Krewe da Bhan Gras Diversifies New Orleans’ Carnival with South Asian Style

Pulling together friends and strangers with ties across the South Asian diaspora, the newly formed Krewe da Bhan Gras brings a dose of Bollywood entertainment to New Orleans’ roving Carnival celebrations.

Story by Ashley Cusick | Photographs by Kathleen Flynn

At the Krewe da Bhan Gras’ debut on February 3, the smell of incense wafted from a homemade float — a vegetable cart used to carry the group’s blaring speaker — as members ate Jell-O shots and mingled amongst paraders dressed as human-sized bugs and Marie Antoinettes.

Excitement filled the air as the many artistic sub-krewes of the Boheme Parade prepared to march into the waiting crowds. As they gathered in formation in the chilly night air, one thing about the Krewe da Bhan Gras stood out. 

“I’ve never seen this many brown people in the state, ever,” said Sarita Panchang, 34, as she looked around at her fellow krewe members.

Indeed, the Krewe da Bhan Gras came together to represent the wide swath of diasporic South Asian people who call New Orleans home, with members ranging from a native New Orleanian with a Bengali great-grandfather to a Guyanese American professor to an adoptee (and recent New Orleans transplant) who learned he was half-Punjabi only after doing 23andMe.

The krewe only officially formed in mid-December, but its members found time to “put the masala in Mardi Gras,” as the group’s motto riffs, bringing a confluence of New Orleans and South Asian cultures to their quickly assembled debut parade. Complete with a bhangra dance routine and unique Mardi Gras “throws,” the Krewe da Bhan Gras fused the traditions of the diaspora with those of the Crescent City, adding more long-needed representation to America’s biggest party.

Julia Kumari Drapkin reaches into the sky as confetti rains down from a balcony during the Boheme Parade in New Orleans.

***

Dr. Monica Dhand, 43, moved to New Orleans to complete her medical residency in 2008. She met Dr. Anjali Niyogi, 49, a mentor who over time would become Dhand’s best friend. Niyogi had been in New Orleans since 1997 after moving to the city for medical school.

The women shared common career interests — both are internal medicine hospitalists who have spent significant time addressing global health issues abroad — as well as a shared heritage. Dhand, who hails from Philadelphia, is Punjabi on her father’s side; Niyogi was born in the Maharashtra state of India and moved to Houston just before her 7th birthday. Over the years, Dhand and Niyogi both leaned into the culture of New Orleans, participating in various Mardi Gras dance troupes and costuming groups. But over time, they recognized there was something missing: a group representing their South Asian heritage. 

“I just remember the conversation of like, ‘We need to have our own dance krewe. Why don’t we have our own dance krewe?’” Niyogi recalled. 

Two difficult years on the front lines of COVID-19 (in Dhand’s case, including trips to outbreak hotspots in both Peru and Brazil) would delay their ability to move their idea forward, as would the pandemic-related cancellation of the city’s Mardi Gras parades in 2021. But as vaccines and treatment options improved, the idea of starting a South Asian Mardi Gras krewe became both a possibility and something joyous to look forward to.

A name for the hypothetical krewe emerged — “Bhan Gras” riffs on “bhangra,” a style of Punjabi dance, plus Mardi Gras — and then, late last year, a mutual friend tapped to become the new creative director of the Boheme Parade suggested the women apply to join.

They did so, and at a fateful holiday party in mid-December, they received an email letting them know they were in. It was great news, with a hitch: the Boheme Parade was only eight weeks away, and the two would have to make their vision a reality in very short order. In a lucky twist, another friend at that party said she’d recently met a woman named Ankita Rathour who was fairly knowledgeable — perhaps even a little obsessed — with Bollywood.

Tania Zachari grew up in Louisiana but would travel to India every summer. Her parade look is a throwback to 1960s Bollywood.

Rathour, 37, moved to Louisiana from her home in India in 2017 and is currently working toward her doctorate in Louisiana State University’s English Department, focusing on gender and violence in Bollywood cinema.

“I’m a self-taught dancer,” Rathour said. “I have danced all my life. I learned classical Kathak dancing for a couple of years very early in my life, but then it was just the television and me. My parents would be like, ‘Go and study,’ and I’d be like, ‘No, no, I have to practice.’”

Between patients, Dhand and Niyogi called Rathour, a stranger to them, to ask if she was interested in choreographing the dance routines for their newly formed Mardi Gras krewe. The idea was enticing but also stressful, as Rathour — who happened to be in Mexico for the holidays — was wrapping up her doctoral program, with her thesis defense scheduled for May. Rathour offered to think about it, but in the end, she could not say no. Before she departed Mexico, she had songs picked out as well as loose movements visualized for the group’s dance. 

“What are the odds?” Rathour wondered. “My last semester, getting roped into doing a Mardi Gras dance troupe. I was like, ‘OK, gods are real.’”

Contrary to what those living outside Louisiana’s parish lines might think, modern Carnival celebrations — marked by incredible handmade costumes, the sounds of high school marching bands, black-tie balls, and, yes, people vying for beads — typically last more than a month. The festivities are still tethered to the holiday’s Catholic origins, beginning each year on Twelfth Night and ending on Mardi Gras Day, or Fat Tuesday, which falls the day before Lent and its penance begins.

But the joy of New Orleans’ Carnival is a somewhat complicated one.

Laura Rosanne Adderley, an associate professor specializing in the history of the African Diaspora at Tulane University, says there are three ingredients you need for a good Mardi Gras: French, Spanish, or Portuguese colonialism; the influence of the Roman Catholic Church; and African enslavement. 

“We kind of skate over what Mardi Gras is, and the reason that that becomes problematic is we then don’t think through the history of the city,” Adderley said. “That image of New Orleans as this, you know, ‘Let the good times roll,’ there’s often kind of a subtext underneath that sort of says, ‘Doesn’t this mean New Orleans is somehow nicer, less racist, and more fun than the rest of the South?’” 

Rather, Adderley said, we must remember that many Mardi Gras parading organizations in the late 1800s and through much of the 1900s were made up exclusively of white men of fairly elite economic and social status.  

These early, highly exclusive parades are the (not-so-distant) ancestors of the large-scale processions that dominate modern Mardi Gras to this day.

But around this exclusion sprang up alternate Mardi Gras traditions that were accessible to Black New Orleanians, said Winston Ho, a public historian at The Historic New Orleans Collection. 

“They had been excluded from so much of the Mardi Gras tradition that basically they created their own,” Ho said. “Things like Mardi Gras Indians and Black krewes, most notably Zulu, all emerged out of exclusion.”

It was not until the early 1990s that the New Orleans City Council passed an ordinance banning segregated krewes from participating in Mardi Gras. Several white krewes refused to integrate, instead ceasing to take part in the holiday. After pushback, the city ultimately passed a revised ordinance that required krewe leaders to sign affidavits swearing that their groups did not discriminate based on race in order to obtain parade permits. 

While parades at least theoretically became more open after this, prohibitive costs to join, limited slots, and the invite-only nature of membership still kept participation out of reach for many.

Jason Christian, whose wife, Ankita Rathour, is the krewe’s choreographer, paints a sign.

In 2005, the vast displacement of New Orleanians in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina would bring about yet another major shift to the holiday. After Katrina, “it was very difficult for conventional krewes to start parading again. The city had only just reopened a couple months earlier,” Ho said. “So one of the things that emerged in the aftermath of Katrina was these micro-krewes, or walking krewes.”

These alternative parade groups featured less fanfare than their large-scale competitors, but they in turn tended to be more DIY, more affordable, and, because their paths weren’t crowded with large floats, they were able to allow a larger number of krewe members, all on foot.

“The somewhat new tradition of alternative krewes, I think, is one of the healthiest things that’s happened to Mardi Gras in quite some time,” said Arthur Hardy, a historian and connoisseur of Carnival. 

In just the last handful of years, a growing number of these alternative Mardi Gras krewes have cropped up that are not centered on a group costume or theme, but rather on the wide-ranging cultures that have long existed in New Orleans, even if not represented at Mardi Gras. At the Carnival parades of today, one can see Vietnamese, Brazilian, and Mexican sub-krewes. 

“I think that’s been really inspiring for us,” said Dhand. “It’s nice to see other people standing up and saying, ‘We’ve been here all along.’”

Across the 47 years Hardy has spent covering Mardi Gras parades, he said he’d heard of no South Asian group prior to the new Krewe da Bhan Gras; Ho also believed the krewe was likely the first of its kind. 

Ho, who grew up in New Orleans, said he’d always felt like Mardi Gras “wasn’t really created” for Asian Americans like himself. 

“The idea of a whole group of Asian Americans coming together and creating their own krewe, it just goes to show you Mardi Gras has the potential to be inclusive. To be a tradition that belongs to everybody,” Ho said.

“To me, it represents Mardi Gras at its finest, its most organic,” Hardy agreed. “This is a free show. You don’t buy tickets. It’s not corporately sponsored. The citizens are the shareholders of Mardi Gras.”

Progress has been made in the 166 years since the city first marked Mardi Gras with street parades, but threads of the celebration’s exclusionary and racist roots still reach to the present day, as the Krewe da Bhan Gras would learn soon after their jubilant debut.

On a warm January day, a speaker strapped to a shopping cart blared “Mundian To Bach Ke” as Krewe da Bhan Gras members shimmied around a City Park bike path, practicing Rathour’s choreography: a fusion of Bollywood moves and bhangra.

Rathour encouraged dancers to be overly expressive with their faces — “very Jim Carrey, to put it in the American context,” she said — to incorporate freestyle, and to ensure, on top of it all, that their dancing was always infused with joy.

In the short time between their acceptance into Boheme and today’s practice, held just one week before the parade, the group’s founding members had worked hard to pull their new krewe together. 

Rathour began making videos to teach her choreography, while Niyogi and Dhand set about finding dancers. They messaged a local South Asian email list, “Brown and Down,” and used word-of-mouth to recruit others. Soon the group’s 20 parade slots were filled with members from Pakistan, Guyana, Sri Lanka, and more. Dhand had to request additional spots from the Boheme Parade. 

With a group assembling and the parade fast approaching, krewe members began gathering at a cultural center and warehouse space owned by Niyogi and her husband, Jebney Lewis. Lewis, an artist and fabricator, helped the krewe design its two handmade floats, a yellow rickshaw and a neon-pink vegetable cart, both set atop bicycle wheels. 

Across the vegetable cart, which would be used to carry the group’s sound system, members painted “Krewe da Bhan Gras,” spelled phonetically, in multiple South Asian languages, including Punjabi, Hindi, Kannada, Bengali, and Tamil. Julia Kumari Drapkin asked a relative to help her perfect the Sinhalese script she painted for the float. Before joining the krewe, Kumari Drapkin said she’d never met other Sri Lankans living in New Orleans. 

The krewe’s leaders were intentional about including as many South Asian cultures as possible. “We wanted to make sure we were representing the diaspora, because it is very varied,” Dhand said. 

The assembled krewe had members from both Pakistan and India; both Muslims and devout Hindus; both Tamil and non-Tamil Sri Lankans. 

The group also spent time thinking about where to draw the line between sharing South Asian cultures and disrespecting them. For example, should bindis be handed out during the parade? (The group decided to do so, along with information about what the bindi signifies.) 

The krewe’s many pre-parade gatherings were busy but focused, social but productive. In between practicing dance moves, members traded tips on the choicest spots for authentic food in the area and the best places to get one’s brows done. They painted a large set of eyes on their rickshaw float as they discussed which of their traditional outfits might look best for parade day. 

At a snack table with mathri, rice murukku, and cinnamon king cake, Vidhatri “Vid” Raturi, one of the group’s younger members at 25 years old, was tasked with editing the krewe’s three-song set into a clean, rotating loop. A first-year medical student at Tulane, Raturi moved to New Orleans in 2015, and this would be her first time in a Mardi Gras parade. 

“I think it’s very much in line with the culture of New Orleans itself,” Raturi said. “It’s all about having a good time.”

The routine to match the music was created entirely by Rathour, who wanted to make sure her choreography was accessible to the whole krewe, including its nondancers.

“I always think, ‘Can my mother dance what I’m teaching? Can my mother do this step?’ If she can, it works,” Rathour said. 

An occasional stand-up comedian, Rathour also incorporated her worldview into her choreography. She described a move where dancers circled their hands in toward their bodies and then sent them upward toward the sky as “accumulating the wealth, then sending it to Britain.” For a move she called “Kick the Colonizer,” Rathour asked the dancers to get their feet as high into the air as possible.

“These kinds of mnemonics or associations, they really help. And the diaspora really cares for it,” Rathour said with a laugh. “That is the thing: This is a way we bond.”

Amita Krishnan, left, choreographer Ankita Rathour, and co-founder Monica Dhand dance as the Krewe da Bhan Gras rolls through the French Quarter.

***

The Krewe da Bhan Gras may be a new phenomenon in New Orleans, but South Asian people in the region are anything but.

“There have been Asian people here in the South for a very long time,” said Ho, a historian who specializes in Asian American history in Louisiana. Ho highlighted Filipino immigrant communities in New Orleans that predate the Civil War.

“South Asian Americans are one of the largest and oldest groups of Asian Americans in the city,” Ho said. He cited Vivek Bald’s Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, which told the story of early Bengali immigrants, almost exclusively men, who came to New Orleans beginning in the late 1800s. Many married Creole women of color, and these couples often sold embroidered fabric and clothing on the North Claiborne Avenue corridor, according to Bald.

Some of these Bengali men were buried at the Arabian Cemetery, inside Mount Olivet Cemetery in New Orleans' Gentilly neighborhood and possibly one of the first Muslim burial grounds in the South. Mount Olivet is historically Black (Professor Longhair, Fats Domino, Ellis Marsalis Jr., and Allen Toussaint are all entombed there), but these early South Asian immigrants were given a space in the cemetery to be buried with their Black wives and children.

Decades later, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 would open the doors for a larger wave of South Asian immigration to the United States, especially amongst immigrants with higher education levels. Piyush “Bobby” Jindal, who was born in Baton Rouge to Indian immigrant parents in 1971, would go on to become a two-term Republican Louisiana governor starting in 2008. Jindal was the first nonwhite governor elected in the state, and the first Indian American governor in the nation.

Over the last 30 years, Ho said, as the emphasis previously placed on assimilation has dissipated, more Asian immigrants and their descendants have begun to express interest in Asian cultures and traditions.

For the members of the Krewe da Bhan Gras, embracing South Asian traditions within the context of New Orleans has felt like a perfect pairing, in large part because of the common ground that already seems to exist between the cultures. Several krewe members noted a shared affinity for vibrant dance and music; how South Asian and New Orleans cultures both thrive on bringing people together and centering on food; and the similarities between baraat processions at South Asian weddings and New Orleans second line parades.

Niyogi remembered a time her parents visited New Orleans on Mardi Gras Day. She was nervous about them navigating the day’s massive crowds, risqué scenes, and general chaos. But to Niyogi’s surprise, her parents wanted to go all in, ascending balconies to throw beads and even requesting to head farther into the crowded French Quarter. Niyogi and her husband debriefed after, wondering how the day’s intensity and large crowds had not thrown her parents off at all. Finally, Niyogi’s husband had a realization: “He was like, ‘Oh. Because this is just another Tuesday in Bombay,’” Niyogi recalled.

When parade day finally arrived, members of the Krewe da Bhan Gras gathered at the warehouse space early. Intricately embroidered lavender, mint green, and royal blue fabrics filled the room as Raturi applied makeup and false eyelashes to a line of waiting krewe members. Others pinned flashy lights underneath their traditional attire, applied mehndi to their hands, or munched on king cake in their full regalia. 

Tania Zachari, 45, the second-generation owner of a Louisiana oil and gas company, grew up in the state but would travel to her native India every summer. For the debut parade, she brought three trays of homemade Jell-O shots to share with her new krewe. Members snacked on the treat as Zachari finalized her parade look, a throwback to 1960s Bollywood.

At the parade lineup, the group posed for photos and warmed up in the chilly night air by dancing.Their completed rickshaw float was covered in a canopy of fuchsia fabric with dangling bells, and marigolds hung from the vegetable cart float. 

“I've never seen anything quite like this,” said Kevinn Poree as she stood amidst her krewe. A New Orleans native who identifies as Creole, Bengali, and Black, Poree said her great-grandfather was amongst the first waves of Bengali immigrants to come to the city in the early 1900s. 

Dr. Maryum Ijaz, 30, was born in Pakistan but moved to New Orleans from Richmond, Virginia, over the summer. Tonight would mark the first time she’d ever marched in — or even seen — a Mardi Gras parade. 

The Krewe da Bhan Gras gathers just before the Boheme Parade.

When it was finally time to roll out into the streets, the Krewe da Bhan Gras made a vibrant splash, its more than 30 dancers performing bhangra moves along the parade’s slow-moving journey as throngs of viewers danced alongside or paused to take videos, and in some cases, sang to their music or even wept.

“Represent! Represent! Represent!” screamed Archana Sharma, a local high school teacher, as dancers shimmied by her.

The group’s “throws” — special tokens that krewe members hand out to parade watchers — were far from the typical Mardi Gras beads. They included sandalwood soap, incense sticks, hand-labeled packets of spice, and a miniature “krewe cookbook” with members’ family recipes, such as Sri Lankan love cake and an apple curry from Kashmir. 

For her throws, Rathour curated notes on colonialism, printing off colorful cardstock slips with information on the ravages of the British empire.

“Here’s bindis and bangles, and here are some facts,” she said with a laugh.

In the thick of the French Quarter, Raturi FaceTimed her mom to show her the crowd’s reactions as other members hoisted up the group’s rickshaw float in the aftermath of a popped tire.

“Usually Mardi Gras and bhangra are not associated,” said Vikram Seshadri, 27, a smiling parade watcher visiting from Boston for his first Carnival. “It's great to see some representation.”

***

The Krewe da Bhan Gras members were riding high after their successful debut, with several noting surprise at the profound feelings that participation in the group had brought them. 

For Joey Algier, 29, who first learned of his South Asian heritage via an at-home genetic test when he was already a young adult, the group provided a sense of belonging he’d otherwise found hard to come by.

“New Orleans is so special in so many ways. It’s home for me,” he said. “And it’s so nice to be here with the spectrum of people who look like me, with passions like me.” 

Dhand, the group’s co-founder, was taken aback by the way being in the krewe made her feel. 

“What I didn’t expect was this feeling of place, and belonging. In a place where I already thought I had a place I belonged,” she said. “I didn’t know that there was another part that had not yet been satisfied, you know? And it’s not like I don’t have South Asian friends. But there’s something very special about all of us intentionally gathering, and forming this community.” 

The group’s shared common ground — and with it, the freedom from having to explain certain things — “was something that was unexpectedly beautiful for me,” Dhand said. 

After the parade, Dhand said the group’s Instagram account received a slew of “really beautiful messages.”

But the group’s post-parade high came crashing down a week or so later, after a video of their performance was shared (mostly with enthusiasm) around local Twitter. 

In response, some tweeted:

“You let them in, they change the culture!” 

“Who in Louisiana asked for this?”  

One commenter even suggested that the moment portrayed in the video — the group’s choreographed dancers smiling their way through the crowded French Quarter — was when someone should have begun shooting. 

“It’s just really scary to think that you create something really beautiful, and there are people who would rather see you dead,” said Dhand. “Just purely because you exist. That’s it.”

On Facebook, Rathour wrote, “Open call for shooting us down. A majority-women South Asian crew. I haven’t slept a wink and am terrified for my life.” 

Rathour said her time living in the United States has been heavy in many ways. She has loved her studies, her adviser, and her students at LSU. But the proximity to mass shootings, to police mistreatment of Black people, and to hatred aimed at Asian people has been “brutal,” she said.

“But that is the thing,” she said. “I love how joy erupts in times of brutality. This collective joy. I always remind myself there is joy. There is beauty in the world. There are people who are creating beauty. And that’s why I feel very fortunate that I got this opportunity.” 

After finishing her dissertation, Rathour plans to make her first visit home to India since the pandemic began.

Dhand said she will likely arrange a reunion for krewe members in a few weeks, perhaps around Holi celebrations. 

She is proud of how the krewe turned out.

“It really does matter to see people like you just doing your thing, and just expressing yourself, and being open about it, and understanding that you belong,” she said. 

“That’s what you’re saying when you’re being public,” Dhand continued. “You’re like, ‘I have a right to be here. I’ve been here this whole time.’”

Ashley Cusick is a freelance reporter based in New Orleans. Her work has been regularly featured in The Washington Post and the Phoenix New Times. Follow her on Twitter @AshleyBCusick.

Kathleen Flynn is a New Orleans-based photojournalist and documentary filmmaker who focuses on stories of struggle and injustice. Flynn has spent over 20 years as a working journalist, including a decade at the Tampa Bay Times and three years at NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. She has covered in-depth community news, veterans issues throughout the country, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami in Thailand, immigration in Mexico, post-conflict Liberia, India’s booming pharmaceutical industry, and the war in Afghanistan. Her work has been recognized with six regional Emmys, honors from the Overseas Press Club, World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, the Edward R. Murrow awards, the Nieman Foundation, the National Press Photographers Association's Best of Photojournalism, and with a Casey Medal, awarded for the nation's best reporting on children, youth, and families. In 2019 the National Press Photographers Association awarded its Humanitarian Award to Flynn for her career covering human rights issues and injustices. She is a member of Women Photograph.

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