A Sonic Approach to Anticolonialism in India

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Kama Maclean
• Subject Area: Asian Studies
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 519791652

This project aims to apply the methods of Sound Studies to the history of anticolonialism in India. Extending on my earlier work, which draws extensively on visual archives to construct historical narratives, this project aims to explicitly trace the reverberations of sound - especially mediated speech, slogans and songs - in anticolonial mobilisation in the interwar period. Orality was a critical element of political communication, which, due to the difficulties in capturing the spoken word, has not yet been studied in detail; yet the archives are full of sound. The deeply affective qualities inherent in sound, and the growth of technologies to amplify and record them in the period under investigation, renders this a rich approach to understanding anticolonial politics. The key objectives are to retrieve sonic traces in the archive, drawing on audio recordings, texts, visual and oral histories; to develop an understanding of the potency of sounds in creating communities and communicating nationalist messages, while evading censorship; and to trace the impact of early recording and sound projection technologies on nationalist mobilisation, to demonstrate how such technologies disrupted prevailing soundscapes and shifter politics. The project will focus on the civil disobedience movement, coordinated by M. K. Gandhi, training an ear to the ways he attempted to control and direct mobilisation and discipline through the use of soundscapes: by projecting and coordinating particular songs and slogans over others, and through the use of loudspeaker and basic printing technologies (such as cyclostyle), which enabled the dissemination of songs and speeches to larger audiences who were unable to read. This will demonstrate how sound became an important method of political communication in India, where illiteracy and regional languages preclude the creation of a truly national imagination of the nation based on reading, as proposed by Benedict Anderson. The project outcomes will be able to contribute to scholarly debates through the publication (by Maclean) of three scholarly articles in highly regarded journals; to give form to a collective of international scholars to shape and influence discussion about sound histories through a coordinated workshop in the final year of the project, resulting in a collection edited by Maclean; and to train two PhD students to completion, writing theses and researching with sound-sensitive methodologies, each student publishing a journal article by the end of their candidature, as well as contributing to the edited collection. The project will engage with larger scholarly audiences through an established website via the Department of History at the SAI, sharing research findings and prompting discussion on sound histories.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants