Hardip Singh Dhanjal combined his job as a Southall youth worker with an interest in music
Hardip Singh Dhanjal combined his job as a Southall youth worker with an interest in music
HardialSinghRai
Wed 10 Feb 2021 07.18 EST
Last modified on Wed 24 Feb 2021 14.46 EST
My friend and colleague Hardip Singh Dhanjal, who has died aged 60 of cardiac arrest, was a pioneering designer who shaped the imagery surrounding bhangra’s emergence as a popular dance music for young Asians in Britain in the 1980s. He designed innovative album sleeves for labels including Mighty M and MR Records, and bands such as DCS, as well as flyers for the daytime raves that that flourished in Southall, west London, and Handsworth, Birmingham.
Published:
January 8, 2021 at 12:47 pm
Rob Attar: The latest series of your documentaries on South Asians in Britain centres on the 1990s. Would it be fair to describe this as a golden age?
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Kavita Puri: Yes, the 1990s were absolutely the golden age, and that’s how the people that I interviewed talked about it. The programme is called
Three Pounds in My Pocket because when the generation that came over in the 1950s and 1960s arrived, they could only bring as little as £3. By the time you get to the nineties, it’s really the children of the £3 generation who are coming of age. They were in their twenties and had a very different relationship to Britain. Many were born here, this was their country, and by the nineties, they were navigating their way, and their identity, in Britain. For so many of them, it was a mixture of home life – which may still have had ties back to the mother country, whether it was India, Pakistan or Bangladesh – and also B