Ravi Sandhu founded Pungra in 2012, though the thinking behind it goes back much further.
Ravi was drawn to maths and music from a young age, and started learning the dhol at seventeen. He noticed the teaching was entirely oral and colloquial — passed on by ear, with little of the explicit, structured notation that Western music takes for granted. It didn't sit well with him, and it set a pattern: Ravi rarely accepted "that's just how it's done" without asking why.
In his early twenties, working in user-focused software roles, that instinct turned into a teaching philosophy: ask people what they actually want, rather than assume it. Between 2001 and 2005, Ravi formally interviewed his own class attendees about their reasons for attending — and found that roughly 95% had little or no interest in performing. What they wanted was the exercise.
He sat the Exercise to Music Level 2 qualification in 2007, confident, and failed it — a humbling that showed him the real gaps in his own knowledge. He took it seriously and rebuilt his teaching around what it taught him.
By 2010, living in London and moving between performance dance groups and fitness spaces, Ravi kept noticing the same pattern: classes billed as "fitness" that were, in substance, performance routines in sportswear. He set out to build something honestly different — Punjabi music, real fitness principles, and participant health as the only goal.
The 2012 YouTube moment that gave the organisation its name (see the article on "Pungra" vs. "bhangra") crystallised that mission. From 2012 to 2020, Ravi taught classes and posted workout videos, partly so fitness centres could evaluate his work without an in-person audition — though many still turned him down, not for the workout's quality but because he was the only instructor qualified to teach it. Late 2019, he began designing a certification programme to fix exactly that problem.
Then the pandemic hit, and eight hard, expensive years caught up with him — he came close to shelving Pungra altogether. What changed his mind were the messages that started arriving a few months in, from people around the world using his old videos to stay active during lockdown. He returned in 2023 more determined, and built Pungra's certification as continual professional development endorsed by CIMSPA, with Exercise to Music Level 2 as a non-negotiable prerequisite — the credential he'd noticed most rival "bhangra fitness" brands quietly lacked.
The brand's ongoing role is to hold that standard — through certification, the instructor directory, and free public resources — rather than to run classes itself.