outcaste at the Notting Hill Arts Club and Swaraj at 93 Feet East, but from 1996 through to November 1997, Anokha grew in reputation to become one of the hippest places to be seen in London. As one journalist recalled some 20 years later:

Lines would stretch across the block, and the likes of Afrika Bambaataa, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, and Bjork (some say even the late David Bowie was a fan) walked through the doors, sometimes ending up behind the decks, till the end of the night. (Patil, 2017)

Anokha was an experimental club night at which, despite these impromptu star-guest turns, a range of DJs and musicians performed, played, toasted and orchestrated an always ethnically eclectic dance floor. Although it comprised a decidedly mixed crowd, many of these DJs and musicians, as well as many of those on the dance floor, had South Asian heritage. The music and scene were experimental, convivial and, importantly, at the time, somewhat uncategorizable precisely because it was so fresh. Just as importantly, in the mid- to late-1990s, it provided a space where British-born South Asians could mix with an ethnically diverse crowd of others in the broader context of a soundtrack and vibe that was familiar via kinship and familial backgrounds steeped in various forms of South Asian music, aesthetics and cultural expression. Singh and Kapoor were effectively creating an ephemeral spatiality that represented a nascent British-born, second-generation South Asian sonic modernity; a space where, in Anamik Saha’s words, young South Asians could ‘emerge from the background and take center stage on the dance floor’ (Saha, 2011: 442). As Tia De Nora has written, ‘[i]f music can affect the shape of social agency, then control over music in social settings is a source of social power; it is an opportunity to structure the parameters of action’ (de Nora, 2000: 20). For British-Asian clubbers, then, these ‘parameters of action’ precipitated a sense of ownership and agency. At Anokha, new forms of kinship were formed not just with one another, but with a sense of what it was to be modern, avant-garde and ‘cool’, no matter the colour of your skin. At the same time, at Anokha clubbers were aware that listening, dancing and being there was a way of building new worlds although they did not yet know the shape of them. In other words, there was a latent feeling that clubbers were part of something that was emerging, something replete with social and political potential. In this sense, Anokha was an ephemeral staging ground for conviviality; for the kind of ‘feral beauty of postcolonial culture, literature and art’ that, as Paul Gilroy (2004: 157) writes, has contributed to ‘the making of new European cultures’. (That said, as convivial as Anokha’s dance floor was, it was certainly not free from the strictures of class hierarchy as well as gender and sexuality norms. As Falu Bakrania (2013: 160–185) has argued, the political potential of Anokha’s dancefloor was nonetheless underpinned by a predominantly heteronormative, middle-class, albeit cosmopolitan, body politic. And in terms of the musicians themselves, the Asian Underground scene itself was, of course, overwhelmingly male.) ⁴

In June 1997, Anokha’s ‘vibe’ was given the conditions to proliferate beyond the ephemeral and contained space of its iteration as weekly club night in East London when Singh, together with producer and DJ Sam Zaman (whose stage name was State of Bengal), put together and released a 12-track compilation album comprising artists who regularly performed at Anokha. The album was called Anokha: Soundz of the Asian Underground, at once announcing what would emerge as a heavily contested genre of music that was, in fact, far too disparate in terms of musical style and sound for any one generic category to do justice to it (see Jazeel, 2025). The album itself was an eclectic mix of tracks that ranged in style; from State of Bengal’s frenetic breakbeat club anthem, ‘Flight IC408’, which interspersed samples of an airport boarding announcement for a flight to Calcutta; through the soulful R&B voice of 14-year old singer Amar that slides seamlessly over the pared down arrangement of sarangi and tabla accompaniment in the track ‘Heavy Intro’; to the triumphant orchestral strings that sound the melancholic yet hopeful melody of A. R. Rahman’s ‘Mumbai Theme Tune’. The 12 tracks showcased a wide range of an emergent British-Asian sound that, back in 1997, was virtually unheard of in the UK music market. To Billboard magazine, Singh described the album as, ‘basically British Asians embracing their own cultural atmosphere’ (Singh in Sexton, 1997: 13). Largely because this music was so new and different to what was available at the time, the decision to release the record was a commercial risk. London Records rejected the album when Singh offered it to them, telling Singh the record had ‘no place’ in their catalogue; a telling remark with respect to the racialized borders of British public and pop culture at the time (see Jazeel, 2025). Thus the album’s eventual release by Island Records effectively produced a new, emergent kind of spatiality within the contours of British public culture.

The album soon received critical acclaim and is now widely regarded as a release that helped to kickstart a wider explosion of British-Asian dance music in mainstream British culture. Put differently, from the second half of 1997 onwards the album helped to precipitate an emergence of this music, and indeed British-Asian culture, in society. Unlike the club night’s spatial containment within the four walls of Hoxton Square’s Blue Note Club, an event that took place weekly, in London, and whose reputation was relatively underground, the condensed material form of the CD album had the potential to travel, to be mobile. Anokha’s sound and aesthetic could now move from the relatively esoteric space of the weekly club night into living rooms, cars, bedrooms and parties across the nation and beyond. The album even received some limited airplay on mainstream radio stations by DJs like Pete Tong (Radio 1), Gilles Peterson and Patrick Forge (both Kiss FM). If ‘Anokha’ was a word that for a few clubbers and musicians was coming to symbolize a particular kind of second-generation British-Asian experience of coming into sonic and aesthetic modernity, it had just been given the potential to proliferate. The CD was beginning to precipitate new ‘forms of collectivity, not only in co-present situations but across space and time’ (Hesmondhalgh, 2013: 85). This emerging spatial proliferation of Anokha’s sound and vibe was both affective and signifying (see James, 2021: 17). It was what Malcolm James refers to as a form of ‘sonic intimacy’, where intimacy refers not to any necessary sense of privateness, but instead to relation and reciprocity (James, 2021: 13). The scale at which Anokha could now build kinship and relations was shifting via the mediation of technology and the sonic mobility that CD publication offered.

As I argue below, that potential for Anokha’s vibe to proliferate was taking shape at just the right time in the United Kingdom. Just 1 month before the album Anokha: Soundz of the Asian Underground was released, Tony Blair’s Labour Party was elected into government. Soon after their ascendance to power, a crucial part of New Labour’s plan to transform and modernize Britain was to re-brand Britain, making its ethnic and cultural diversity visible. ‘Cool Britannia’, the moniker of Tony Blair and New Labour’s flirtation with pop culture is, thus, a crucial part of the story of the role that the Asian Underground played in the emergence of a more capacious, if decidedly uneasy and unequal, understanding and experience of Britishness for Britain’s south Asian population. I return to this below.

Mercury rising

In November 1998, Talvin Singh released his first solo album, OK, also with Island Records. This too was a record that was firmly associated with the Asian Underground. However, musically the album was a much more cosmopolitan and worldly composition than any straightforwardly hyphenated British-Asian moniker might imply. Singh collaborated with a range of musicians for the album, many Indian, but many European and North American, including Bill Laswell in New York. He also collaborated with Japanese flautist Ryuichi Sakamota, and even travelled to Japan to record a group of Okinawan folk singers for the title track OK. On its release, the album received one or two indifferent reviews internationally. For example, Rolling Stone magazine wrote in November 1998:

The trouble is, the album winds up suggesting that most disavowed of music terms, jazz fusion. Unlike the more song-oriented music of Cornershop or Asian Dub Foundation, OK’s long pieces are too ambient, too close to the vaporousness of New Age music . . . [M]uch of the album boils down to mere techno soup, diffuse future jazz that simply hangs in the air to no great purpose. OK is OK and no more. (Hoskins, 1998: 120)

This early hesitancy around the album is not so much a reflection of the quality of an album that is regarded by many (including myself) to be one of the most important and innovative British albums of the 1990s. However, it does hint at the album’s out-of-placeness at that particular historical moment, where dominant structures of feeling and taste in the popular music world had no existing templates with which to evaluate or categorize the album. For the reviewer, Barney Hoskins, the album can only be described via a series of deferrals with respect to what it is not; it ‘suggests’ jazz fusion, is ‘unlike . . . song-oriented music’, its pieces are too long, ‘too ambient’, is ‘too close to the vaporousness of New Age music, is ‘diffuse’ and ‘hangs in the air to no great purpose’. My point here is that if reviews like this suggest the album’s out-of-placeness, they also hint at its newness, its creativity and experimental élan. Indeed, Stuart Hall’s (1996 (1989)) ‘New Ethnicities’ essay is a critical reflection on Salman Rushdie’s 1987 critique of the Black British films Handsworth Songs (1986) and The Passion of Remembrance (1986), wherein Hall bemoans that Rushdie seemed to be addressing the films from ‘the stable, well-established critical criteria of a Guardian reviewer’, which Hall regards as ‘an inadequate basis for a political criticism and one which overlooked precisely the signs of innovation, and the constraints, under which these film makers were operating’ (p. 448). Existing critical templates can often be an inadequate basis from which to critique art that creatively and formally breaks the mould. Singh’s OK was precisely that kind of album.

Despite this early hesitancy around the album, over the next few months it proved a resounding success, particularly here in the United Kingdom. OK was nominated for the Mercury Music prize in 1999, and went on to win it. In terms of the story this article tells with respect to the Asian Underground’s emergence into the mainstream, this win proved decisive. Talvin Singh remains the only British-Asian musician to have won the Mercury Music prize; however, in a 4-year period from 1998 through 2001 the Prize’s shortlist contained at least one British-Asian act each year: Asian Dub Foundation and Cornershop in 1998, Talvin Singh and Black Star Liner in 1999, Nitin Sawhney in 2000 and Susheila Raman in 2001. The effect of Singh’s win in 1999 was both immediate and significant. The event itself was covered live on national television (on BBC2) and national radio (BBC Radio 1), and the day after the ceremony Talvin Singh was interviewed on Radio 1 and his music was aired on mainstream daytime radio, whereas it had previously only been played on specialty shows, much like the Anokha album 1 year prior. Billboard magazine reported that the win would have an immediate effect on sales, and quoted one record shop owner with a chain of 40 stores, who, having placed his chain’s order the morning after the win, said that Singh’s album would immediately be ‘racked and discounted’ in his stores (Pride, 1999: 38).

Less than a year later, when the nominations for the next year’s prize were announced (which included Nitin Sawhney’s 1999 album Beyond Skin, a record that alongside Singh’s OK has become somewhat totemic with respect to the history of British-Asian dance music), The Times newspaper wrote somewhat hyperbolically that:

The Mercurys are the only power on Earth – apart from perhaps the threat of being injected with a syphilitic serum – that would induce the NME to run a piece on folkie matriarch Norma Waterson [herself nominated in 1997], say; or force the The Daily Mail to explain who Talvin Singh is without implying he’s a dole scrounger. (Moran, 2000: 6)

Hyperbole, yes. But Singh’s Mercury Music Prize win was a breakthrough for British-Asian dance music generally. It was a moment when not just Singh, but British-Asian sonic modernity emerged into the broader public consciousness because of the space it created in the UK media and commercial music landscape. In this very sense, Talvin Singh’s win was synecdochic; his was the sound of the British-Asian experience knocking on the door of the postcolonial nation, demanding to be let in. And as I show in the next section, it was not just the media and Britain’s major music radio that were there to open that door.

Cool Britannia and British-Asian belonging

From May 1997, Britain had a new government following the Labour Party’s landslide election victory. Tony Blair’s New Labour immediately set about the task of rebranding Britain as per their manifesto promise to deliver a ‘new life for Britain’. Part of their work was to mobilize a renewed sense of optimism in the country, laced with what sociologist Jason Arday (2019) refers to as a ‘feeling of psychedelia and euphoria, a sense of freedom and expression that was perceived to have been suppressed under oppressive Conservative rule’ (p. 8). As we well know, New Labour co-opted the Britpop movement to do this, which by 1997 had become the voice of modern youth culture in Britain. Oasis’ album Definitely Maybe was released in 1994, as was Blur’s Parklife, and in July 1997 Noel Gallagher and a handful of other pop culture celebrities were pictured drinking champagne with Tony and Cherie Blair at No. 10 Downing Street. This was Cool Britannia. But New Labour’s exercise in rebranding Britain was also an attempt to make its ethnic and cultural diversity visible (see Saha, 2020: 10–14). ⁵ An instinctive ‘internationalist’, in October 1997 Blair told Time Magazine that ‘When I see pageantry in Britain, I think that’s great, but it does not define what Britain is today’ (Blair quoted in Power Sayeed, 2017: 47–48).

It is no surprise, then, if a little less well known about this period, that New Labour did their best to co-opt Talvin Singh and his emergent aesthetic into their project. In October 1999, just a few weeks after Singh won the Mercury Music prize, he was lined up by The Labour Party to top the bill at their 100th anniversary conference in Bournemouth. The conference itself was framed around a vision for a new future for Labour, and a new future for Britain. As The Guardian wrote, ‘Labour will close its 100^th anniversary conference today with a short rendering of the Red Flag but it will be the only nod in the direction of tradition. The organizers have opted to look forward rather than back, and will parade a string of icons for the next century’ (MacAskill, 1999: 13). Singh was to be one of those icons; New Labour’s embodiment of that aspirational and hopeful future for the outward looking, progressive nation-state. As one Labour official put it, the intention was to ‘celebrate multiculturalism and youth’ (ibid.). However, Singh, who flew back from a DJ set in New York on the morning of the conference, pulled out of the performance citing concerns that he would not get through customs and immigration in time to play (ibid.). Ultimately, the conference made do instead with a media clip of the newly minted Mercury Prize winner and doyen of the British-Asian music scene.

A few months later, though, Talvin Singh’s symbolic currency as the sound and hope for a contemporary, forward-looking Britain was consolidated in another, very public, way. The second track from his album, ‘Butterfly’, which was also his first single, was chosen as the song that would play in the new year, and the new millennium, at a New Year’s ceremony that took place at London’s Millennium Dome (now the O2), a construction that was one of New Labour’s flagship projects when they came into office. The millennial New Year’s Eve show was to be the official opening of the Dome. ‘Butterfly’, therefore, was the soundtrack to an extravagantly choreographed stage show, complete with dancers and acrobats, which celebrated not only the opening of this much talked about construction project, but also the UK’s entry into the third millennium. The ceremony was attended by Tony and Cherie Blair, the Queen and Prince Phillip, other state dignitaries, as well as 10,000 guests including 6000 members of the public. It was cut to multiple times in live TV coverage of celebrations around the country. Whether they knew it or not, a good chunk of the British public were toasting their hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears for the new year, and the new millennium, to music composed by a young British-born South Asian from the east end of London. The Asian Underground was truly, now, overground.

What I want to stress here, via this analysis of Talvin Singh’s meteoric rise to fame in the late 1990s, is simply the emergence of a British-Asian sound and aesthetic; from the ephemeral, contained, avowedly underground space of Anokha, the club night in 1997, through the more esoteric and avant-garde edges of the music publishing industry with the Anokha album release, into the more mainstream and visible Music Prize landscape, which precipitated national media and press attention, to eventually here: where a newly elected centre–left government places the hopes and aspirations for the future of postcolonial Britain on the shoulders of British-Asian dance music. My argument in this article thus far has been that Asian Underground music was a form of mediation that precipitated what Raymond Williams referred to as an emergent structure of feeling, the effect of which was ultimately to reconfigure what Britishness signified at the turn of the millennium, and to provide forms of visibility, recognition and belonging (if incomplete) to many British-born South Asians. However, it is important to stress that the Asian Undergound music was part of a broader field of emergent British-Asian cultural production through this historical moment. This wider ecology included literature (Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia was published in 1990, for example, and later in that period, Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane was published in 2003), film (the movie East is East was released in 1999, and Gurinder Chadha’s Bend it Like Beckham in 2002) and television (the comedy series ‘Goodness Gracious Me’ aired primetime on BBC2 from 1998 through 2001, the first series of which starred the musician Nitin Sawhney, who was part of the original Goodness Gracious Me line-up). The effects of this proliferation of British-Asian public culture were quite profound with respect to the ways that a second generation of British South Asians were pulled into the national polity, and national narrative, in ways that they had not been before.

It is in this context, for example, that the band the Asian Dub Foundation was able to unironically claim to a reporter for The Times in 1999 that ‘We’re more British than Oasis’ (in Williamson, 1999: 40). In the context of the conservative backlash against the 1999 Runnymede Trust’s Report on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (more commonly referred to as the ‘Parekh Report’, (see The Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, 2000)), which emphasized that British national identity cannot and should not be preserved in stasis like some antique piece of furniture, these kind of brown-British proclamations were brave, yes, but they were also beginning to make sense to, and in, a broader public sphere for perhaps the first time in the postcolonial history of this country. The British-Asian vibe had well and truly proliferated, becoming part of the sanctioned national narrative.

The story of the Asian Underground does not end in the early 2000s. Indeed, there is much more to say about the scene’s afterlives that are beyond the scope of this article. For example, it precipitated the nationwide relaunch of the BBC’s Asian Network on Digital Audio Broadcasting; it helped a generation of British-born South Asian artists gain visibility and a foothold in the entertainment industry in the United Kingdom (though that work remains incomplete); and as I have argued above, it has helped to open the seams of Britishness to its constitutive South Asian outsides. ⁶ However, if the work of this article thus far has been to track how this emergent field of cultural production produced something of a tear in the tightly woven fabric of Britishness in a relatively short period of time, then the last section of this article argues that the effects of the scene have far from transcended nationalism. As we know, the power dynamics of institutional racism and bordering in the United Kingdom remain, and as I suggest below, historically the more recent calcification of bordering practices in contemporary Britain are not unconnected to the very openings this article has thus far mapped.

From Cool Britannia to diversity conservatism

In the early 2000s, Tony Blair’s New Labour began introducing draconian asylum policies in the wake of 9/11 and 7/7, in part to avoid being outflanked by far-right groups whose neo-fascist rhetoric was gaining traction with the electorate and with the Conservative Party who were in opposition at the time. In 2001, the ‘Anti-Terrorism and Security’ Parliamentary Act legislated that suspected terrorists who were immigrants could be interned (potentially on a permanent basis). In 2002, the ‘Secure Borders and Safe Havens’ White Paper set out comprehensive reforms, which included a stated goal of managed migration, and in the same year ‘The Nationality, Immigration and Asylum’ Act increased restrictions on asylum and new enforcement powers (see Somerville, 2007). Regulatory changes, White Papers and parliamentary acts that have effectively tightened border control, expanded the powers of policing immigration and asylum, and enhanced the State’s expulsion powers, have since been a feature in the political landscape, both up to the end of the Labour government in 2010 and into the present (see Goodfellow, 2019). What New Labour’s immigration policy in the early 2000s did was to help naturalize an emergent public discourse concerning an ‘immigration problem’ in the United Kingdom, a discourse that was linked to security concerns in the wake of 9/11 and 7/7 as well as population anxieties in the face of the expansion of the European Union, both of which were fuelled by the right-wing press (ibid., Ch.3). As Anamik Saha (2020) puts it, New Labour’s initial (and superficial) embrace of multiculturalism was ‘subsumed into rhetoric around a supposed “crisis of multiculturalism” that became the dominant discourse throughout Europe’ (p. 16).

This recent political context is relevant to the historical narrative of this article insofar as this is the broader configuration in which we must locate the emergent British South Asian structure of feeling, from the mid-1990s onwards, that the article has thus far teased out via The Asian Underground scene and its proliferation. If my argument has been that the work that British-Asian culture had done to recalibrate common-sense understandings of the national polity was enough to enable many British-born South Asians to firmly position themselves inside the national polity, then in this closing section I stress that this was happening just as that polity was reifying and tightening its own borders. Furthermore, the legacies of this conjuncture have seen some British South Asians actively participate in that reification of the nation-state via the call to a particular kind of exclusionary nationalism and national feeling. For example, in a 2005 soundbite provided to The Guardian Newspaper supplement, G2, entitled ‘Race Manifesto’, Priti Patel, then a 32-year-old corporate relations manager at PR firm Weber Shandwick, drew on her own claims to nativism to draw a sharp distinction between those born in the United Kingdom, and those trying to gain entry. She stressed that:

Far too many people misguidedly assume that if you are a non-white person you are likely to be an immigrant or an asylum seeker, when obviously the reality is completely different. Stronger immigration controls will address some fundamental misperceptions about ethnic groups as well as put an end to the large number of people who are coming to this country under false pretences. There is only one party that represents my value and beliefs, and that is the Conservative party. (Patel quoted in Harker, 2005: 6–7)

What is striking in this tiniest of soundbites is the sense not of a border that is dissolving in any sense, but one that is simultaneously shifting and hardening; shifting in the sense that Britishness is now a signifier that legitimately includes what were once (pre-Anokha) its brown, South Asian, constitutive outsides, but hardening in the sense that just as the national polity is widened in the kinds of ways this article has tracked, the door to the nation-state is being pulled shut behind those it newly includes. Months after these comments were published, Priti Patel stood unsuccessfully for election as Conservative MP for Nottingham North. She would go on to be successfully elected to parliament in 2010 as MP for Witham in the Conservative–Liberal Democratic coalition government, was re-elected in 2015, became a vocal Brexit supporter and in 2019 was appointed to the position of Home Secretary in Boris Johnson’s government. She swiftly became known as one of the most hardline Home Secretaries in recent years, masterminding ‘the Rwanda Plan’ as a proposed deterrent to excessive levels of immigration and asylum claims. Her draconian stance on immigration politics was perhaps only surpassed by her successor, Suella Braverman, also a British-born South Asian of the same generation (if a few years younger), who would claim in October 2023 that seeing a flight take asylum seekers to Rwanda is both her ‘dream’ and ‘obsession’.

It would be churlish to claim any kind of direct causal relationship between the proliferation of The Asian Underground scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the emergence of deeply Conservative, British-Asian political figures like Priti Patel and Suella Braverman (we can add former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to the mix here). In other words, my argument does not hinge on the tracks that do, or do not, populate the playlists of Patel, Braverman and Sunak. And it is important to stress that many of the British-Asian musicians that this article has engaged with have provided persistent and valuable critiques of the Conservative government’s immigration and asylum policies. ⁷ Instead, my point is simply to stress that British-Asian dance music’s key role in the precipitation of an emergent structure of feeling in the late 1990s has enabled the conditions where it is not impossible, nor does it now even seem incongruous, for the children of South Asian immigrants to be making such insular and degenerative arguments about the rights of others to enter the United Kingdom.

It is, of course, not just Priti Patel, Suella Bravermen and Rishi Sunak riding this wave of what the sociologist Les Back refers to as ‘diversity conservatism’ (Back, 2024). Since 2019 or so, cabinet appointments under Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have become increasingly ethnically diverse. However, this diversity has come just as the country has been pushed further into the kind of post-imperial melancholia (Gilroy, 2004) that has resulted in the nationalist, anti-immigration present, the seeds of which were sown by New Labour’s response to security concerns in the wake of 9/11 and 7/7 as sketched above. Note, for example, how the inner chamber of Parliament has variously vilified the Black Lives Matter movement (as Patel did in response to opposition MP Florence Eshalomi’s question in 2020 about structural racism in contemporary Britain (see Gray, 2020; Taneja, 2022: 111)); or witness the Conservative Party’s claims that ‘critical race theory’ is political and thus an imminent threat to the neutrality that should instead pervade Britain’s educational institutions (as British Nigerian MP – and former Secretary of State for Trade and Business – Kemi Badenoch did in a 6-hour House of Commons debate on Black History Month in 2020 (see Nelson, 2020)); and read the flat denial of endemic racism in the United Kingdom in the published report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED), which was published in 2021 (see Commission of Race and Ethnic Disparities: The Report, 2021). What is common across these examples is the optics of non-white senior politicians, political advisors or delegated political authorities, drawn from a second generation of British immigrant families, making political enunciations and denials that are deeply problematic in terms of the contemporary politics of race and immigration. It is the appearance of diversity that is so seductive and provides an alibi for the entrenchment and solidification of an ever-more impermeable and deeply nationalist post-Brexit border. As Les Back put it with reference to the Conservative government in 2021:

What we have . . . seen is the drawing of people of colour into the machinery of government to be the spokespeople for an increasingly draconian and nationalist post-Brexit conservatism . . . Through figures like Home Secretary Priti Patel or Sajid Javid, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, and Kwasi Kwarteng, Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, government takes on the appearance of diversity. While at this same time this form of diversity conservatism is presiding over an openly anti-immigrant border policy and resisting broader pressures to address racism domestically and globally.

The contemporary politics of diversity conservatism are some distance, both conceptually and historically, from the dancefloor of Anokha and the subsequent emergent structure of feeling that club night precipitated. The work of this article has primarily been to build an archive and tell the history of British-Asian dance music in an important and brief period – specifically The Asian Underground music scene between 1997 and 2002 – in ways that map the role it has played in providing the conditions for an opening, a tear, in the national polity for many British-born South Asians, including myself. However, the last section of this article has offered a corrective to any unqualified celebration of that moment: of its nostalgic narrativization as a halcyon or Utopian political moment. Culture, as Raymond Williams reminded us in Marxism and Literature, is always on the move. As progressive and freeing as emergent structures of feeling can be, they are constantly articulating with hegemony, both displacing and becoming dominant structures of feeling, and the residues of conservatism are always also at play in the cultural and political field, particularly in what Sivamohan Valluvan (2019) refers to as the deafening ‘clamour of nationalism’. My aim in piecing together the affective history of the openings – in terms of claims to national belonging – that The Asian Underground helped to precipitate, should not be confused with an attempt to prematurely celebrate, nor simply disavow, the political effects of that very recent conjuncture. The Asian Underground’s meteoric rise to prominence within, and as part of, British popular culture was another episode in the trajectory of the postcolonial nation-state, the contemporary political consequences of which this article has aimed at opening space for further reflection.