I am half Punjabi by ethnicity, and the dholak (or dholki as we would say it) has a bit of a history in my family. My paternal grandmother could hardly do much apart from derive her joy from watching me grow, and occasionally visit family friends. But one day, on the night before the wedding of a family friend, I saw and heard her play the dholki, and she drummed beautifully that night, leading the women in joyful song as the mehndi was being applied to the bride-to-be's hands and feet.
It was a side of her I never thought I'd see, and I'm glad I did see it. As a passionate drummer with a noticeable spiritual bent, I felt the love and joy from her drumming and began to realise that I wasn't a blip in the family, regardless of what my parents kept saying to me. I wasn't playing an instrument that was merely meant for boys and men. This desire to drum was passed down; it may have skipped a generation but I saw it in a 4-foot-tall, pint-sized grandma whom I affectionately called maaji (not naniji as I would have ordinarily been expected to do).
My drumming falls largely under Western schools of musical thought, I'm aware, and my beliefs differ from those that my grandparents held. But the love is still present. Today, I felt it was right to reconnect a bit with that ancestral drum. This particular dholki belongs to Soundskills, the community centre at which I teach and make music. I don't think I'm doing particularly well with it, but I would like to be half decent at it one day, at least to make my grandmother proud.
