Toor and Chahal’s video reflects a new wave of Indian diaspora dance, a wave that has been enabled by platforms like YouTube and TikTok, and intensified during the pandemic with live performance on pause. With her graceful, one-of-a-kind style — a blend of bhangra, Bollywood, hip-hop and giddha, another Punjabi folk dance — Toor embodies a coming-together of genres that has found an enthusiastic global audience.Today, artists like Toor, 31, are changing the way that bhangra and other Indian dance genres are seen, creating dances meant to be consumed online in productions that resemble professional music videos. Whereas team-based performances emphasize the beauty of group synchronization, videos made for YouTube can draw out an individual artist’s skill, her facial expressions, her choices of fashion and makeup.Bhangra is life,” Puneet Mirza continued. People in Punjab “are always doing bhangra for any festival, any happy occasion.” It can also be a medium for political dissent: Bhangra dancers and musicians around the world have been outspoken in support of the millions of Indian farmers and workers, many of them Punjabi, who have been protesting the country’s agricultural reforms that began last year.The genre descended from folk dance forms in Punjab, a region of northern India and Pakistan. “These dances were created largely, though not exclusively, by farmers,” said Rajinder Dudrah, a professor of cultural studies and creative industries at Birmingham City University in England.he new bhangra music expressed a sense of Punjabi cultural pride while also creating dialogue with the wider culture — Jay-Z famously remixed the track “Mundian to Bach Ke,” or “Beware of the Boys,” by British-Indian artist Panjabi MC. It also reshaped the Indian music industry: “That music then drew the attention of people back in India, not just in the Punjab, but also in Bollywood,” Dudrah said. “They also have crafted and created their own Indianized, Indian contemporary bhangra.”he new bhangra music expressed a sense of Punjabi cultural pride while also creating dialogue with the wider culture — Jay-Z famously remixed the track “Mundian to Bach Ke,” or “Beware of the Boys,” by British-Indian artist Panjabi MC. It also reshaped the Indian music industry: “That music then drew the attention of people back in India, not just in the Punjab, but also in Bollywood,” Dudrah said. “They also have crafted and created their own Indianized, Indian contemporary bhangra.”A staple of Toor’s channel is the comparison video, in which she sets different styles against each other, showing off her range. In the flirty “Aankh Marey” (“Wink”), she slides and hip-shakes through the new and old versions of a popular Bollywood song: pleather leggings and a crop top in one, lehenga and ’90s dance moves in the other. In “Track Suit,” Toor presents a modern twist on giddha, traditionally a women’s dance that is, Dudrah said, “the female counterpart to bhangra.” She and her backup dancers showcase giddha’s characteristic clapping and foot stomps, lighter and more contained than those of bhangra but no less energetic. With a competitive air, Preet Chahal and two men dancers in tracksuits take over the scene, breezing through a jaunty bhangra routine to the same song.“If you think about giddha through the body of someone like Manpreet Toor, who’s in a North American space, you can then start to see that it’s not just clapping and dancing the female body in the conventional, traditional sense,” Dudrah said. “It’s also layered through new choreography.”Because their dances are set to music that is owned by record companies, YouTubers like Toor usually can’t make money from their videos. “If it’s by a big label, which is most of the time like Sony or T-Series, we have to give up the rights, so we don’t monetize,” she said. Dancers have to find other ways of making a living. Unlike a genre like ballet, Puneet Mirza said, in which dancers can aspire to perform professionally, bhangra doesn’t have a clear career path. “If you study bhangra, where do you go?”For many dancers, including Toor, the answer is to teach classes. Toor has often recruited her students as backup dancers for her YouTube channel, including for her most popular video, “Laung Laachi” (“Clove and Cardamom”), with more than 32 million views (the girls in that dance “have been looking up to her since they were little kids,” Chahal said).Bhangra Empire, true to its name, has built a dance class business that Puneet and Omer Mirza estimate has reached 5,000 students in the Bay Area and other cities. “When we first started, we looked at ourselves as performers, but now we kind of look at ourselves more as teachers trying to teach the next generation,” Omer Mirza said.