Punjabi Wave: why young India keeps pressing play on Punjab
Punjab is not one trend this month. It is three, all at once. The biggest music video on YouTube in India this week is a Sidhu Moose Wala track. College bhangra teams from Ludhiana to Samrala are filling Shorts with zonal youth festival performances. And a Punjabi short film series called “Nand” has quietly run past 60 episodes. Music, campus and drama, one region, same few weeks. That is the Punjabi Wave, and it has been building since September.
The moment
Start with the song. “Kaali Hoodie” is Sidhu Moose Wala featuring Bohemia, with The Kidd on production, and it is the biggest music video on YouTube in India this week. Moose Wala died in 2022, and new tracks under his name have kept coming since. Bohemia was on his album Moosetape, so this one is a reunion of sorts. The title is a piece of clothing, which tells you something about how this music thinks about style. More on that below.
Then the campus. October is youth festival season in Punjab, and college students are posting it all. Last week it was Panjab University’s youth festival, Zone 2, hosted at Malwa College in Bondli, Samrala, streamed live with bhangra and Punjabi lok geet (folk songs) on stage. This week it is SCD College Ludhiana’s bhangra team at their zonal youth festival. These are not polished music videos. They are college kids in full costume, on a college stage, filmed on a phone from the third row.
Then the drama. “Nand”, a Punjabi short movie series, posted episode 59 last week and episode 60 this week. A serialized Punjabi story that people keep coming back to every few days is the quietest part of this wave, and maybe the most telling.
It did not start this week
Punjab has been in the feed most weeks since mid-September. There was a Mankirat Aulakh meme, Diljit live in Kolkata, and a “date a Punjabi guy” POV going round. Early October brought Honey Singh’s “Casa Tupka Anthemo” with Priyanshi, another Moose Wala track, “Ghostface Killah”, and a wave of “trending Punjabi suits design 2026” videos. It went quiet for one week, then came back through the college stages. When something keeps returning in different forms like that, it is not a viral clip. It is a culture young India keeps choosing.
Why it lands right now
Part of it is just volume. Punjabi music has a constant supply of releases and features, and each one gives people something new to play, edit and argue about. But the more interesting part is how the Punjabi Wave travels. A bhangra jump needs no translation. A dhol beat works whether you are in Ludhiana, Pune or Guwahati. The Tamil and Telugu meme pages we keep writing about win because they are in your own language. Punjabi culture wins the other way round: you do not need the language to get it.
you do not need to speak punjabi to feel a bhangra jump. that is the whole trick.
And the college stage clips add something the music videos cannot. They are proof that this is not just something people watch. It is something people their age do, in costume, in front of their friends. Watching a kid from SCD College land a bhangra jump hits differently from watching a superstar.
What it looks like
The look of the Punjabi Wave runs on two tracks, and they meet on the same feed.
The first is the festival stage: loud, saturated colour. Parrot green, marigold, electric blue, in kurtas, lungis and suits, with turbans tied tall and dupattas flying. The suit design videos from earlier this month sit in the same lane, Punjabi suits treated as something you follow seasons for, not something you wear once a year. And underneath it all is phulkari, the Punjabi embroidery of bright thread stitched in geometric patterns, the kind of thing that looks old and new at the same time.
The second track is the song itself: “Kaali Hoodie”. A black hoodie. Naming a track after a piece of streetwear says the quiet part out loud: this music is also about how you dress. So you get a single wave with two very different wardrobes. One is phulkari and parrot green. The other is all black, hood up.
Where bae6 comes in
We do not have a Punjabi Wave tee yet, and we are not going to pretend one of our existing shirts is it. But you can probably see where our heads are at. That tension between phulkari colour and a black hoodie is exactly the kind of thing we would put on a tee. When we make it, it will live right here on the Punjabi Wave page, next to this story.
Till then, keep the dhol on.
