You can barely worm your way through the thicket of writhing bodies on the Chop Suey dance floor, where New York City DJ Jay Dabhi, aka Lil' Jay, has launched a bass-thumping, fist-pumping sea of otherworld exuberance. At one corner of a late September throng — the touring cast of "Bombay Dreams," just off a two-week run at Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre.

Here in this sweltering Capitol Hill club is a Seattle you may not recognize: A crowd of several hundred, most of them of Asian Indian descent, lost in the modern dance beats underlying traditional bhangra and popular Bollywood music.

The scene, sponsored by Sounds of the East, aka The Bollywood Project, has a distinctly Indian flavor drawing not only the adventurous but Asian Indians seeking cultural familiarity and reinforcement. And not far from Chop Suey, I Heart Shiva, the granddaddy of the local Asian Indian music scene, hosts twice-monthly events at the Baltic Room.

"Music [at other clubs] doesn't make me feel like I want to get out on the dance floor," says Sounds of the East habitué Mrina Natarajan, a Microsoft tech writer who left India eight years ago. "Also, I want to see people who look like me. ... It gives you a sense of belonging."

"Some people don't even speak their native language, but they come here to get connected," says I Heart Shiva's Ravi Wadan, who plays the dhol — the two-headed drum central to bhangra music — at the Baltic Room's events. "It's something they can bring their friends to and say, this is the kind of music we listen to in my country."

Bollywood refers to the music from mainstream, Hindi-language films that appeal to people throughout South Asia and beyond. Bhangra, a regional form rooted in India's fertile northwest state of Punjab, is a centuries-old style of folk music and dance commemorating harvest season.

Tradition, and Microsoft

Through migration, the sounds and rhythms of bhangra in particular have earned crossover appeal, having trickled into the U.S. mainstream through pop songs like "Beware of the Boys" — a hit by England's Panjabi MC remixed with rhymes from American rapper Jay-Z — and Britney Spears' "I'm A Slave 4 U."

Some DJs mix bhangra with house and trance; Manpreet Wadan, I Heart Shiva's co-founder, frontman and headliner DJ (as well as Ravi's older brother), blends it with Dr. Dre and Nirvana. "It's not mainstream, but I want to take it mainstream," he says.

Seattle is one of numerous U.S. cities — Houston, Chicago, San Francisco — with thriving Asian Indian populations and music scenes. A 2002 Census report estimated the number of Asian Indians in King County at more than 17,000, but some estimates put the number at more than 20,000. (The number of Asian Indians in the U.S. more than doubled to nearly 1.7 million between 1990 and 2000, the nation's fastest-growing ethnic group.)

But what sets Seattle apart, says New York DJ Rekha Malhotra, who did a guest stint for I Heart Shiva last year, is what she calls "the Microsoft factor."

While some estimate that Asian Indians comprise as much as 30 percent of the company's overall workforce, it's the sizeable number of first-generation Indians temporarily employed here on H-1B visas that lend the scene authenticity and a role as cultural comfort zone. (According to multicultural marketing firm Ameredia, Asian Indians receive half of the H-1B temporary work visas issued annually by the U.S.)

Adds tech writer Natarajan, who leads the Seattle chapter of the Network of Indian Professionals: "They're not expecting to be here long, so it's home away from home."

We're Not Rockers

Built on the rapid rhythms of the dhol, bhangra lives on in its traditional form through dance team competitions held around the world: One of them, Bhangra Bash, is set for March 24 at the University of Washington.

In the 1980s, DJs in the United Kingdom, where long-established Indian immigrant communities had kept bhangra alive, began adding R&B, house and reggae beats to its hypnotic vocals. A decade later, it leaped to North America, further merging with hip-hop and spawning bhangra scenes in New York City and Vancouver, B.C.

Now, the two club nights offer competing atmospheres: Sounds of the East's Bollywood remixes find a following in an older, primarily Indian audience. About half are Microsoft employees, says promoter Shelly Kamran, a cultural enthusiast still irked by the fact that the word "bhangra" comes up as a typo in Microsoft Word. ("Hello, can someone at MS help me with this?" she rants on her MySpace page.)

Sounds of the East is equally proud of its Indian flavor and own successes, such as bringing some big-time UK stars to Seattle — for example, Panjabi MC.

"We do Bollywood, they do bhangra," says Kamran. "It's like pop versus underground hip-hop."

Some who prefer Sounds of the East's events find bhangra too repetitive or its Punjabi-language songs too inaccessible. For others, like Pranali Pathare, a UW doctoral student from Bombay, it's Chop Suey's predominantly Indian crowd, many of whom know the Hindi lyrics to the music from more popular Bollywood soundtracks.

"When all these Indian people know the songs and start singing and dancing, that's pretty infectious," Pathare says.

Marc Ramirez: 206-464-8102 or mramirez@seattletimes.com

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