The Bradford Dhol Project: Exploring Placemaking and Collective Identity Through a Drum

How can music be used to build a shared sense of place in pluralised, post-industrial locales? Moreover, how can a culturally-significant musical instrument with multiple (and sometimes competing) heritages help develop a shared sense of place in multicultural communities? This article explores these questions through the Bradford Dhol Project (a community music initiative), drawing on qualitative research conducted during dhol workshops with Bradford (U.K.) community groups: Touchstone and ‘Stand and Be Counted’. Bradford is a large post-industrial city marked by economic deprivation and significant cultural diversity, including a sizeable South Asian population. Social issues are exacerbated by it being, to some extent, geographically divided along ethnic lines, generating undercurrents of mistrust and intercommunity tensions. The dhol drum, historically central in Indian and Pakistani musical traditions, has become an aural reminder of ‘home’ for diasporic communities in places like Bradford. Here, it has established new meanings through its prominent presence at public festivals and civic events, not only among the diasporic communities, but also those without historic cultural connections to the instrument. Rather than tracing the dhol’s routes of globalization, this article examines how the instrument’s cultural significance contributes to placemaking by evoking memories of place for those who migrated with it and enabling new meanings formed in the multicultural context of Bradford. Building on Bates’s (2012) call to examine ‘the social life of musical instruments,’ this article demonstrates how culturally significant instruments like the dhol can play an active role in social life by supporting the development of shared cultural and spatial identities. Ultimately, it argues that music—and musical instruments in particular—not only carry traces of their origins but also serve as a tabula rasa through which new collective senses of place can emerge. Developing shared senses of place and culture is a crucial starting point for improving social cohesion.