A light scent of sandalwood lingered in the lounge. The soft, colourful lights filtered through hovering smoke as music resonated throughout the room – a mix of booming club beats and tabla, topped with melting sitar riffs. Then the voice of Ustad Sultan Khan joined the ensemble, reminding this writer of the old Indian classical songs that his mother used to listen to every morning. The sound of the sitar seemed to grow by the second, blossoming into something magnanimous, the sinuous bass lines reverberating along with the tabla's da da dhin na and the club beats, as the Ustad's haunting vocals diffused over it all.
This grand unification was thanks to a band called Midival Punditz, one of the first Indian 'electronica' bands to make it big on the international scene. The group's founders, Tapan Raj and Gaurav Raina, are known for their cross-cultural vision, which they describe as marrying "the soulful elegance of Southasia's extraordinarily rich traditional and classical music heritage with the exuberance and limitless potential of modern Western electronic music". The group is also an integral part of the musical collective known as the Asian Massive, an offshoot of the Asian Underground movement, the UK-based collective that mixes contemporary metropolitan culture with traditional Southasian music. According to Raj, "It is about trying to stretch Western audiences towards Indian sounds, and to stretch Indian audiences towards modern, electronic, Western music."
As more and more Southasian artists cropped up in the British music scene, a record label (and club) called Outcaste was founded in 1995. Featuring only Southasian artists, its music later became known as the Asian Underground. The term 'Asian Underground' was initially used to describe Southasian artists based in the UK, who, during the mid- to late 1990s, were merging elements of Western underground dance music with the traditional music of their homelands. These artists were generally second-generation, British-born youth, many of whose parents had experienced life as immigrants during the 1960s and 1970s, when racism in the UK was at a peak. The music of the Asian Underground became a response to the race-based atrocities faced by these youths and their families. It was the music of the displaced – a manifestation of alienation, and a trans-national discourse that found its roots in the processes of migration in the post-war British cultural milieu. The Asian Underground movement also made the statement that 'brown' people were as cool as anybody else.
Throughout the 20th century, local cultural forms around the world, including those of music, came under pressure from the introduction and encroachment of Western forms. According to Bruno Nettl, a music and anthropology scholar, the reactions by non-Western societies to this dynamic can be classified into three types. First, there is the desire to leave the traditional culture intact, essentially allowing the form to live on with no change whatsoever. Second, there is a call for complete Westernisation, the "simple incorporation of a society into the Western cultural system". Nettl describes the third reaction as "moderate" compared to these first two – it is the search for modernisation, which he defines as "the adoption and adaptation of Western technology and other products of Western culture … with an insistence that the core of cultural values will not change greatly". This vision of 'modernisation' is what gave birth to the unison of traditional Indian music and electronic music through Western technology.