Swaraj: Claiming Space

After decades of underrepresentation on the UK’s dancefloors, second-generation South Asians turned late 90s club culture into a space for belonging through nights like Swaraj and Anokha. As Swaraj returns, key figures from the Asian Underground cast their mind back to a transformative moment in British club culture.

“It was the first time the words British, Asian and cool have ever been used in the same sentence,” Ash Chandola laughs. “We did feel proud of what we were doing. It was different, and we felt proud of our heritage – both British  and South Asian.”

Chandola is reflecting on a unique moment he was part of during the late 90s and early 2000s – a fertile creative epoch when musicians, producers and DJs, primarily in London, began combining drum ’n’ bass, breaks and big beat with samples and instruments from musical forms rooted in South Asia. The movement was quickly dubbed Asian Underground and blossomed amid a tight-knit nexus of club nights, promoters and labels. It was also welcomed by an unusually receptive media landscape, at a time when South Asian artists working across literature, film and TV, were finally beginning to receive wider recognition.

Swaraj, the night Chandola ran from 1997 until 2010, was one of the key spaces in which this scene flourished. Starting off at the Blue Note in pre-gentrification Hoxton, east London, Swaraj (meaning ‘self-rule’ in Sanskrit) became a magnet for clubbers seeking community and immersion in this emerging sonic world.

It took the place of another night at Blue Note, Anokha, run by Talvin Singh. Singh was a leading figure in the field, known for his compositions melding drum ’n’ bass with sampled tablas and other Indian instruments. His 1997 compilation Anokha: Soundz of the Asian Underground was largely credited with giving the genre its name, though the relevance of the term has been endlessly debated. In 1999, Singh went on to win the Mercury Prize for his album OK. Other significant artists of the era included Nitin Sawhney, Badmarsh and Shri, Joi, State of Bengal, Asian Dub Foundation, and Fun-Da-Mental, who were known for their militant politics and fusion sound rooted in hip-hop.

“The Blue Note was a little bit grimy, in a good way,” Chandola chuckles, recalling the first ever Swaraj night in November 1997. “Fun-Da-Mental played live. And they came on to the opening riff of Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols. That really set the tone for Swaraj. It’s always had a little bit of a punk ethos – anything goes, spontaneous collaborations, that element of surprise.”

“It started off really small, but it became a worldwide phenomenon because of what had happened with Anokha, Talvin Singh getting a Mercury Prize and then all these other club nights,” adds Pathaan, who worked alongside Chandola and became one of the resident DJs at Swaraj.

While Pathaan had been steeped in northern English club culture and electronic music from his time spent studying software engineering in Leeds, Chandola had grown up listening to David Bowie, The Beatles, punk and post-punk before later discovering hip-hop and acid house. All of these musical traditions influenced the sounds that emerged from Swaraj. “It became a beautiful evolution of where we were heading, and we were conscious about keeping it different from Anokha,” Pathaan continues. “Anokha was pretty much Asian drum ’n’ bass, whereas we were all of it – balearic, house, breaks, drum ’n’ bass, a bit of rock,” mentioning tracks like Temple Head by Transglobal Underground, alongside artists such as Andrew Weatherall and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. 

Swaraj became a creative petri dish for many artists who would go on to be ambassadors. One of these was Bobby Friction, now renowned for his role as a DJ and radio broadcaster on the BBC. In the late 90s, Friction, who was known on the London clubbing scene for his flamboyant outfits, had ended up on the cover of the Evening Standard Magazine, after being photographed by journalist Nik Cohn. Cohn was the author of an article called Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night, which inspired the film Saturday Night Fever, and had been tasked with finding ‘the new Tony Manero’. It was Pathaan who first encouraged Friction to try out DJing, something that had never occurred to him before. “I was DJing with vinyl and with CDs, and I fucked it up about ten times. But the response was really good,” Friction remembers.

Clubs like Swaraj, as well as Anokha before it, led to lasting cultural shifts. “All of those club nights had a really inclusive feel to them,” Shazia Nizam says. “They were a place of real freedom and expression, and I think this was the first time, as second-generation Asians, we had visibility.” Nizam had entered the music industry around the time the Asian Underground scene was emerging. She worked for labels like Virgin and Nation Records, which was co-founded by Fun-Da-Mental member Aki Nawaz and home to artists such as Andrew Weatherall, Transglobal Underground and Jah Wobble. She then joined the team at Outcaste, the pivotal home of artists such as Nitin Sawhney, Badmarsh and Shri, and Ananda Shankar. Outcaste also hosted a club night at Notting Hill Arts Club, on the other side of the city from the scene’s east London epicentre. “We were getting our artists on covers of things that they never would’ve been on: DJ Magazine, Dazed and Confused, the Guardian supplement,” Nizam continues. “We were changing perceptions in a really big way.”

“The story of all South Asians, culturally and artistically, has always been one of invisibility,” Friction says. “All this [music] going on, no one covers it. They did for the Asian Underground for a while, but they didn’t during the 80s for Bhangra. They didn’t during the early 90s, before the Asian Underground came about.”

Despite this, the Asian Underground scene had many of the same blind spots that affected millennial club culture as a whole. “It was a pretty male-dominated scene, but there were some women around who were really critical and integral to what was happening,” she says, mentioning Outcaste co-founder Ritu. “Men just did not make space for them,” she continues. “There’s been a lack of wanting to recognise the contribution of the women.”

Bobby Friction also points to how a London-centric media tended to overlook similar club nights outside of the capital. Of these, Shaanti, run by Sharnita Athwal for many years in Birmingham’s Custard Factory, was the most important. “Swaraj was very cool, very London, very arty. The punters were all proto film directors and future arts leaders and all that stuff,” Friction says. “Whereas with Birmingham, it was like, let’s get all these Brummies into a fucking warehouse and hit them with a Funktion-One sound system,” he laughs, mentioning Shaanti’s closer affiliation to working-class Punjabi culture.

After its heyday in the early 2000s, when many of its artists had found mainstream recognition, the UK scene began to lose momentum, though it had already influenced diaspora communities in cities like New York and Toronto. Swaraj migrated across London to Mass in Brixton before settling in Brick Lane’s 93 Feet East. In the process, it went from weekly to monthly to more sporadic events.

For Nizam, this was partly due to the artists shifting to other projects. “Certainly my peers at that time, we all went on to do our own things,” she says. Less music was being produced and labels and promoters began to lose interest. “Where’s the record label that’s gonna promote people? You need to have a bit of a machine behind you to put out music.”

Chandola and Pathaan concur. “I kinda disappeared up the arse of world fusion,” a straight-faced Pathaan says, while Chandola explodes into laughter. Pathaan founded several record labels, including Stoned Asia, and was increasingly playing gigs on the club circuit in Ibiza. Chandola, meanwhile, branched out into curating events at major venues including the Royal Festival Hall, and running Brighton’s Great Escape Festival.

In 2026, however, Swaraj is set to return to its former home at 93 Feet East. This comes at a time of increased visibility for South Asian-led club nights and collectives like Dialled In, Daytimers and Brown Excellence, the latter specialising in eclectic club nights playing everything from Bhangra to UK club bangers and music from across the Middle East and South Asia. Bobby Friction thinks there’s still an important niche for Swaraj.

“What Swaraj was always really good at was mixing up live performances with DJs,” he says, mentioning a set he saw by Leeds-based Black Star Liner, who fused dub and electronica with sitar and tabla samples. “They were just a riot. Anarchy on stage – stage diving, stage invasions. They were absolutely unbelievable.” 

“Secondly, I think it’s really important for clubbing to be cross-generational now. What I’m talking about is a cross-generational discovery of each other with amazing music, so lessons are learned and there isn’t anything fizzling out ever again.” Chandola says this is exactly the intention: “We’re on our third wave of resident DJs, artists and audiences. What’s really lovely is that a lot of people who used to come back in the day, our mates who are our age, are coming in July with their kids.”

For Friction, club nights like Swaraj also feed a hunger for IRL experiences in the face of digital atomisation. “We’re living in really dangerous, really scary times. I don’t think music should be more political, as in we need more bands spouting political stuff. But I do think the act of dancing together, of generations dancing together, is highly political. So that’s what I’m looking for with this new Swaraj night.”