Cricket, Bhangra and Belonging: How Diaspora Music Is Rewriting British Culture
Walk through a park on a warm Sunday in Southall, and you’ll hear two things before you even see them: the thwack of a cricket ball smacking into a bat and the unmistakable dhol beats from someone’s portable speaker. A few decades ago, you wouldn’t have thought to put those two together, but now they belong to the same soundtrack of British life. Diaspora music has reshaped what it means to belong here, and it’s doing it with a swagger that even the most traditional institutions can’t ignore.
The British Empire scattered people across continents like rice at a wedding, and, ironically, those very movements have come back to redefine Britain itself. Once, the soundtrack of this island was folk ballads, hymns, and the occasional pub singalong. Then ships arrived carrying families, stories, and, crucially, instruments and rhythms that would start sneaking into the country’s cultural bloodstream. Steelpan from Trinidad, bhangra from Punjab, reggae from Jamaica—at first they lived in small pockets, blasted at community centres and weddings. But music doesn’t like being confined, and soon the bass and the beats were leaking out through walls, down streets, and into the mainstream.
Bhangra is the perfect example of this infiltration. Originally a celebratory harvest dance from Punjab, it became the weekend sound of young South Asians in Britain by the 1980s. Groups like Alaap and Heera were already mixing traditional dhol and tumbi with electric guitars and synthesisers, and the result was irresistible. Suddenly, second-generation kids, who were being told at school to anglicise their names, had a dance floor where they could shout those names proudly over the speakers. Bhangra wasn’t just music, it was a declaration: we’re here, we’re loud, and we’re not going anywhere.
It didn’t stop with weddings. By the time the 1990s arrived, bhangra was everywhere. Panjabi MC was layering hip-hop onto bhangra and turning it into something global. Even Jay-Z jumped on a remix, and suddenly a folk rhythm that started in the fields of Punjab was being blasted in New York clubs. That’s diaspora music at its finest: elastic enough to stretch across continents, stubborn enough to keep its roots.
Cricket fits into this soundtrack more subtly but no less significantly. On one hand, it’s the quintessential English sport, the thing you imagine played on village greens while cucumber sandwiches sweat in Tupperware boxes. On the other, it became the sport of the South Asian diaspora, partly because of colonial legacy, partly because of community. When Asian immigrants began forming cricket clubs in Britain, it wasn’t just about batting averages. It was about creating spaces of belonging, places where you weren’t the odd one out. And after the matches? The music came out, the food was shared, and the cultural remix deepened.
When diaspora music collides with cricket, you get a cultural mash-up that’s as British as it gets. Imagine a community match in Birmingham: players in whites, families spread out on blankets, someone frying samosas on a portable stove, and bhangra booming out between overs. Tell me that’s not more authentically British in 2025 than the royal pageantry most tourists come for.
The brilliance of diaspora music is how it reshapes identity for everyone involved. For the children of immigrants, it offers a way to hold on to heritage without feeling trapped by it. You don’t have to choose between Lata Mangeshkar and the Spice Girls; you can sample both, throw in a bassline, and create something new. For Britain as a whole, it’s been an education. You can’t talk about British music anymore without mentioning reggae, grime, bhangra, Afrobeat, or bhangragga (yes, that was a thing). Each wave of migration brought its own playlist, and each playlist left its fingerprints on the national charts.
Of course, this hasn’t always been a harmonious process. There were years when radio stations refused to play diaspora music, when nightclubs turned away people who didn’t fit a certain look, when entire genres were written off as “niche ethnic noise.” But music thrives on rejection. The underground scene grew fatter, stronger, more inventive precisely because it was shut out. Pirate radio, mixtapes, weddings that doubled as raves—diaspora music didn’t wait for permission. By the time the mainstream noticed, the sound was too big to ignore.
What’s ironic is how many of these genres, once sidelined, now represent Britain on the global stage. Grime has become as recognisably British as the Beatles once were. Bhangra is instantly associated with British Asian youth culture. Reggae, once seen as foreign, is now woven into the DNA of British pop. Diaspora music has stopped being a guest at the party; it’s now running the DJ booth.
You can see it most clearly in festivals. Take Notting Hill Carnival, originally a response to racism and exclusion in the 1950s. What began as a way for Caribbean communities to express themselves through calypso and steelpan is now one of the biggest street parties in the world. And yet its roots are still visible: music as survival, music as celebration, music as belonging. The same applies to melas up and down the country, where bhangra groups share stages with grime MCs and Afrobeat DJs, and the audience doesn’t think twice about dancing to all of them in one go. That’s the Britain diaspora music has built: layered, noisy, unapologetic.
Belonging is the quiet theme running beneath all of this. For many in the diaspora, belonging has always been complicated—a push and pull between here and there, between fitting in and standing out. Music softens that tension. It says you can carry your history in one hand and your future in the other, and you don’t have to drop either. The dhol and the drum machine can play in the same track, and no one bursts into flames. If anything, it sounds better that way.
And for those who aren’t part of a diaspora? Diaspora music still offers belonging. It invites you in, asks you to dance, tempts you to taste something new. Plenty of white British teenagers learned their first moves at bhangra nights, stumbled into grime clubs, or got baptised in bass at carnival. Diaspora music doesn’t stay behind locked doors. It spills out, and in doing so, it pulls everyone a little closer together, even if only for a few sweaty minutes on the dance floor.
It’s tempting to say diaspora music has changed Britain, but the truth is messier and better. Britain itself has always been a mash-up, a place of borrowed traditions and reworked identities. Diaspora music just makes that reality harder to ignore. Cricket matches with bhangra soundtracks, carnival streets filled with steelpan and soca, grime verses that weave in patois and Punjabi slang—this is what belonging sounds like now. It’s noisy, it’s hybrid, and it’s brilliant.
So next time you hear the beat of a dhol drum drift across a park while a cricket ball sails through the air, don’t treat it as an oddity. Treat it as Britain singing back to itself, a chorus written not by kings or parliaments but by the people who made a life here. Diaspora music isn’t rewriting British culture from the margins. It’s writing the chorus everyone ends up humming, whether they realise it or not.