Listening to the City: The Protestant soundscape of Early Colonial Madras

Abstract

This paper is an examination of the Protestant soundscape of the city of Madras in the 19th century through an analysis of the  relationship between sound, urban space and religiosity in the context of early colonial urbanism. In order to do so, I draw on the scholarship of sensory historians who have argued against an “ocular” understanding of modernity, and have emphasized that sound, like the other senses, have been critical to its constitution. In my attempt to be a listening historian, I will attempt to de-familiarize Protestant mission records from the period in order to understand the ways the aural was crucial to how missionaries perceived, negotiated, and navigated the complex political and cultural worlds they encountered.