DFG Project A Sonic Approach to Anti-Colonialism in India

Kama Maclean's DFG-funded project applies the methods of Sound Studies to a study of the history of anticolonialism in India. Extending on her earlier work, which draws extensively on visual archives to construct historical narratives, this project traces the reverberations of sound - especially mediated speeches, slogans and songs - in anticolonial mobilisation in the interwar period. Orality was a critical element of political communication, which, partly 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 sounds, and the growth of technologies to amplify and record them in the period under investigation, renders this a rich approach to understanding anticolonial politics beyond the widely-acknowledged constraints of the colonial archive. The project locates traces of the sonic (understood as perception whose origins lie in sound, but which transcend it into the haptic and the affective) in the archive, drawing on audio recordings, texts, visual and oral histories to discern their impact. The objectives are 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 shifted political dynamics, in the context of the civil disobedience movement.

The project focuses on the political impact of the ‘arrival’ and convergence of a number of sound technologies, including public address equipment, ‘talkies’, radio and gramophone in the late 1920s. Talks on this topic were the focus of her Inaugural Lecture at the University of Heidelberg, as well as presentations at CeMIS in Göttingen; the German Historical Institute in London; and the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS) Annual Lecture in 2023, held in cooperation with the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge. The following publications are forthcoming from the project:

• Kama Maclean, 2025. ‘”Noisy”’ Photographs: Listening to Images from the Civil Disobedience movement in Bombay’, in 
  Sumathi Ramaswamy and Avrati Bhatnagar (eds). Photographing Civil Disobedience: Bombay, 1930-1931, New Delhi and Ahmedabad: Alkazi Centre for Photography and Mapin Publishers. 
• Kama Maclean, 2026. ‘The Im/possibility of Public Address: Microphones and Crowds in Bombay, 1931’, in Nazan Maksudyan, Julio Velasco, Louis Petitjean, Sarah Kiani (eds), Sound as Affect, Media, Data: Auditory Sensorialities, Sonic Materialities, Aural Epistemologies, Heidelberg Asian Studies Publications. 
• Kama Maclean, 2027. ‘Gandhi’s Voice: Mass Politics and the Arrival of Public Address Technology in India’, Past & Present (May, in press).

In September 2025, Maclean gave a series of lectures at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of South Asia Studies, each representing a chapter of her book. She is now writing the book, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation’s Opus Magnum grant, due for completion in 2027. 

The DFG has also funded two PhD Positions as part of the project. Anamitra Ghosh and Jacob Thomas are working on PhD projects which focus on the various ways in which radio, songs and slogans were utilized in anticolonial contexts during this period.