Kama Maclean`s project aims to apply 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 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, 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 key objectives are to locate sonic traces in the archive, drawing on audio recordings, texts, visual and oral histories to discern their impact; 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.

Image: ´Gandhi spricht zu den Bewohnern des Dorfes Aat`, from Walter Bosshard, Indien Kämpft! Stuttgart, 1931.

We are excited to share Dr. Joanna Simonow’s book release with you! In "Ending Famine in India: A Transnational History of Food Aid and Development, c. 1890-1950", the author provides insight into how famine was addressed in India at the beginning of the twentieth century - both to provide short-term relief and long-term solutions. As of 23.06.2023, it has been published by Leiden University Press and is available there. In addition, the book will also be published as an open access version, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF).

Scholars working on critical editions of premodern texts have at their disposal increasing quantities of material digitized as e-text. This presents the scholar with unprecedented opportunities: the scholar can now easily access and collate large numbers of witnesses available in online repositories or emerging from ongoing research projects, including those that produce e-text from manuscripts. But it is also a challenge: almost as soon as the scholar decides that their critical edition is complete and sends it to the press, new witness material is bound to emerge, potentially rendering the just finished edition, in a sense, obsolete.

In my talk, I introduce a new online software tool designed as a response to these new opportunities and challenges: the Open Philology Editing Environment, developed recently at Leiden University under the auspices of the Open Philology Project.

Dr. Rafal Felbur is Wissenschaftlicher Assistent to the Professorship of Buddhist Studies at the University of Heidelberg, Germany

You can get more information about the event here.