“Happy Homes Have Gramophones” –Gender, Technology, and the Sonic Restaging of Community Before and After the Partition of Bengal
co-edited by Praseeda Gopinath and Monika Mehta
Our listening practices are discursively constructed. In the sonic landscape of India, in particular, the way in which we listen and what we hear are often normative, produced within hegemonic discourses of gender, class, caste, region, and sexuality. . . This forum, Gendered Soundscapes of India, offers snapshots of sound at sites of trans/national production, marketing, filmic and musical texts. Complementing these posts, the accompanying photographs offer glimpses of gendered community formation, homosociality, the pervasiveness of sound technology in India, and the discordant stratified soundscapes of the city. This series opens up for us the question of other contexts in India where sound, gender, and technology might intersect, but, more broadly, it demands that we consider how sound exists differently in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Afghanistan. How might we imagine a sonic framework and South Asia from these locations? —Guest Editors Praseeda Gopinath and Monika Mehta
For the full introduction to the forum, click here.
To read all of the posts in the forum, click here.
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“She compelled respect at once by refusing on any account to be phonographed: perhaps she thought, amongst other things, that if she committed her soul to a broken piece of wax it might get broken…my subsequent experiences showed that it was only too likely,” wrote the British musicologist A.H. Fox-Strangways in 1910 about Indian female singer Chandra Prabha, while remarking on the harsh reactions to the gramophone in India (90). Such deep-rooted discomfort with the gramophone speaks to the cognitive, perceptual and experiential challenges faced by a listener/performer when a new auditory technology substitutes familiar terrains of musical production.
In this post, I revisit the decades prior to and following the 1947 Partition of Bengal, a phase singularly volatile not only in India’s political but also its musical and technological histories. I examine how the introduction of European harmony/polyphony in the aural imaginary of Bengal negotiates ideologies espoused by the nationalists in the (re)constitution of gendered space post-Partition by transforming relations of consumption. The production of gendered domesticity was vitally related to rigid conceptions of physical space and its allocation in colonial Bengal which, further, influenced music reception in ways worth probing.
The auditory regimes prior to the emergence of recording/radio-broadcast typified public modes of listening based on live performances engendering affective flows and presupposed human proximity. This culture of aurality is inextricably tied to communal modes of consumption and performance, be it the high-end salon-tradition of the Bengali modern song, the hard-hitting agitprop strains of the Bengal wing of the IPTA (Indian People’s Theatre Association) or even the stylized elite classical genres. The collective nature of musical practice conjures up traditional connotations of masculine spaces, especially in the case of the elite Bengali household where the gendered ideology of spatial orientation relegated the respectable Bengali woman (bhadramahila) to the interiors of the house (antahpur/andarmahal). The delights of salon-music were to be relished by the man of the house (babu).
‘Gramophone – a home entertainer’
Thus, the communitarian character of musical practice often made it elusive to respectable women. However, the emergence and subsequent sophistication of auditory technologies ushered a radical transformation to such a dynamic by dissociating music from the human performer. Besides leading to the obvious technological alienation in the listener, the privatization of the listening experience was accompanied by a condition of a penetrating solitude and interiority, a state speaking to the voices and /sounds emanating from the phonograph. At the sociological level, the entry of recording technology redefined long-held divisions of domestic space and the gendered dynamics thereof by not only democratizing musical consumption but also forging provisional collectivities of listeners often cutting across gender, class and caste. Besides, traditional associations of musical genres with specific loci- classical music with the salon/concert space for instance- gave way to a more fluid conception of domestic space assuming multiple sonic/musical identities depending on what the gramophone played. The phonographic interface, thus, radically reconfigures listening practices and produces a different paradigm of self, sound, community, and gender.
What is at stake here is not some covert form of linear technological determinism, but a more nuanced detour around auditory-technologies, spaces of consumption, and the affordances thereof that calibrate auditory experience along new registers. What merits contemplation is how (if at all) these technological innovations in the commercial arena complement and usher formal nuances and sonic innovations in the musical works they mediate. The gramophone renders problematic the uncritical conflation of the sonic and visual registers typical of live musical performance and, in the process, sets in motion a unique dynamic of interacting with musical sound. Severed from its visual footholds in live performance, phonographic sounds often provoke the listener to imagine the singing/performing body which, in turn, informs the way the sounds are processed mentally.
Vintage Gramophone spotted in Little India, Serangoon, Singapore, Image by Flickr User Linkway88, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Indian music has traditionally been based on a single melody which, in its skeletal grammar, is an individual mode of expression, even when performed by a group. The intrinsic form of Indian and traditional East Asian music in general exhibits a non-harmonic character. The concept of musical harmony proper is considered a European import. European harmony, polyphony, and counterpoint are in their very essences a set of disparate tonal registers forging a gestalt which impresses on the mind of the listener an overarching unity. At an experiential level, the polyphonic form embodies a distinct sonic ontology and a novel dimension, as it were, and thus cannot be reduced to merely a stylistic import. It induces a new auditory condition, a new register of being-in-listening (the lecture snippet from 57:08-.1:02:07 effectively demonstrates the morphing of the basic melody of a song into its polyphonic equivalent). The new auditory condition conjoins the familiarity of the melody with the markedly different yet complementing registers of the polyphony, creating a novel sensation for the uninitiated Bengali listener.
Among the very early records to employ musical polyphony in India were two iconic musical works of the mid-20th century, one devotional in intent– Aham Rudre from Mahishasurmardini (1931) composed by the legendary music director Pankaj Mullick–and the other, a professed experiment in introducing polyphony in Bengali music, Shurer Ei Jharna (1958), by the noted composer Salil Chowdhury.
In the current context, it is important to note how the sonic dimension of musical polyphony in Aham Rudre and Shurer Ei Jharna embodies and substitutes notions of aural communities and restages a communitarian character. Notably, the creation and circulation of these works paralleled the establishment of commercial state-radio in India (1930) and the first microgroove record in Kolkata in 1958 by the Gramophone Company.
The Gramophone Company in Calcutta marketed its records with the Bengali tagline “Shukhi Grihokon Shobhe Gramophone/Happy Homes Have Gramophones,” projecting the phonograph as the symbolic ideal of the domestic idyll and in the process confronting gendered spatial demarcations head-on by invading the auditory horizons of the secluded Bengali women. The striking presence of the gramophone in the iconic Gramophone Scene (1:35:17-1:35:28) in Satyajit Ray’s movie Ghare Baire–set in the backdrop of the 1905 Partition of Bengal–beautifully illustrates the sorority forged by the gramophone which, notably, draws even the marginalized widow Bouthan within its field of influence.
However, the gramophone superseded its commodity-character to serve not only in crass exhibitionism but also as an index of a masculine, elite consumerist culture where “serious music” and musical connoisseurship often became synonymous with the gramophone and recorded sound. A new breed of “record-collectors” came into existence, mainly belonging to the upwardly-mobile/elite classes whose passion for records was their most prominent identity-marker in the domestic realm, occasionally outweighing even their professional concerns.
But even as the radio and phonograph transcended the hitherto gendered character of musical reception by entering the women’s quarters and dissolving time-honored segregations of auditory spaces within the household, it had to contend with a deep-seated psychological discomfort in the listener, a fundamental unease with befriending technology that substituted the human. I argue that the newly insulated character of the radiophonic auditory experience was counteracted by significant efforts, conscious or otherwise, at sonically restaging and reclaiming the community lost in technological mediation.
Indian farmers gathered to listen the Farm Forum programme broadcast by All India Radio in the 1950s, Image Courtesy of Flickr User Public Resources.Org, (CC BY 2.0)
Given pet notions of musical anthropology and the chronological coincidence between the early uses of harmony and the entry and sophistication of technologically mediated music in Bengal one could, at the risk of slight oversimplification, posit that the import of the harmonic form at this significant juncture sonically compensates the auditory solitude induced by radio/phonograph by recreating a modified and idealized Platonic (Platonic here is used as an allusion to ‘music of the spheres’ to point towards how musical harmony since medieval times has been associated with ideal public) community and restaging it within the confines of the constitutive plurality of the polyphonic mode. As an aside, the initial introduction of polyphony in Shurer Ei Jharna (1958) garnered flak from a large section of the audience who cognized it as a group of amateur performers ‘singing out of key’ (Salil Chowdhury’s lecture from 30:31-31:15). Over the next few decades, however, this form was trans-culturated and seamlessly assimilated within the sonic vocabulary of the Bengali/Indian masses, so much so that without the regular vocal/instrumental counterpoint, commercial songs nowadays are often felt to be lacking hue.
The sonic changes that I have been investigating preceded or followed the Partition of Bengal, which informed the gendered patterns of popular musical consumption. It is well-known that the exigencies of the Partition proved emancipatory for women in that they were exposed to the vagaries of the workplace, leaving the confines of their quarters. It is with an often uncritical celebratory fervor that the Partition is credited with fashioning the independent, self-reliant and educated middle-class Bengali working woman, on occasion emerging as the sole bread-earner of the family. Jasodhara Bagchi says that the “partition accelerated the earlier trends of the twentieth century of abolishing the ‘purdah that had confined the Bengali bhadramahila to her antahpur (private quarters)…The same stroke that brought this flood of uprooted marginalised women to Calcutta also opened the door to many new opportunities for Bengali middle-class Hindu women. They came out of the private domain of domesticity and child rearing to take up public duties.’”(8) Uditi Sen, however, in her revisionist reading of the celebratory impulse argues that “situational aberrations” notwithstanding, the Partition did not lead to “a transformation of social norms or any substantive change of women’s ideal role within the bounds of the family.”(16)
In the aftermath of the Second World War, which had also witnessed the entry of women into the professional/public sphere, the USA launched a propaganda war to restore women to their hearth, revivifying the “cult of the housewife,” deploying films and popular music to promote the trope of the ideal housewife. Redefining domestic spaces as woman’s space had also been in the cards for the Indian state post-Partition, which had to a large extent been governed by patterns of popular media consumption. Arguably, the coincidental emergence of musical harmony and sophistication of private auditory technologies in the years following the Partition contributed to efforts to restore women to their private quarters, by compensating the lost professional community of the self-reliant working woman with the poetic/sonic community embodied by the polyphonic form, in the process enlivening her insipid lived quarters. Popular media technologies often employ innovation in content to revivify clichéd formats; musical harmony coupled with sophisticated audio-reproduction provides a classic instance of inaugurating a new sonic dimension in popular music which provides a powerful and enthralling form of domestic leisure.
Thus, in the context of early 20th century Bengal, the gramophone was a significant import which not only reconfigured perceptual registers and musical cultures but also listening practices by entering the interiors of elite Bengali households. Besides democratizing the listening experience, which till then had largely been restricted to male constituencies, the gramophone privatized musical consumption. It was through the introduction of musical polyphony, which is intrinsically ‘public/ communal’ as regards its sonic character, that this impulse was counteracted. As mentioned earlier, these technical/musical innovations widened the scope and impact of musical performance and arguably contributed to the reconstitution of gendered domestic space post-Partition which points to subtle and complex relations among technology, (musical) genre and gender.
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Featured Image: Screen Capture from by SO! Ed. Satyajit Ray’s Ghare Baire
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Ronit Ghosh is a postgraduate student at the Department of Art and Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark. His research interests include aesthetic philosophy, critical sound studies and the sociology of Indian popular music. He has published articles on sound studies in the International Journal on Stereo and Immersive Media and The Rupkatha Journal and has an article forthcoming in the Journal of Sonic Studies. He is a classical violinist and an aspiring music composer.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Tape Hiss, Compression, and the Stubborn Materiality of Sonic Diaspora–Chris Chien
Pushing Play: What Makes the Portable Cassette Recorder Interesting?—Gustavus Stadler
Hearing “Media-Capitalism” in Egypt–Ziad Fahmy
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Sounds Difficult: James Joyce and Modernism’s Recorded Legacy
Today’s post from Damien Keane marks the first in our recurrent series, “Live from the SHC,” which will broadcast the research of this year’s Fellows at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities, directed by Timothy Murray, whose theme for 2011-2012 is “Sound: Culture, Theory, Practice, Politics.” The Society’s Fellows study a diverse range of sound studies topics: the relationship between sound and urban space, the moment when musical sound enters (and exits) the body, the sound of popular culture in interwar Egypt, the role of sound in constructing pious Muslim communities in secular European countries, and the manipulation of sound by “circuit benders”–to name just a few of the projects being researched up at the A.D. White House (To see the full list of Fellows, click here. To see the slate of SHC courses being taught at Cornell this year, click here). To allow our readers the opportunity to listen in to the goings on at the SHC, Sounding Out!‘s correspondent on the inside, Editor-in-Chief and SHC Fellow Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, will be curating the online conversation amongst the fellows about their current research (and, of course, their sonic guilty pleasures)–so look (and listen) for it on selected Mondays from now through May 2012. –JSA
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Anyone remember these? "Gramophone" by Flickr User My Little Finger
I began asking my students how many of them had turntables almost nine years ago, when, as a graduate student teaching a course on the twentieth century, I found myself seventy pages into Dracula and having to explain what a phonograph is: then, only one or two hands went up, or half-up, in response to the question. A year ago, when I put this question to students in a course on modernism, fully two-thirds of the thirty-five students in the room raised their hands – although more than a few of them also believed that Steve Jobs had invented the mp3. Even allowing for self-selection and/or misrepresentation on their part, and for a soft form of administrative research and/or miscounting on my part, this swing is quite dramatic.
But what I find intriguing about the uptick is how it tracks with an equally dramatic rise in the use of a kind of allusion in commentaries about the effects of digital media on education. I am referring to those parenthetical asides that so often follow mention of residual technologies such as turntables and albums (e.g. “anyone remember those?”). While these asides are delivered in the manner of a stand-up comic doing material about blind dates or the post office, they serve to euphemize powerful attitudes about technology and what it is to be modern that are even less funny than such shtick, perhaps most directly by assuming the unqualified and unimpeachable newness of the present. Asking if anyone remembers the record player – or the chalkboard or the library or the secretarial staff – takes for granted that you’ve already taken it to the next level, having left off your turntable with parietals and rumble seats.
The limited edition of Joyce's _Anna Livia Plurabelle_ (1928). All further images by the author, Damien Keane
Which brings me to the gramophone recording that James Joyce made of the ending of Anna Livia Plurabelle, an episode of what would eventually become Finnegans Wake. Joyce had begun publishing pieces of his work in progress in 1924, and the Anna Livia Plurabelle section was by far the most visible of these, having appeared in several variant forms by the turn of the decade. Among these were its publication as a stand-alone, limited edition book in 1928, and the release of the recording that had been made at C.K. Ogden’s Orthological Institute in Cambridge, as a double-sided twelve-inch gramophone disc in 1929. Each did surprisingly well, and in tandem they helped to secure acceptance of Joyce’s formally challenging aesthetic procedures among readers. Indeed, some in the literary field, such as T.S. Eliot, hoped that recordings of authors’ readings would soon supplant, or at least augment, the market for limited and deluxe editions.
The label for side 2 of ALP gramophone recording (1929)
The fact that recordings did not replace books would be of little interest now, were it not for the way that their relationship in 1929 neatly conjures the supposedly defining trait of our own moment: the demise of one media epoch and the emergence of another (and with economic catastrophe at hand, too). Yet it is the gramophone recording – the “new media” format of that past moment – that is considered thoroughly obsolete today. What then can be said about the “listening history” of the recording? How has the sound of Joyce’s recorded reading interacted with perceptions of the readerly difficulty of the text, which, whether rightly or wrongly, are the pre-eminent “mode” through which readers approach Finnegans Wake? Put simply, if reading the text is hard, is listening to a recorded reading of that text hard?
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The front cover of Hazel Felman’s setting of ALP (1935)
In thinking about these questions, what catches my attention is the slippage between different senses of “difficulty,” between the positive inflections of literary difficulty and the negative connotations of sonic interference. Contemporary listeners tend to emphasize the crackles and pops that compete with the sound of Joyce’s voice and its language, and thereby locate the “difficulty” of the recorded reading in the sound of the recording itself. It is as though the recording medium actually impedes access to Joyce’s language or somehow imposes itself between the listener and his voice – despite the fact that the medium enables this access in the first place. This is to say, the “low” fidelity of the recording of Joyce’s voice simply cannot reproduce the literary experience of Joyce’s prose, that most elusive, or rarified, object of speculation. (Is it the singularity of literature or is it Memorex?) Today’s default reaction to the recorded reading might be juxtaposed to a much earlier response, Hazel Felman’s setting of the very end of the passage for piano and voice, published in 1935. Here is her explanation of the genesis of her composition:
The emotional reaction I experienced on hearing a recording which James Joyce made of the last pages of ANNA LIVIA PLURABELLE was profound. As I listened to the record time and again, the conviction grew upon me that if I could re-create in music the mood that the author creates when he reads the closing chapters of ANNA LIVIA PLURABELLE, I would be justified in translating into a musical idiom what already seemed to be sheer music.
A Close-Up of Felman's Music
Felman’s response pivots on the aural clarity of the Anna Livia Plurabelle recording – she notes, for example, that D is used as a pedal point in the setting because Joyce’s voice modulates around a pitch of D in the recording – and the “sheer music” she heard there was mediated by that very recording.
The ending of Felman’s setting, including D pedal points.
Almost eighty years after Felman, today’s hi-fi listeners more often hear in the recording only a poor realization of Joyce’s text, a judgment that has nothing to do with Joyce’s performance and everything to do with the grossly uneven staking of the recording’s semiotic content against its materiality. Yet we do well to recall that surface noise is just as “modernist” as Joyce’s innovative prose. Why do we always forget that? To ask this question brings us back to turntables and students. (Anyone remember them?)
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Damien Keane is an assistant professor in the English department at the
State University of New York at Buffalo. He is nearing the completion of
a manuscript entitled Ireland and the Problem of Information.
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