Writing a BrAsian City: ‘Race’, Culture and Religion in Accounts of Postcolonial Bradford

The organic ‘Asianisation’ of geographical, social, economic and political spaces within postcolonial Britain has been described and analysed most often in terms of a shifting but dominant discourse of ethnic, racial, cultural and religious difference. In this chapter, I explore a case study of how Asianised Britain has been ‘written’ in this way, with reference to just one city, Bradford, in West Yorkshire. The story of ‘Brad-istan’, as it is sometimes dubbed locally, has been consistently documented, perhaps more than any other centre of the South Asian diaspora world-wide. Over a period of forty or more years, the iconic status of Bradford has been very publicly inscribed. My argument here is that, beyond the headlines, a body of writing about the city now exists that is worthy of a new sort of reflection. Considered individually, ethnography, novels, official reports and travelogues from the 1960s to the 2000s provide only ‘snapshots’ of a British-Asian city from particular perspectives at particular moments in time. However, considered together, such ‘snapshots’ can also begin to map, in broad outline, the emergence and changing shape of ‘Brad-istan’. Indeed, one of my overall arguments is that unless we have a better understanding of social and historical change in ‘British-Asian’ cities like Bradford, we can not properly evaluate the reality of their contemporary dilemmas.