CAS Event
Wednesday, December 2 at 4:30pm MST
Part of the聽Sound and Noise in Asia聽Speaker Series.
飞颈迟丑听Madhumita Lahiri聽from the聽University of Michigan.
How can print serve the needs of a largely illiterate and famously multilingual nation? For nationalist writers in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India, answering that question meant emphasizing the sonic functions of printed texts. India鈥檚 diverse vernaculars were extensively textualized only in the nineteenth century, when British-led vernacularization projects inscribed a noisy and interwoven multilingualism as a collection of visually distinguishable forms: that is, as distinct languages with different phonetic scripts. Yet that early emphasis on linguistic differentiation was soon rivaled by a desire for inclusion, as anticolonial writers at the turn of the twentieth century sought to cohere a multilingual nation both in politics and in print. In this talk, I argue that these writers approached the literary text as a sound recording technology by analyzing the 1926 Bengali novel聽Pather Dabi聽(鈥淭he Right of Way鈥�) by Saratchandra Chatterjee. Set in British Burma and famously banned in British India, this novel has often been discussed for its radical anticolonialism. I show that its political content is inseparable from its sonic operations, for聽Pather Dabi聽uses its Burmese setting to dramatize how linguistic communities are interwoven with national ones. Studies of Bollywood cinema have revealed its early positioning as a technology that could unify India across the divides of Urdu and Hindi; my talk will engage the ostensibly quieter medium of print, and in particular the novel, to show its operation as a nationalist technology of sound reproduction. I show, too, how the novel served as a pedagogical apparatus for anticolonial listening. Situating聽Pather Dabi聽within the trajectory of twentieth-century Indian literature in Bengali, Hindi, and English, I invite us to listen for the emergence of the noisy Indian novel: one that taught readers how to listen across languages and that sought to influence their politics in the process.聽