The Sounds of a Strike: Slogans, Poetry, Oratory and Noise in Kanpur, 1938

Abstract

The present article seeks to explore the relationship between sound and temporality during a period of ‘crisis’ through an examination of sources depicting the soundscape at the Parade Ground in Kanpur on the 10^th of June, 1938, right at the cusp of the largest pre-independence strike in the city’s history. Crisis here is imagined as a discursive site of contestation where a choice is imposed upon historical actors between stark alternatives, thus exploding the continuum between the space of experience and the horizon of expectations, thus opening them up to multiple futures. The article contends that the sense of crisis is reproduced through sound, and this reproduction helps accelerate the perceived urgency of the crisis, making the choices more immediate, and removing any scope for deliberation, replacing it with responsive action. Studying the sonic environment, which included sounds both from the dais – poetry, exhortations, oration – and the ground – slogans and reactions to the sounds emanating from the dais – would help enrich a history which is plagued by a paucity of testimonies on account of a subject that as a category remained by and large illiterate, and help us better explain the impact of the workers’ temporal experiences upon their politics.