Gender in Popular Punjabi Music

The paper chapter deals with portrayal of gender in popular Punjabi songs, focusing on the subordination, objectification and trivialization of women. The paper also brings out the underlying causes of misogyny in these songs, be these of feudal and patriarchal nature, or related to decadent consumerist culture in the heydays of rural capitalist prosperity, or anomie and escapism in the face of present-day agrarian crisis. The paper also notes that there popular Punjabi music has heard no counter voices of resistance from women‟s perspective even though there are some popular female singers.