Sounds of Revolt, Echoes of Defeat: Delhi’s Soundscape and the Uprising of 1857

Abstract

The Uprising of 1857 marks a watershed moment in the history of modern South Asia. Especially for India’s Muslims, collectively punished for its outbreak by the British colonial regime, the violence of the Uprising and the final destruction of the Mughal court in Delhi in its aftermath became enshrined in the collective memory as traumas only surpassed by Partition in 1947. Based on the analysis of a range of Urdu-language sources across multiple genres (including earwitness accounts, songs, and commemorative poems), this paper examines how the inhabitants of Delhi literally heard their world turn upside down. After 1857, the city’s soundscape would never be the same. I argue that sound and music, based on their affective qualities, played central roles in the ways in which the violence of 1857 was experienced, processed, and remembered. I show that loss of life, place, culture, and identity was time and again articulated in sonic images and metaphors relating to the heard past. Moreover, my layered discussion of poems and songs composed by both elites and non-elites seeks to disrupt the common military understanding of the uprising and explain why nostalgia became the central emotional category in which Muslims commemorated the event.