This article revisits Mahatma Gandhi’s political practices as essential expressions of sonic nationalism. Gandhian scholarship has largely focused on philosophical concerns, questions of ethics, and has largely engaged with biographical/textual readings, along with other affiliate disciplines like peace studies. This article draws on sound studies, sensory history, affect studies and performance theory to argue that Gandhian methods of praxis, like community prayers, devotional singing, disciplined hearing, silences and charkha’s rhythms, were conscious sonic strategies, reintroducing sound as a pivotal function of political communication. The hypothesis of this article frames Gandhi’s regulated vocality and sonic minimalism as counter-aesthetic strategies against colonial rhetoric and aggressive nationalist politics; thus, underpinning repetition and moral attunement as key sensory phenomena to cultivate restraint and facilitate the creation of a dispersed listening public by the virtue of affect through contemporary technological infrastructures. Further, it engages with Gandhi’s acoustic devotionscape and the mediation/circulation of sound as interrelated nodes of a multisensory political economy, cultivated discipline, ethical listening and aesthetic inclusion that challenged established forms of dominant communicative hierarchies without resolving the material stratifications of social identity. Methodologically, it presents an interdisciplinary framework that can associate sonic studies with South Asian historiography beyond established institutional, visual and textual discourses.
Ayan Chakraborty (Fri,) studied this question.