Chapter 10 Early radio in late colonial India

As previous research on the role of the radio in (post)colonial India has shown, radio broadcasting is deeply implicated in the narratives of empire and postcolonial nation-building. Radio thus becomes seemingly synonymous with the imperial project during colonialism and with the national project in the postcolonial period. In this chapter, we shift scholarly attention to public discourse and audience formation during the early years of radio in colonial India (1925 and 1936). We analyse how early radio impacted people’s perception of space and place by re-structuring the geographies of ‘home’, ‘world’, and ‘empire’. We also show how the radio affected audiences along the rural-urban divide, re-configuring their understandings of sound, technology and listening

Chapter Introducing Asian Sound Cultures

In this brief introduction we highlight the importance of broadening the cartography of sound studies beyond the West. Over the last decade or so, the geographical range of sound studies has rapidly broadened at the same time as keywords and approaches to sound in the humanities and social sciences have become increasingly standardised theoretical and conceptual tools. The need to explore ways of thinking about sound articulated by experiences outside the West is becoming essential to ensuring the field remains as open to interpretation and as diffuse in nature and geography as the object of study itself. In this introduction we outline the contributions to this project made by the chapters gathered in this volume. We argue that mixing historical perspectives with ethnography, literary studies, film studies, technology, language and music and listening for the inflections driven by sonic regimes imposed by a global process of change in Asia can help us to better understand the shared experience and construction of modern sound. We also argue for an ‘international localism’ that, whilst accepting that the sound of modernity is inseparable from the process of modernity, amplifies the ambiguity of modern understandings of sound and mobilises the diverse historical experiences and rich social practices of Asia to provide alternative horizons for the exciting and vibrant field of sound studies

Sing who you are: music and identity in postcolonial British-South Asian literature

This thesis examines the role of music in British-South Asian postcolonial literature, asking how music relates to the possibility of constructing postcolonial identity. The focus is on novels that explore the postcolonial condition in India and the United Kingdom, as well as Pakistan and the United States: Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy (1993), Amit Chaudhuri's Afternoon Raag (1993), Suhayl Saadi's Psychoraag (2004), Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and The Black Album (1995), and Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999). The analysed novels feature different kinds of music, from Indian classical to non-classical traditions, and from Western classical music to pop music and rock 'n' roll. Music is depicted as a cultural artefact and as a purely aestheticised art form at the same time. As a cultural artefact, music derives meaning from its socio-cultural context of production and serves as a frame of reference to explore postcolonial identities on their own terms. As purely aesthetic art, music escapes its contextual meaning. The transcendental qualities of music render music a space where identities can be expressed irrespective of origin and politics of location. Thereby, music in the novels marks a very productive space to imagine the postcolonial nation and to rewrite imperial history, to express the cultural hybridity of characters in-between nations, to analyse the state of the nation and life in the multicultural diaspora of contemporary Great Britain, and to explore the ramifications of cultural globalisation versus cultural imperialism. Analysing music's cultural meaning and aesthetic value in relation to postcolonial identity, this thesis opens up new frames of textual and cultural analysis that help understand the postcolonial condition from the interdisciplinary perspective of word and music studies

Chapter 10 Early radio in late colonial India

As previous research on the role of the radio in (post)colonial India has shown, radio broadcasting is deeply implicated in the narratives of empire and postcolonial nation-building. Radio thus becomes seemingly synonymous with the imperial project during colonialism and with the national project in the postcolonial period. In this chapter, we shift scholarly attention to public discourse and audience formation during the early years of radio in colonial India (1925 and 1936). We analyse how early radio impacted people’s perception of space and place by re-structuring the geographies of ‘home’, ‘world’, and ‘empire’. We also show how the radio affected audiences along the rural-urban divide, re-configuring their understandings of sound, technology and listening