Prof. Dr. Kama Maclean Special Lecture Series in University of Pennsylvania

Prof. Dr. Kama Maclean was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of South Asia Studies for fall 2025. While there, she presented a series of 5 lectures on her book manuscript, Sonic Disobedience: Nationalist Mobilisation and the Arrival of Sound Technology. The lectures explore the sounds of the Civil Disobedience campaign (1930-1934), a mass movement that coincided precisely with the ‘arrival’ and convergence of a number of sound technologies in British India. Much of the emphasis on Gandhi’s dominance as a leader and his relationship with ‘the masses’ who adored him has been focussed on their desire for seeing him (darshan). By adopting a multisensorial methodological lens and focussing on Gandhi’s use of public address technologies (microphones and loudspeakers) at mass meetings; his appearance in silent and ‘talkie’ films; and of the Congress appropriation of British radio waves, the talks focused on the reverberations of Gandhi’s voice and the creation of nationalist listening.