Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2008
Since the early 1980s Indian diasporic communities have attained sufficient size, affluence, self-awareness and generational distance from South Asia to have created a set of popular music styles that are autonomous and distinctive rather than strictly derivative of Indian models. While the bhangra music of British Punjabis has attracted some scholarly and journalistic attention, chutney, a syncretic Indo-Caribbean popular music and dance idiom, is little known outside its own milieu. This article constitutes a preliminary socio-musical study of chutney.