Listening with a Feminist Ear

Front matter

LISTENING WITHA FEMINIST EAR

Soundwork in Bombay Cinema

Pavitra Sundar

CHAPTER 1 From Singing to Musicking: Women’s Voices, Bodies, and the Audiovisual Contract Conjoining Sound and Image

Playback Singing and the “Old” Audiovisual Contract Singing on Television

The “Ethnic” Voice and the Aural Lag

Millennial Soundwork

Women’s Musicking and the Somatic Clause

Listening CHAPTER 2 Re-Sounding the Islamicate: The Cinematic Qawwali and Its Listening Publics 73 Qawwalis’ Classic Features 81 Ishq Ishq! Romance in Classic Qawwalis 88 World Music and Postliberalization 100 De-Islamicization and Irrelationality in Sufipop 109 Pious Listening in Dargah Qawwalis 116 Spectacular Dancing in Item Number—esque Qawwalis 125 Speaking CHAPTER 3 Speaking of the Xenophone: Language as Sound in Satya 139 From Cinematic Language to Dialogue-baazi 146 Language, Politics, and Cinema 150 Hindi Film Languages 153 Accenting Bambaiyya 157 Language, Violence, and Marginality 165 Dhichkiaoon! and Other Cinematic Sounds 169 Coda Listening, Loving, Longing 179 Textual and Aural Pleasures 180 Translation and Temporality 185 Seditious Touching in Soundwork 189 Notes 193 Bibliography 223 Index 241

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11713921

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1.1. Champa (Neena Gupta, with Ila Arun as her playback voice) dancing as a banjarin in “Choli Ke Peeche; Khalnayak (dir. Subhash Ghai, 1993)

Figure 1.2. Neeti Mohan singing a version of her song “Nainowale Ne,’ from Padmaavat (dir. Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 2018), on a music video for the album T-Series Acoustics

Figure 2.1. Anarkali (Madhubala) singing the qawwali “Teri Mehfil Mein,’ Mughal-e-Azam (dir. K. Asif, 1960)

Figure 2.2. View from the audience perspective of Akbar (Rishi Kapoor) and his qawwali party onstage singing “Parda Hai Parda;

Amar Akbar Anthony (dir. Manmohan Desai, 1977)

Figure 2.3. Momina Mustehsan looks on as Rahat Fateh Ali Khan sings in the Coke Studio version of “Afreen Afreen” (2016)

Figure 2.4. Jordan (Ranbir Kapoor) experiencing a spiritual moment during “Kun Faya Kun,’ Rockstar (dir. Imtiaz Ali, 2011)

Figure 2.5. God’s-eye view of the dargah qawwali “Kun Faya Kun,’ Rockstar (dir. Imtiaz Ali, 2011)

Figure 3.1. “Mumbai ka king kaun?” asks Bhiku Mhatre (Manoj Bajpayee) in Satya (dir. Ram Gopal Varma, 1998)

Figure 3.2. Dhichkiaoon! “Goli Maar Bheje Mein,’ Satya |(dir. Ram Gopal Varma, 1998)

Figure 4.1. Ramchandra Siras (Manoj Bajpayee) enjoying whiskey and music in “Aapki Nazaron,’ Aligarh (dir. Hansal Mehta, 2015)

Figure 4.2. Deepu Sebastian (Rajkummar Rao) reads Siras’s poem “O Beloved Moon’ in Aligarh (dir. Hansal Mehta, 2015)

VIDEOS

Video 1.1. “Choli Ke Peeche; Khalnayak (dir. Subhash Ghai, 1993): https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11713921.comp.1

Video 2.1. “Parda Hai Parda’ Amar Akbar Anthony (dir. Manmohan Desai, 1977): https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11713921.comp.2

Video 2.2. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's “Afreen Afreen, Sangam (1996): https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11713921.comp.3

Video 2.3. Rahat Fateh Ali Khan and Momina Mustehsan’s “Afreen Afreen?” Coke Studio, season 9 (2016): https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11713921. comp.4

Video 2.4. “Khwaja Mere Khwaja,’ Jodhaa Akbar (dir. Ashutosh Gowariker, 2008): https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11713921.comp.5

Video 2.5. “Kun Faya Kun,’ Rockstar (dir. Imtiaz Ali, 2011): https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11713921.comp.6

Video 2.7. “Kajra Re” Bunty Aur Babli (dir. Shaad Ali, 2005): https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11713921.comp.8

Video 2.8. All India Bakchod’s “Creep Qawwali” (2015): https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11713921.comp.9

Video 3.1. “Goli Maar Bheje Mein) Satya (dir. Ram Gopal Varma, 1998): https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11713921.comp.10

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many genealogies to trace as I think about how Listening with a Feminist Ear came to be. One of them begins with my Carnatic music teacher T. S. Anantharaman, who predicted when I was fifteen that I would write about music. I guffawed at his comments then, but here I am, decades later, with a book on listening. This is not quite what he expected me to write, but the love of music he inspired has shaped both my intellectual trajectory and my listening habits. Long before vocal lessons, came dance. It was my Bharatanatyam teacher, the late Komalavalli Krishnamani, who sparked my imagination through bodily movement and performance. In retrospect, I understand paatu sir and dance patti as imparting early lessons in research. Under their tutelage, I came alive to the pleasures of laboring over a single note, a single gesture, a single set of ideas.

I am grateful to my undergraduate teachers Hugh Egan, Claire Gleitman, Carla Golden, Jonathan Gil Harris, and Nancy Rader for carrying me through my student years at Ithaca College and beyond. Their lessons in cultural critique, theory, and gender politics paved my path to the interdisciplinary program in Women’s Studies and English at the University of Michigan. While this book is entirely different from my doctoral dissertation, that project oriented me in crucial ways and taught me to read across disciplines and fields. From the bottom of my heart, I thank my chair Nadine Hubbs and committee members Simon Gikandi, Christi Merrill, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Derek Vaillant, and Jennifer Wenzel, all staunch supporters from the start. Well after I had left Ann Arbor, Sumathi and Christi continued to open doors for me and encourage me to step out more boldly. Among others who extended a kind hand was Elizabeth Wingrove, whose fierce thinking and teaching continue to inspire me. That I return to insights first gleaned in my work with these graduate mentors speaks to their foundational influence.

A Mellon postdoctoral fellowship took me to Dartmouth College, where I was ensconced in a wonderful community of scholars affiliated with the xiv Acknowledgments

Department of Film and Media Studies, the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, and the Leslie Center for the Humanities. I thank Mary Desjardins for her immense indulgence as I began growing, ever so gradually, into a cinema and media studies scholar. I remember Doug Haynes, Amy Lawrence, Adrian Randolph, and Mark Williams fondly as well, for their guidance and good cheer. In those early years, I was a regular lurker at the feminist preconference at Madison and part of the first cohort of the American Institute of Indian Studies’ dissertation-to-book workshop. I am thankful for the funding earmarked for graduate students (Michigan), adjuncts (Oberlin), postdocs (Dartmouth), and untenured faculty (Kettering) that enabled me to hook into these formative institutional structures. My colleagues in the Department of Liberal Studies at Kettering University were impressive in the way they persisted in their teaching and research in the face of significant constraints. Our humanities reading group was a breath of fresh air, and I will be ever grateful for friendships forged over dinners with Dave Golz, Christine Levecq, David Marshall, Laura Mebert, Laura Miller-Purrenhage, Greg Schneider-Bateman, and Denise Stodola. With David and Greg, I enjoyed the kind of wonderful bond that can only emerge as one hurtles down the highway over seventy miles an hour, several days a week, come rain or shine (or Michigan snow).

I consider myself fortunate to have landed next at Hamilton College, in the Department of Literature and Creative Writing. My colleagues’ rethinking of the historical contours of English as a discipline and as a department allows me to do my work every day. I have the privilege of teaching courses in literary and cultural studies, cinema studies, and sound studies to fabulously engaged students. They keep me on my toes and teach me about my own work. The actual writing of this book would not have been possible without the substantial material support of the Dean of Faculty’s office. A generous start-up package allowed for regular conference travel, professional development opportunities, and subvention monies for the open-access publication of this book. Departmental and Dean’s office funds also supported the hire of two stellar undergraduate research assistants: Yassine Dahlek, who helped populate my Zotero library, and Clara Walling, whose eagle-eyed editing and whip-smart comments eased me through the final stages of revision. Most of all, it was institutional backing for a manuscript workshop and a summer fellowship at the National Humanities Center that put me on the path to completing this book.

I am infinitely grateful to Michele Hilmes and Sangita Gopal, the primary readers at my manuscript workshop. I could not have asked for better inter-

Acknowledgments xv locutors than the two of them—their vote of confidence and incisive advice helped me see the potential of my project more clearly. I am still amazed by Michele’s incredible support for a junior scholar with whom she had no previous connection. Sangita, for her part, joined via Skype (at dawn!) after an April snowstorm stymied her travel plans. Michele’s and Sangita’s deep engagement with my work despite the circumstances meant the world to me. Tom Wilson, Onno Oerlemans, and Margaret Gentry were instrumental in securing funding for the workshop, and I thank them for their faith in me. Over the course of several lunch conversations with Tom and Benj Widiss during our leave year, and with helpful advice from Kyoko Omori, Margie Thickstun, Lisa Trivedi, and Steve Yao, I dreamed up a set of events unlike any that Hamilton had previously hosted. My deep thanks to all my aforementioned colleagues and others who read my work and participated in the day’s activities, including Abhishek Amar, Marissa Ambio, Jennifer Ambrose, Beth Bohstedt, Celeste Day Moore, Mariam Durrani, Tina May Hall, Jessie Jia, Jeff McArn, Faiza Moatasim, Vincent Odamtten, John O’Neill, Andrew Rippeon, and Arjun Shankar. Myriad others helped with the logistics, including Gill King and Carolyn Mascaro—no mean feat, since the workshop was scheduled at the busiest time of the spring semester.

My month-long residency at the National Humanities Center was blissful. With no interruptions and all the support in the world, I worked out some theoretical knots and drafted another essay. Tania Munz, Lynn Miller, and the rest of the administrators and staff at the Center left no stone unturned in making the space as conducive to writing and research as possible. The conviviality of that summer’s cohort was second to none: thanks especially to Masha Belenky, Esther Fernandez, Ivan Ramos, and Jennifer Nolan for many a fun lunchtime and cocktail conversation.

Similar pockets of intellectual and social solidarity at Hamilton kept my research moving along. The sound studies seminar I organized with Celeste, thanks to an interdisciplinary collaborations grant from the Hamilton Humanities Center, was key to me finding my footing at the College during my first year. Jennifer Stoever’s visit and talk were a fitting culmination to a semester’s worth of exciting sonic explorations with Jeff, Kyoko, Amy James, Rob Knight, Scott MacDonald, Janet Oppedisano, the late Sam Pellman, Ian Rothenberg, and Chris Willemsen. Regular work sessions with the Junior Faculty Writing Club and, more recently, with my friends Quincy Newell and Kristen Burson have kept me sane and on track with my writing. Big thanks are also due to the RAVE group—Kristen, Rhea Datta, Courtxvi Acknowledgments ney Gibbons, Elaine Harrigan, Anna Huff, Wes Kramer, Alex List, Max Majireck, Megan Smith, and Darrell Strash—for creating a gentle space of research support across disciplines and ranks. The Feminist Killjoys, the Decolonial group, Contingent Hamilton, and the AAUP crew (shout-out to Susan Jarosi and Jeanne Willcoxon, in particular) also helped ground me during some difficult times.

Over the course of writing this book, I have connected with several overlapping communities of scholars of cinema, music, and sound. Among the colleagues I am happy to cross paths with regularly are: Isabel Huacuja Alonso, Uma Bhrugubandha, Iftikhar Dadi, Manishita Dass, Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, Teja Ganti, Lotte Hoek, Anuja Jain, Shikha Jhingan, Sangeet Kumar, Madhumita Lahiri, Neepa Majumdar, Darshana Sreedhar Mini, Deepti Misri, Navaneetha Mokkil, Madhuja Mukherjee, Anupama Prabhala, Ratheesh Radhakrishnan, Kristen Rudisill, Natalie Sarrazin, Meheli Sen, Gohar Siddiqui, and Samhita Sunya. Thank you for transforming conferences from dreaded occasions for professional grandstanding to much-awaited moments of camaraderie and inspiration. Madison and Utrecht, in particular, will forever be tied in my mind to you and others who were part of those lively conversations. Friends in music circles, particularly Shalini Ayyagari, Jayson Beaster-Jones, Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, John Caldwell, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Kaley Mason, Anna Morcom, Kathy Meizel, Sarah Morelli, and Zoe Sherinian, keep me from feeling like an interloper among musicians and (ethno) musicologists. Several colleagues provided feedback on prior iterations of my arguments, including Rajinder Dudrah, Ajay Gehlawat, Janell Hobson, Constantine Nakassis, S. Shankar, Aarti Wani, Tom Whittaker, and the excellent anonymous reviewers of my manuscript. With others, I read books that stayed with me long after our Friday afternoon chats: I’m thinking here of the queer theory reading group with Ben Aslinger, Megan Ankerson, and Sarah Murray. I have also benefited from the generosity and advice of Jigna Desai, Sara Dickey, Caryl Flinn, Frances Hasso, Priya Jaikumar, Purnima Mankekar, Sujata Moorti, Anu Needham, and Jyotika Virdi.

Closer to home, I found a lively community through the Central New York Humanities Corridor and New York Six Liberal Arts Consortium’s cinema and media groups. Corridor funding afforded Anaar Desai-Stephens and me more occasions to meet and exchange writing, and my work is all the better for it. It also opened up a fruitful connection to the George Eastman Museum and its South Asia archive, and brought me into the company of Tula Goenka, Harleen Singh, Nimanthi Rajasingham, among other wonder-

Acknowledgments xvii ful colleagues. The virtual gatherings that Lisa Patti organized with Rebecca Burditt, Ani Maitra, and Samantha Sheppard were enormously helpful in the early days of the pandemic. Patty Zimmerman’s talent for convening interesting occasions for deep dives into film and media never ceases to amaze. I thank her, Leah Shafer, and Rachel Shaff for widening the reach of my work through the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival and Conversations Across Screen Cultures.

It took me a while to acknowledge that writing a book is not simply an intellectual feat; it demands emotional and institutional labor as well. Regular check-ins with Tina L. Peterson and Kristina Vassil keep me steady—hard to believe we've been meeting for over five years now. Gina Velasco and Jessica Andruss have cheered me on each time I worked my way back to my scholarship after a break. I have also benefited tremendously from Michelle Boyd’s writing advice: thank you for helping me settle into my work. My relationship with the University of Michigan Press began with Mary Francis. Her interest in my project and keen feedback on my proposal had me hooked from the start. The credit for bringing this book to fruition, though, belongs to Sara Jo Cohen. I am grateful to her for not only taking over editorial supervision of the project midway through the review process, but shepherding it through the grueling pandemic years. Her patience and thoughtfulness, not to mention her diligence in answering all my questions about open-access publishing and Indian editions, assured me that I had found the right person and editorial team for this project. For the gorgeous image that graces the cover, I thank Shilpa Gupta. I know her art will continue to inspire me for years to come.

Had it not been for my weekly writing group in Ann Arbor, with Greg, Megan Ankerson, Hui Hui (Tung-Hui) Hu, and Aswin Punathambekar, I would not have dared imagine a book project. Aswin, in particular, has my profound thanks for his encouragement and advice every step of the way. Likewise, I am indebted to Laura Brueck and Praseeda Gopinath, whose friendship over the years has fed my thinking and buoyed my spirits. Even as I worked on this book, I engaged in several cowriting ventures, each of which expanded my intellectual horizons immeasurably and introduced me to colleagues with interests and questions adjacent to mine. Heartfelt thanks to Aswin, Praseeda, Debashree Mukherjee, and my friends in the Accent Research Collaborative, Pooja Rangan, Akshya Saxena, and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan. Time and again, I have retuned my thinking after listening to, and reading, Vebhuti Duggal, Usha Iyer, Monika Mehta, Matt Rahaim, and Amanda Weidman. Thank you to each and every one of you for sharing your xviii Acknowledgments writing, and for always engaging closely with mine. You inspire me not just with your dazzling intellect, but also with your grace and kindness.

The Happy Hour group was my rock through the most isolating phases of the pandemic. To the late John Bartle, Jason Cieply, Lydia Hamessley, Mireille Koukjian, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Peter Rabinowitz, Franzi Schweiger, Frank Sciacca, and Wei Zhan: I am infinitely grateful for your friendship and wisdom. Our daily virtual gatherings seem like a dream now. John’s sudden passing was a horrible blow, as was the equally sudden loss of Sam Pellman a few years earlier. I will always cherish the twinkle in Sam’s eyes, as I will John’s big smile. I am privileged and amazed to also call Margo Okazawa-Rey a close friend. Maureen McDonnell and Laura Halperin have been with me through thick and thin, anchoring me with their laughter as much as their strength. Clare Counihan and I have conspired to hang out over good food and drink in lots of different locales. That she is an editor extraordinaire is also a gift to me—had it not been for her, chapter 3 would have remained a sloppy draft. My dear pals Toy (Sharmadip) Basu, Varuni Bhatia, Sameena Dalwai, and Nihal Satpute were a salve during a recent trip to India, just as my lifelong friends Devi Pottath, Ed Sketch, and Claire Whittemore were on a similarly hectic jaunt across the United Kingdom.

Most of all, thank you to Aimee Germain. Words fail as I try to express all the ways in which you sustain me. Thank you for your love and constancy, for the many adventures and laughs, and, of course, for hiking the face of the mountain with me. I adore Edith for reminding me that I, too, am a creature of habit, and for doubling down on the importance of treats. To the rest of my kith and kin: whether you know it or not, you are all behind this book of mine. Thank you for gently asking me how it was going and then graciously not asking me about it. I dedicate this book to my grandmother, whose desire to learn is matched by none.

Introduction

My love of cinema as a child was sonic. When I think back to my growing years in Bombay, I do not remember going to the movies much. I remember listening to the radio and fussing over my collection of cassette tapes. I remember watching the film-song shows Chhayageet and Chitrahaar on television. I remember evenings spent on a neighbor’s stoop playing antakshari with friends. This popular pastime, which became a successful television game show in the 1990s, involves players taking turns singing Hindi film songs; each song must begin with the letter (akshar) on which the previous player’s turn ended. Thus, while antakshari is typically thought of as a test of musical memory and fandom, it is in fact a sonic game, driven by the consonants that begin and end the opening refrain of film songs. To put it in the terms of chapter 3 of this book, antakshari (lit. last letter) conceives of both music and language as sound. Such aural and oral engagements with cinema are by no means a thing of the past. Think, for instance, of the bombastic citing of film dialogues in daily life, often laughed away as dialogue-baazi.' Think of the ringtones and caller tunes people use to personalize their sonic identity on mobile phones; most of these musical refrains are culled from popular film soundtracks.” Think also of #Kolaveri, the wildly popular Twitter hashtag that cited a viral film song in order to critique the Indian political establishment.? Each of these examples illustrates what is well known about Indian film songs: they have a life of their own and circulate independently from the films for which they were initially composed. What is true of film songs is also true of other sonic fragments from films. They pervade everyday life and remind us that the pleasures and politics of cinema in India are aural, not simply visual.

Many before me have lamented the hegemony of the image in contemporary scholarship.“ The problem is not so much that we live in a world rife with visual media and metaphors, but that we continue to disregard other ways of organizing and experiencing the world. We tend to dismiss other sensory data, including the sonic, in our research. Most pertinent to this book is the fact that despite decades of film sound and music criticism, the fallacy that cinema is a visual medium, rather than an audiovisual one, persists. The inattention to the aural is surprising in the South Asian context, given the importance of music in many of the subcontinent’s film traditions. Song-dance sequences have long been considered a distinguishing mark of mainstream films, and a crucial moneymaking device. Over the last four decades, scholars of Indian cinema have challenged Hollywood- and Eurocentric frameworks in film studies, probing questions of genre, theatricality, and verisimilitude. But much of this work rehearses the visual predilection of the discipline, paying little heed to any sounds apart from dialogues and, occasionally, song lyrics. Music is relegated to the realms of pleasure and economics; film sound is reduced to words; and films continue to be “watched, not heard.

Listening with a Feminist Ear bridges the gap between the quotidian aurality of my (and other fans’) cinematic engagements and the visual focus of film studies as a discipline. I home in on the aural domain of mainstream Bombay cinema to unpack its political ramifications and possibilities, identifying singing, listening, and speaking as key sites of cultural politics.” In the first two chapters, I think through the sound of Indian womanhood and the Islamicate in Hindi films from the mid-twentieth century through the present. Noting the dramatic morphing of these constructs since the advent of economic liberalization in the early 1990s, I argue that underlying the dynamic terrain of gender, sexuality, and ethnic and communal (religious) identity in mainstream Hindi cinema are fundamental changes to aurality and visibility in Indian public culture. In the following chapter, I listen for how the materiality of language can stretch the boundaries of city and nation, and reframe the relationship between cinematic speech, song, and sound design. Keeping in play the many different sonic elements that films use, as well as the interaural fields in which those sounds register, helps us chart new paths through the history of cinema. It generates counterhegemonic understandings of identity and belonging so sorely needed in our times.

If my interventions are audible now, it is due to the concert of voices surrounding my project that have also been touting the significance of the aural for the past several years. Analysis of Hindi films was resolutely focused on visual narratives until the publication of two books: Sangita Gopal and Sujata

Moorti’s edited volume Global Bollywood (2008), which tracked the many itineraries of Hindi song-dance sequences, and Gregory D. Booth’s ethnography of Bombay film musicians, Behind the Curtain (2008).° The conceptual and methodological challenges posed in these key studies—one situated primarily in cinema and media studies, the other in ethnomusicology—echoed those posed by Alison E. Arnold in “Hindi Filmi Git” (1991) and Peter Manuel in Cassette Culture (1993), as they pivoted away from ethnomusicology’s traditional foci of classical and folk music.’ This important scholarly corpus has grown substantially in recent years, clarifying the production and circulation networks undergirding Indian film and music industries, and specifying the musical features associated with various genres, music directors (composers), and time periods. Posing an implicit challenge to the ocularcentrism of Indian cinema studies, this body of work is a companion to my own attempt to initiate scholarly conversations about aurality in the Indian context.* I build also from the work of those feminist scholars who incorporate the aural into their analyses and treat the film song as more than just a musical plot device.’ Last but not least, I write in the company of other South Asianists who have recently turned their attention to the noisy soundscapes and diverse sound cultures of the subcontinent.” In Listening with a Feminist Ear, I use the generative possibilities of this nascent sonic turn to listen more deeply, and a bit differently, to Hindi cinema.

Even as I pursue questions of interest to scholars of film music, I follow Neepa Majumdar in asking how we might theorize sound in Bombay cinema “beyond the song sequence.’ What is to be gained in “thinking sound,’ as Alexander G. Weheliye puts it, not just thinking of sound in this cinema?” One approach might be to think beyond “song”—that is, to attend not just to musical elements like melody, rhythm, and instrumentation, but also to other aural, visual, and performative elements that constitute the “sound” of a song. What might we learn from listening to vocal timbre and accent, for example? How might a singer’s or music director’s broader oeuvre and the “re-animation” of songs in extracinematic contexts shape the meanings attached to a particular song? How might we conceive of the sound-image relationship in terms other than “song picturization’? Another approach might be to think beyond the musical “sequence”—that is, to expand aural analysis beyond song-dance numbers, which are typically understood as “interruptions” to the narrative. This work demands listening to so-called background music (orchestral score), dialogues, voice-overs, ambient noise, and sound effects. What happens to song when we conceptualize it in relation to such apparently nonmusical elements in the rest of the diegesis? What is the relationship between music and speech? How do we conceive of the sound of words or that of silence?

In this book, I propose a third approach, one that encompasses the aforementioned but generates more expansive theoretical questions about singing, listening, and speaking in cinema. The capacious conception of the aural I embrace in this book (“soundwork’”) and the interpretive practice it enables (what I dub “listening with a feminist ear”) shift the intellectual terrain of Indian cinema studies. I ask very different questions of Bombay cinema and the Hindi film song than previous studies have. How might our understanding of individual films, and of cultural history more generally, shift if we centered listening in our methodological and epistemological frameworks? What would Hindi cinema sound like if we kept in mind different—nonmusical, nonfilmic, even non-Hindi—histories and contexts? What if aural and oral figures drove our analyses? What can we glean from recasting familiar concepts in sonic terms? How might such critical listening inflect our understanding of Hindi cinema and Indian public culture at large? Jonathan Sterne writes that “to think sonically is to think conjuncturally about sound and culture”™® This is the project I pursue in Listening with a Feminist Ear.

The three chapters of this book demonstrate a few different ways of putting into practice the ambitious theoretical and methodological reach of my project. Together they offer a way of attending to Hindi cinema that amplifies the aural without diminishing the importance of the textual, the visual, or anything else. My task, at its most fundamental, is to reorient (Indian) cinema studies toward the aural, to infuse it with a sonic sensibility. More modestly, I aim to convince my fellow scholars and fans to listen as carefully as we watch. I seek to undermine the assumption that sound simply augments visual narratives. The emergence of sound studies as a distinct field of inquiry—in particular, the burgeoning of feminist media studies and South Asian studies scholarship on sound—is crucial to my effort to coax cinema studies to listen. Historian Mark M. Smith proposes that we understand sound studies “as a desirable ‘habit’ of historical inquiry. . . . By ‘habit’ [he means] methodological, epistemological, and even ontological embeddedness—a way of examining the past that becomes second nature so that evidence is read, consciously and even subconsciously, for tidbits of the acoustic, smatterings of the auditory, gestures of silence, noise, listening, and sound” I agree, and I want to extend such a “habit” beyond historical research. What would it take to bring one’s “habit” of sound studies to other modes of analysis? I seek with this book to make listening with a feminist ear a habit for all subsequent scholarship on Indian cinema.

Listening as Habit and Hermeneutic

Like my fellow scholars of the aural, I take not just music but all sound to be “a social formation that is constituted by struggle and struggled over; one that is both overdetermined semantically and yet manifold in its semiotic possibilities’”'* Recognizing that soundwork is a discursive realm of both constraint and possibility, we must become “sound students.” The term is Jonathan Sterne’s tongue-in-cheek adaptation of a dismissive epithet (“cultural students”) from the US culture wars of the 1990s. He writes: “sound students produce and transform knowledge about sound and in the process reflexively attend to the (cultural, political, environmental, aesthetic . . .) stakes of that knowledge production”! That is to say, if we acknowledge sound to be a site of culture and politics, we must listen—and we must listen as carefully, thoughtfully, and reflexively as we do all else. Along with Nina Sun Eidsheim, Charles Hirschkind, Roshanak Kheshti, Kate Lacey, Lisbeth Lipari, Jennifer Lynn Stoever, and others, I conceive of listening as a critical and ethical endeavor.” Listening is not a passive exercise but an engaged and interpretive one. It is a “directed, learned activity, a way of engaging with aural material that is cultivated over time. Thus, listening requires the physiological faculty of hearing, but is not reducible to it.” The disciplining of auditory perception, or what Sterne calls “audile technique,’ is a wholly social and cultural experience.” It is steeped in the specificities of time and place, context and genre.

While scholars of cinema (Indian and otherwise) have been slow to pick up on the importance of soundwork and the cultural politics of listening, key Indian nationalists and music reformers of the early to mid-twentieth century were well aware of what was at stake in listening. Most famously and apropos to the history of Bombay film soundwork, B. V. Keskar sought in his position as Minister of Information and Broadcasting (1952—62) to reform the nation’s listening practices. His ban on Hindi film songs and simultaneous encouragement of classical music on All India Radio was designed “to forge a soundscape for the new nation by educating, and more importantly by disciplining, citizen-listeners’”™* While radio listeners roundly rejected Keskar’s plan to police what “good” music and listening entails, his emphasis on listening as a cultivated practice, something that is learned and not self-evident or fixed, and his assertion of its relevance to national identity are notable. Further, certain listening formations and auditory practices that are commonplace in India today owe their shape to discursive, institutional, and industrial developments of prior decades. I demonstrate this claim in the first two chapters of this book by tracing conventions of vocalizing, watching, and listening in Hindi cinema that have become so familiar over time that they go unremarked in both scholarly and popular discourse. Histories of soundwork can fix our “ways of listening” as they do our verbal, vocal, and musical practices.” In this book, I propose listening with a feminist ear as an unlearning of some of those aural and interpretive tendencies.