“Calcutta streets calling … I don’t see anything, I listen”: Semiotics of Urban Noise and Postcolonial Bengali Poetry as an Aural Archive of Urbanism

Abstract

This paper examines postcolonial Bengali poetry of the 1960s-80s to explore urban sounds as a site of cultural production that represents the creative and political experiences of Indian city-dwelling beyond the paradigm of the visual. We explore works by the Krittibas group of Bengali poets to trace the evolving semiotics of urban noise during Calcutta’s politically volatile decades of mass movements, naxalism, and the aftermath. The modernist reception of the city prioritised vision over other senses as urban cacophony disturbs the introspective ‘gaze’ of the Benjaminian flâneur-poet. However, recent scholarship on “aural flânerie” (Boutine 2012) revives the multi-sensory poetics of urban cultures. Informed by Sound Studies, this paper addresses postcolonial Bengali poetry as an aural archive of urbanism to situate urban noise as a disruptive sensory experience, challenging the modernist voyeurism of the planned city. This specific canon of Bengali poetry exhibits the relation between sound and place-making through formal and thematic experiments with urban soundscape, listening to street noises, the bustle of the bazaar, the radio announcements, political sloganeering, and people gossiping. Referring to “hollow speeches of revolution” and “running footsteps at midnight”, this alternative archive of “Calcutta streets calling” forms the acoustic perception of the postcolonial metropolis to represent the aural history of ideological contestations about “the right to the city”.