 Hello and welcome to our British Library South Asia Seminar Series which is part of our research and digitization project called Two Centuries of Indian Print. Today we have Dr. Vibhuti Dukal who's going to speak on becoming a listener in mid 20th century North India. Dr. Dukal is assistant professor of film studies at the School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University in New Delhi. She was awarded her PhD in Cinema Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University on a CSTS ICSSR Doctoral Fellowship. She works at the intersection of sound, music and media. Her work has been published in books and journals by Spage, Taylor and Francis and Oxford University Press. We are very happy to have amongst us Dr. Pawitra Sundar as a chair for the event. She's an associate professor of literature at Hamilton College. Her scholarly interests span cinema studies, sound studies, postcolonial literary and cultural studies and gender sexuality studies. She's a founding member of the Accent Research Collaborative and is a recipient of CNY Humanities Corridor Awards, South Asia Media and Performance Cultures 2018-20. Her forthcoming monograph, Listening to Bollywood, brings a feminist ear to Bombay cinema. About the format of this talk, Vibhuti is going to speak for around half an hour or 45 minutes and then we'll have a short discussion between the speaker and the chair, after which we'll open it up for audience Q&A. If during the discussion you would like to put in your questions, please use the chat box to do so. So without much further ado, I invite Vibhuti to speak on becoming a listener in mid 20th century North India. Over to you Vibhuti. Thank you, Brianka. Thank you so much. I'd just like to share my screen. I just a quick check if I could. I just want to know if the screen is visible. It is. Thank you. Thank you. So, thank you very much to Dr. Priyanka Basu and the South Asian seminar series that she curates at the Shlipre for inviting me to present my work in this forum. It's, I really look forward to this opportunity for feedback and to develop and, you know, in order to be able to develop this work and I'm also the absolutely thrilled that I could have Dr. Pavitra Sundar chairing this session. She's someone whose work I have read and admired for a very long time so it's really a privilege to be able to share this in front of her and of course with all of you and for being here. So, before I. So without further ado, I'd like to begin. In this talk, I would like to think about what it could mean to be a listener in the mid 20th century in North India. I do this by focusing on a concert of different practices which take us to a realm that are not often thought of, or not commonly thought of as belonging to listening. I look specifically at the production of radio listeners clubs, or Shrota Sangh, as they were called magazines, and some of the writing found there in specifically narratives about how one became a listener for those familiar with Hindi. Mesh Rota Kase Bana, or Mesh Rota Kase Bunny. Across this material, I posit the possibility of thinking the figure of the listener through what I would like to tentatively call a vernacular techniques of sound by turning from the question of who or what the listener is to asking the question, what is listening. Before beginning, however, with exploring what it means to be listener in mid 20th century North India, let me first try and lay out an answer to the question. How is this listener understood or discussed in order to, sorry, in order to consider the listener. It is the first question that we must ask. Consider, for instance, this example. K.S. Malik, the station director of all India Radio, produces a typology of listeners in an essay on the listener's role in the Radio Times of India in 1961, where he distinguishes listeners as wavelength wanderers, general listeners and so on. And separates that category of listeners from the attentive listener who could be listening singly in the comfort of his home or collectively in groups or publicly. Malik's comments are of course made in the early 1960s, but this disdainful discourse about the listener and the inattentive wavelength wanderer has persisted over the years. Listeners, a former radio announcer with the IR and mark to me, were of two kinds. In 2012, he was amongst the first to indicate what I would hear repeated by various people. Radio announces creators of Geet Koshers or compendiums of songs, and others who had been part of the world of radio. That 90% of listeners would listen only for their name very carefully on air, were interested in sending for my issues, but not interested in listening very carefully. These were also the ones who would usually be carpenters, tailors, small shop owners or lower middle class or working class tradesmen. Only 10% of the listeners he continued were ones who would pay attention, who would really be interested in the music and not just in hearing their names. The phrase then that they just wanted to hear their name, they meaning the listeners is a statement that was repeated by almost everyone I spoke with. Thus, radio personnel, as well as people who consider themselves serious radio listeners, including those who reminisced about radio stations in the mid 20th century, went about dividing listeners into those who just wanted to hear their names on air, and those who were connoisseurs of music or at the very least, people interested or listeners interested in music and not importantly in their own names. Certainly this typology of listeners or the discourse around the characteristics of listeners including good listeners was a practice of distinction, which was both class lead, as well as structured along the dynamics of metropolitan and small town. In both instances, such a typology of beer is presenting itself engaging with listening is a marker of cultural capital, or its absence. Typology and practices and the distinction notwithstanding, I'm interested in the ways in which these so called non listener radio listeners thought about themselves, position themselves and articulated themselves through creating through creating and writing magazines that they call Shota Sange magazines, or radio listeners clubs magazines. I will focus thus on some of these magazines and the narratives that they contain for most of this talk, both to showcase them as forgotten and told bits of archival evidence, as well as to think through the magazines and its creators, users, readers and their investment in the film song in the radio. Using these magazines and the tales they tell, I wish to take these non listener listeners seriously to use their writings in their work in the form of these magazines as sources to construct one histories of radio in India to histories of engagement with the film and the film song in India, as well as three to argue for a vernacular techniques of sound. Before I proceed further, a smaller side in the role of the film song in this narrative. I choose to focus on a sound that has been acknowledged as one of the most dominant sounds as one of the most dominant sounds in the acoustic ecology of North India, particularly, but also parts of East and West India and Pakistan, certainly if not further afield, which is the film song. The film song's ubiquity is of course a truism that has often been remarked upon. Known for its popularity, its widespread circulation and permeation of the urban and often even rural soundscape and indeed its repeatability across formats and contexts. Festivities, both religious and secular, as well as everyday life, ranging from public safety announcements to everyday idioms from the contemporary moment to the past, from the common man's wisdom to participating in everyday life as a soundtrack in large parts of India and South Asia. It is this ubiquity and popularity that allow me to strategically deploy the film song in two ways. One, to consider it as a metonym for cinema itself. And two, to stand in for sound. In other words, for me, the song, even as it may be disaggregated into the singing or speaking or laughing or humming voice, the musical track and external noises and or other elements are taken together as sound. Sound, in this instance, like electricity, may be studied as it passes through and congeals and objects like films, radios and magazines. And in each case, its trace differs. It may also arguably be, it may also be foregrounded by focusing on techniques such as humming, reciting, singing, listening and arguably even reading and writing. In other words, to be able to examine sound, one must do so in media stress, since it is not an object in the way in which radio films and magazines are, but rather is already passing through several objects, processes and environments. This produces for us a situation of relations then, particularly those that are across and between media. Sound then emerges intermediately, and thus, by corollary, is both multimodal and multi-sensorial. In this way, my approach is in concert with scholarship-elocate sound as emerging through and with complex inter-material practices. And in the case of these magazines, sound appears not as established sources of sound. For instance, in the form of musical notations or lyrics or remarks upon musical albums, but rather they appear through the figure of the listener and the listener's engagement with the film song and the radio. They appear indirectly through the very act of producing these magazines as writings in relation to sound, music and listening. Thus, the traces through which sound appears and what constitutes commonsense sound are things we are forced to revise as we consider this material. The magazines that I refer to were produced by radio listeners' clubs, which mushroomed across Kasbahs, small towns and cities in Hindi-speaking North India, especially during the first or two or three decades post-Indian independence. These were published from small cities and towns across Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan for the most part. These are all states for those who are unfamiliar with the Indian map in the northern half of India. There were a few published from Maharashtra and at least one from Asansol in West Bengal. These were usually brought out by different groups of people who often call themselves listeners and would form radio listening clubs under different names. Often, though not always, these radio listeners' clubs would name themselves after the place that they belong to. For example, the Araya Radio Shradha Sangh or the Riva Radio Shradha Sangh after the towns Araya and Riva respectively. One of the stated objectives of most of these clubs was to bring out these kinds of publications, a sample of which is on the screen in front of you. The writings in these publications vary tremendously from writings on radio, film music and cinema to short stories, poems, jokes and parodies. To interviews with radio personnel and other listeners to short essays that historicized listeners' clubs and their activities, including publishing these magazines, organizing seminars and gatherings and so on. They also carried addresses of radio stations, advertisements and names and addresses of listeners who do not belong to the club, but who had expressed an interest in being part of a group of... a group to maintain correspondence with or had supported the club in some way. Specifically, there are not many of these magazines left in the form of complete runs. In fact, there is only one which I found, which is called the Listener's Bulletin, which begins its life as Radio News in 1971. And by the middle of 1973 has changed its name to Listener's Bulletin, the one it continues to bear. This magazine was registered with the Registrar of Newspapers of India, however, most of the other magazines and periodicals were not. While this periodical continues, sorry, while this magazine continues to be printed at about three or four times a year, there were a large number, possibly hundreds of such magazines which were published during this period, which were unable to sustain themselves in the present. These magazines were often produced on inexpensive low-quality and thin paper, especially when compared with the print quality of a published book or a film or literary magazine that belonged to well-established Hindi or other vernacular press. Thus, they had, as printed and bound objects, more in common with four-page leaflets publicizing films and film songs called Chapatias, literally four pages or leaves, which were sold near cinema halls, railway stations and sometimes at panvaris, which is the beetle leaf cellars shop, then highbrow or even middlebrow vernacular Hindi literature. However, these magazines were usually subscription-based and circulated amongst groups of people, more men, less women, who were participating in the process of listening to the radio, writing to the radio and to each other. Often these magazines were printed locally, sometimes in streets not far away from where those who had composed the words for their pages lived. In some cases, presumably depending upon the amount of funding available for the magazine, the name of the printing press has been given. In others, there is no indication of where the magazine is printed. Of course, there is no single publisher for any of these magazines. Sometimes there would be no month or year of publication. They were simply titled by the name they had adopted, Gita Anjaliya, Shikana, Pakiza, so on. Often they were published around primarily religious festivals such as Holi or Diwali, or National Holidays like Republic Day. In that sense, even as magazines, there is no sense of periodicity to them, any kind of regular seriality to them that we come to associate with other magazines, such as film magazines or literary magazines. So there would be the sheer absence of a regular period of publication, whether weekly or monthly or annual, etc. More interesting would be to consider the period and the event that the magazine used in terms of religious festivals, a springtime festival, an autumn one, another one in midwinter and so on. What much of this indicates is arguably the manner in which these magazines were embedded in events both local and national. Even before we start looking at the content of the magazines then. We may note the relationship between the format of the period of the magazine. So for instance, it's being structured around socio-cultural or religious events and sociality. The audience for these magazines seems to have been fairly variable. Of course, encompassing those who were literate, but also those who may not have come within the traditionally perceived ambitit literacy, including panvarious farmers and workers. In one of the radio club magazines, there was an advertisement for Hindi magazine, which specifically hailed farmers, workers and listeners clubs together as its readers. Consider then that these magazines were not merely providing us with glimpses into film and radio history, but we're also finding ways of making note of the ephemerality and locality of small everyday sites of listening, such as bringing together those who were perhaps outside of its ambit. For instance, one such site that would find repetition in and across most of these magazines would be the barn shop. And it would include those who, interviews of those who own them, advertisements of barn shops, and also people who just sat at the barn shops and listened. Consider, for example, an interview of Gopal Charasiya of Jhaja Munger in the 1976 issue of a magazine called The Interview, which was published by the Asan Soul Radio Shruta Sangh, which contained the report of a meeting and an interview with Gopal Charasiya. The article in question calls Charasiya a famous radio listener. And Charasiya was someone who owned and ran a barn shop near the Jhaja railway station. Charasiya in his conversation with the author Ram Prasad comments, albeit indirectly and in and through the interview, one of the things that we notice is the way in which the barn shop, per se, becomes part of the life world of radio listening, the life world of sending for Mayashis. So it's when, therefore, when by the time we come to thinking about the practice of distinction, again, we really get a sense of who it is and what, where they're located, as we're able to look through these interviews. So Charasiya and Charasiya has some had some very interesting remarks upon radio listening and the practice. One of the things that he said, for instance, was an indirect comment upon the importance of the announcer and how his voice sounds on air and how they were tied into the listener's desire to write into the program. Because on being asked why his name is no longer heard on air, he said, So this is a reference to he's saying that after Manohar Mahajan's departure, Manohar Mahajan being a famous radio announcer with Radio Ceylon in the late 60s and early 70s, after Mahajan's departure, all the programs sounded out of tune. Such an encounter tells us of the significance of the perceived quality of the announcer's voice. But it also tells us equally that the listener is not someone who is necessarily bound always by the narrative of being set up as someone who will send in and who will listen out for his name on air. In spite of being clubbed as someone whose name appears on air, he places before us an aesthetic choice. He comments upon the announcer's voice's quality and actually in that sense positions himself as not being part of any preconceived template, very much like the magazines that he was being interviewed for. So some of these magazines would then have page numbers and articles that have titles, whereas others would not. In certain cases, it was simply impossible to try and provide any kind of or even try and find any kind of complete bibliographic information inconsistent in page count ranging from no more than eight pages to more than 60. These magazines are also worth well worth placing within the broader Hindi print sphere, especially in certain kinds of continuities with other popular Hindi film magazines and other popular Hindi magazines at the time including Sushma, Madhuri, Sadhita, Dharam, Yogi and others. And the former two magazines, which is Sushma and Madhuri, particularly focused on the filmic including the musical and bordered on an engagement with the literary. Well, the latter primarily focused on the literary occasionally drawing along the filmic. All four magazines Sushma, Madhuri, Sadhita and Dharam Yogi had different publication histories, belong to different publishing houses, different publishing timelines, but all produced a milieu within which these listeners clubs bulletins interacted with them in terms of language, often in terms of genres of writing that were produced. In being part of this milieu, they helped train the reading and listening body, but also that the listening body or in this case, the body of the user who access the listeners clubs magazines would have had access to some of these forms if not in writing but at least orally. For instance, that the practice of these magazines being read out at these very one shops. I wish to focus or turn my attention now away from the Shroda Sung magazines in the world that they are part of, particularly to one kind of narrative that emerged in these magazines, which is I'd like to look at the narrative of becoming listeners. So, how did I become a listener that often peppered these magazines and were written by the readers and radio listeners clubs members themselves. I'd like to use these narrative narratives of becoming listeners to locate the readers of these magazines as they were listeners, readers and writers together. The act of listening was thus both physically tuning into the sounds of the radio, but also recalling radio sounds and radio programing through these magazines by writing into them as well as by reading them. These magazines would then form part of the milieu that listening was formed through. I'm looking then at three interrelated elements here, one the content of the narratives. And that's an examination of the phrase and consequently the concept of becoming listener to to foreground the act of writing oneself as listener and three to think through the objects that these magazines were and how they brought radio and cinema together. So the narrative of these stories is fairly straight forward and deployed a common coming of age as listener trope. The trope took the following form. I, the narrator and author was a casual or inattentive listener I heard programs such as api gigit songs for you or when you sang or some other usually listeners request based program on it, irrespective of a specific radio station, whether it was Radio Ceylon, or any other all India radio station, whether local or national, or any other all India radio station. So that stirred in me the desire to hear the trope continues that stirred in me the desire to hear my name on air. One fine day I started writing in requests and thereafter became a listener. This trope was found most listeners clubs bulletins, one after another, but not all. In fact, the presence and absence of such stories and radio clubs magazines also became a marker of distinction. Thus, the serious radio clubs radio listeners clubs magazines would engage with radio programming look towards collecting and exchanging notes and material about music, especially film music and his shoe all things associated with the firm Irish writers, the listeners request writers. The disdain of these serious listeners and magazines notwithstanding. Let's look at the stroke and slightly greater detail, because it provides us with interesting ways of considering the figure of the listener as someone who writes and listens. For instance, consider one such story written by Sri Rampur's Ramesh Sonamani. Now this story is found in Suman in the October of 1976. This issue was brought out by two listening clubs together. These were the Rava Radio Shrodha Sangh and the Rashmi Radio listeners association, both from a small town in Madhya Pradesh. The story begins by telling us, let me tell you about my romantic tale of listening. It proceeds then to inform the reader about an ordinary winter's day when the narrator woke up, lays around in bed and turned on the radio. While listening to radio programs on the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation or Radio Ceylon, he heard a listeners request based program which featured friends from his town. At that moment, the narrative says he decided to send in a firm Irish himself. After this, he says one after another, he sent in requests to all the radio stations Ceylon, with Bharti and other local radio stations. And then one day, the incessant sending in of requests paid off. His name was announced along with the song. It's a song of love, which is a well-known song. Apart from the descriptions of happiness at hearing his name, the narrator mentions at the end. In this way, I had become a listener. I wish to think about what it means to write about becoming a listener based on narratives of how one became a listener. In Ramesh Sonwane's story and other similar tales, becoming a listener would also be synonymous with active participation on the radio through farmishes or participation in radio listeners club. The writers of these stories would try and mark out the point where they felt that they had finally become a listener. So what are the implications of such narratives? So I try to, in this next part of the paper, gloss the phrase becoming listener in a few ways. One, I try to consider the way in which sonic experiences are articulated. Two, I think about what it means to actually become a listener. And lastly, I'd like to remind us of situating this trope of coming of age as a listener amongst other discussions of listeners and listening that takes place in the magazines, both in these magazines as well as the broader Hindi film and Hindi literary magazines of the time. First, let us consider the articulation of sonic experience. Here it appears to be about the processes which are brought into the fold of listening, namely, particularly on and through the radio, namely the physical actor hearing the radio, writing firmashes, three, the identification of hearing one's name on air, and so on and so forth. There are also, at this point of time, I would like to remind us of the distinctions being made between serious listeners, wavelength wanderers and so on, outside of these narratives, also as processes and moments that are being brought into the fold of sonic experience, that are being brought into the fold of what it means to listen. So what if we were to start gathering all these points together, across all these stories, and all the conflicting points at which one is marked as having passed on the stage of having become a listener. One is faced in a sense with Zeno's paradox. The question then becomes, when does the, in the listener stories about when and how they became listeners, at what precise point did they become listeners? And in this, I'm considering not just the radio listeners narratives in the magazines, but also across the various distinctions of serious and non-serious listeners that are being made. So when did they become listeners? Was it when the name was heard? Was it in the anticipation of the name being heard? Was it when the film song itself was being played? When is it? Is it at all possible to mark across these various senses of who or what a listener is, or when or how the listener is made? Or is there a name pass here? Because like the famous philosophical arrow of Zeno's paradox, the listener must either implode in the first point on its path, or the listener will remain in motion, much like the film song that it wants to hear. The listener was then in passage across the several points that came up. Being listener can never be there. One is forever becoming listener. The expression becoming listener then also simultaneously gathers together and exceeds each of these points, which in themselves are multimedia, multimodal and multi-sensorial, because they're working with different kinds of technologies, print, sound and playbacks devices such as the radio. Becoming offers us then the possibility or to think becoming listener offers us then the possibility of relations amongst milieu or among the milieu. And the possibilities of relations are nowhere foregrounded as they are another critical narrative that the content of these stories can carry. That of techniques which may be identified as including the practices of attentively listening to radio programs, particularly for Mayesh-based ones, writing requests, postcards and letters to various radio stations and radio programs, waiting to hear one's name on air and so on. In order to think of these as techniques of sound through these magazines, it would be fruitful to consider the act of writing stories listeners and how that feeds into listening. To pay attention to writing is practice is to focus on the relations between reading, writing, listening and indeed to pay attention to the recursivity between these acts of reading, writing and listening. And through these magazines, I'd even like to suggest that there is a certain also recursivity between objects and practices. The object not only bears the trace of the practice of listening, but becomes a participant in the practice of listening itself. Before I proceed to sort of develop this argument a little further. Let us recall and let us not forget that these were amateur acts of writing and publishing which followed certain very specific rhetorical strategies and tropes. And as we have seen above the very claim to the listener was fraught. But prior to this moment of being us and them serious non serious listener who sense for my non listener who doesn't was a casual listener lies the I and the we, the psychic individuated figure and the collective underlying both these categories that is the production of the listener and the conditions that produce it. Thus, before asking who or what a listener is another question does appear. What does it mean to listen, or in other words, what is listening. I'd like to point out a small difference between the title of my talk and the title that was registered. Becoming listener and becoming a listener. Initially, I thought that I would write in to the curator of the series Dr. Basu and say, I think we should work with becoming listener. On second thought, however, I let the earth stand. The inclusion of the article forced me to articulate what seemed to be a schism in my work that had struggled with for a while. There seemed to be a cleavage between becoming a listener which indicated the local locatable historical and specific nature of the listening techniques objects and stories in mid 20th century North India, and more abstract ideas of listening, becoming listener that emerged from continental philosophical paradigms. Till I realized that to become a listener historically in a particular epoch was to participate in a process of becoming always being in movement, becoming listener and becoming a listener were effectively the same thing. And central to this act of becoming was the techniques of sound. Before I proceed a small explanation of techniques, I use the term matches, as it has been well established to refer to the coming together of technologies, the techniques and practices of body and use that are engendered, as well as processes of externalizations of memory, including the use of devices such as monuments and objects, and the individuation that have central to a very condition of living. To open up listening in India in the mid 20th century then from the vantage point of the early 21st. I find myself conducting an archaeology of listening. Now Susan Douglas understands an archaeology of listening is historicizing various modes of inattentive listening to the radio in attentive or attentive modes of listening to the radio identifying them various layers informational dimensional and associational. She brings insights from psychology in order to frame the repeated acts of listening to the radio as well as listening to music on air in this act of archaeology. Drawing upon Douglas's term in her process of historicizing I inflict its meaning with paying attention to listening emerging not only from an excavation of cultural practices that surround radio and film in mid 20th century India, but also crucially to see these as technical practices. In other words, while Douglas underscores radius importance to listening as a socio cultural and political practice. I'm invested in I am invested in the way in which listening emerges is distributed across various media objects infrastructures and practices. I treat archaeology of listening then in a capacious and media archaeological sense, bringing together film radio print and other sound media. It is to this end that I treat the radio film and the magazines I draw upon as objects as interfaces that process variously the environmental, the technological, the sonic and the political. In doing so they constitute intermediate relations that allow us to foreground listening. I also structured this act of listening by thinking about the transmission of and the repeated availability of the film song between and across these media in the mid 20th century. Listening for me then emerges not only as distributed but centered squarely on techniques learned across these various forms. Listening, I argue, is then not only about listening with the ear physically, but fundamentally about activating oral and muscular consciousness that had listened when reading the song when writing into radio stations requesting for the song or indeed will listen. Listening, in other words, is as much about practices of inscription language and memory, as it is about listening to disembodied voices amplified through loudspeakers and played via radios and gramophones or conversely stabilized through telephones. Listening body is formed, changed and repeated through the several media and the ally practices, or a training through process of recordings, whether it's through a gramophone or print material. The listener is produced across varied material practices which include in this case reading and writing, but also intrusionally something that I don't focus upon in in this particular talk at all. Practices of humming singing hearing the song physically, publicly and collectively. Listening, then, and an engagement with sound and sound media is found in traces and magazines and film which provide evidence to think about the indicated practices of reading writing and viewing as well. Listening, then, I'd like to suggest is thus attunement and attunement born in across an off social musical linguistic technological and cinematic practice, all of them of course technical practices. Listening is attunement is figured through an assemblage of devices memory and the formations of oral consciousness. The use of attunement is as much about the affordances of technologies in an in an epoch, as well as a series of variable bodily techniques, which in this case includes both the active physically having heard sound or reproduced through recall and inscription. It is equally though in India, especially in the mid 20th century about the social and the vernacular finding trace and sound, whether in the form of reference to practices sending from my shoes or practices of distinction and so on. A neat distinction between sociality sound and techniques is then difficult to establish. I would like to suggest in the Indian context. Without making a claim to provincializing Europe or the global south. I argue that the vernacular or the local in terms of sociality and sound, including the sounds of language is central to the techniques of sound. Consequently, the listener is figured in and through these techniques as multimodal multi sensorial and emerges as vernacular. Both in his location, his or their location in the small town, but also in the idiom of the idiom. Both in terms of language, but also the idiom in terms of sound. In this case, Hindi or Google and examination of the techniques of listening finds itself. Thus, an examination of these techniques. I imagine finds itself also in conversations with scholars that locate Technicity as a key to the study of sound, especially in the context of the global south. Listening closely then is to examine the techniques of sound, especially as they find themselves stake today in the digital with the appearance of machine listening which mimics the recursivity of human memory practices and positions recognition and recall and recommendation in new ways. The horizon of the digital is one where new colonial capitalist forms and modes of listening threatened to take over in the form of audio surveillance. And musing stripping apps are of course transforming soundscapes bodily habitations and memory itself to excavate and reflect upon the techniques of sound in the long theory thus as I have tried to do becomes more urgent in the digital presence in the digital present. In a sense, then the digital constitutes the degree zero, which allows us to reflect upon these past practices technologies and imaginaries. Thank you. Thank you so much we put the that was wonderful. I would now like to invite Dr for the dress under to have a discussion with the booty after which we'll open it up for fashion announces. Thank you, thank you Priyanka and thank you so much for booty as always. I, I learned so much from reading and listening to your work so thank you for this. I think one of the things I really appreciate about your intervention on this topic is that you reframe listening as an as more than just listening as an intermedial practice for process right and so that what's happening is when you shift the question from who or what is a listener to what is listening there's a there's another question you're asking that's implicit which is, how do we listen right how does so that's the sort of that's the question in between that gets you from who's a listener what is a listener to what is what is listening. And of course what it means to listen, as you were suggesting I think towards the end of your talk is perhaps slightly different at different historical moments given are engaged, given these different evolving techniques. vernacular techniques of sound. In addition, I think what you're doing is you're also shifting. How we think about sound itself, right sound as or what is a sonic text. So, so as we as scholars of music and sound listen, we now have to think about what what it is that we are constituting as the object. So that it's not just, you know, we put on our headphones and listen to sound for hours on end and then write something up about it but we're also thinking about literary texts or texts that are non literary right so texts of the bizarre text that are that would otherwise be dismissed as low culture so there's a methodological intervention here there's a shift in the in how we're constituting the object as well as layers of theoretical. So, thank you. I guess my questions today revolve around to two matters, time and place. And I'm really struck by the formulation of becoming listener. Right. There's a continuity it's a continuous process it's sort of future oriented in the in the way that it's raised at least in English right, but in the story that you that you read out. What was becoming listener is something that has already happened. But it's a retrospective narration, right, and it's also in the Hindi it's is that I'm a short a bunch of car. I had already become listener. Right, and maybe there are other stories that cast it as, I don't know is that I'm a short a bunch of guy or some other temporal formulation right, but it seems to me there's something going on there with time that it would be worth talking about a bit more. I have a question about place to but shall I stop there and let you pop in with a comment. I don't know. What do I don't know she has a particular recommendation, but it's okay. But I'm noting them down with us if you would like to just sort of. Okay, so I'll continue the next question here. The other question I think has to do with place, right and I think what you so beautifully show as I'm going to refer back to the beginning towards the beginning of the talk. You talk about how sound is already passing through several objects processes and environments sound as that as that produces a situation of relations. Those that are across and between media, and that I think as your paper demonstrated makes a whole lot of sense to me and there's this instruct by the sense of movement. That is built into this notion of sound, we can only understand sound in thinking of it across as it moves across these different texts and moments, but also as something that is constituted through that move. Okay, and it seems to me that there's a tension there between that and this linking of short as some short as songs to place, but because so many of them are named after the place where they people listen from right. And so, I'm trying to figure out how to keep that sense of motion and movement conceptual motion and movement in play, even as I think about the ways in which this social in geographic sonic imaginary is being constructed, precisely through invocations of place, right so as you say in your other work listeners listened in to hear their names on air, right but also to hear the name of their place on air. So there's a mooring in place that is also sort of constantly in being questioned if you will in in and through movement. So those are the two broad questions I thought of as you were speaking. Thanks, this is just fantastic. Unfortunately, I have to be honest and confess that I hadn't thought of either of the two questions that you've posed to me. So I'm not really sure I have answers but I am. I am really interested in what you're saying about time. And the way in which there is a certain kind of as you as you point out very correctly that this in some sense is a retrospective narrative for some of them as well. I had already become a listener in this way. I think why why I'm holding on to the to the to the future sense of, especially the English sense of becoming listener as opposed to closing it off with the Hindi off. So what I had become is to actually to try and look across the narratives, sort of both the diversity of narratives, but also to think about. More broadly as to what is this relationship between past and present in terms of listening itself and I think that's really why your question kind of hits into because even if there is this retrospective construction of myself as listener. How do I really hold on to say okay, I have marked out. This is the moment I became listener in that story. But somebody else has said that you are not listener at all. And then there's someone else. And there is also another layer where I am listener because I have sent in the request, but somebody else was not sent in the request or doesn't send in requests is not listening. So I think it's that kind of I really I want to be able to gather the stories but I do like the question of time that you've posed because I still think there is something of tremendous value there in terms of more broadly how to think about what it what it means to really kind of think through how this is a process in time because and and I'm still hoping to unpack it something I haven't quite done is its relationship with memory right and just the very sort of how songs are being asked for how they being that the way in which there's a repeated sense of listening taking place across contexts and so on again. So I think time is going to be very significant except I really haven't done that yet at all. Sorry, I don't know if I know this is great. So I guess one thing that also occurs to me as you speak is that it. Even in these. So one, it seems that it's an implicit answer to people like yes Malik who are saying oh there are these innovative listeners were non listeners, even if these stories don't the writers don't say they think we are not those arbiters of high culture don't think we are listeners but in fact we are they're not framing it in that way but what you're suggesting is that there's an implicit argument against you know the implicit of claiming of the status of listeners when they are being dismissed as wavelength wanderers. So that's that's interesting to me, but they're in a different way there's also a diminishing of certain listening practices in this narrative itself, right because it everything has to start with listening I heard the song in the radio. I heard someone else request a song right on the radio their name was heard on the radio and then I had this desire to hear my voice on radio, and then I started writing letters so there's still a listening is. If not a starting point it is already happening before one becomes listener before one here before one writes the letter weights and then at some point declares that one has become listener, so there's an even in these narratives it seems to me there is a certain claiming of a diminishing of certain kinds of listening so listening by itself listening that is not writing that is not reading is somehow not listening, even in these narratives, so they actually there's a. They dovetail to some extent with. You know Malik and the radio announcers dismissal of casual. Maybe. No, I think you're absolutely right there I, I, I don't. I don't think I, I don't think I would disagree with that at all I think there is that kind of that tough dealing does happen. There is. I think what was interesting for me was, and I think this is where in some senses. And this also takes me to the second question right which is the question of sound and movement in some ways that what what is interesting to me is this then this tension that you've marked up because sound movement allows for becoming it produces but yet there's this very constant and very insistent yanking back not just into place but I would say into this is listening. As you're saying right this this is what constitutes listening not that that is not and in that and there are layers you're absolutely right so the layers of practices of distinction that are taking place here. The other, the other thing that I think is that that that's quite interesting and again, sort of works with this in the same kind of tense manner in the situation is. The way in which in some senses, I think what it means to kind of become listener to be able to send out that for my ish to be able to repeatedly send those for my ish is what that means in terms of listener is something that is both being articulated in terms of sound and yet not being articulated in terms of sound if you. So there's a, there's that kind and I think that's the tension that I found myself actually even rubbing up against while I was writing. You know, some of this material together. Again, I'm not sure that wholly answers what you put to me but I absolutely don't disagree with what you're saying in terms of the practice of these narratives kind of dovetailing with the radiant answers yeah definitely. I'm going to ask one more question since I have the floor. You framing this in terms of vernacular, which I thought was really interesting, because what I want is to use your work beyond the vernacular right so I want to claim it to think about listening to cinema in general, right, rather than just a set of, not just rather than a set of listening practices or processes that are limited to or about or coming from a place of the, you know, small town radio listeners. And so I'm really struck by the, by the use of vernacular, which places it in a particular way when I love it love it so much I want to use it for everything. I'm wondering if you want to talk a little more about that, the purchase of vernacular, which you were again beginning to do at the end. But I'd love to hear more. Yeah, that I actually. That is something that I am trying to develop a little again it's something that yes I sort of which is why I think this work I would think of as being toward a certain kind of vernacular techniques. I think by vernacular here though I'm using it in sort of specific ways, which is, I think I would want to use it in terms of the local in terms and not necessarily not necessarily vernacular as in parochial, although arguably it could be that as in parochial. But why I want to think about the vernacular in particular is for two reasons one is. I think I'm trying to think through not just techniques of sound as they appear through the radio, or through print, or through cinema which, and at the intersection of those. In terms of what they are as technologies media technologies. But I am also wanting to see them in concert with languages technology. Right so vernacular also in that sense language is a certain kind of tool is certain kind of medium is certain kind of technology right. And musical traditions oral traditions. So there's so, which is why for me sociality. And the vernacular in terms of the linguistic broadly speaking out and I'm forgive me because I'm using the words as placeholders right now because this is an argument I'm still kind of working through. For me they they they're kind of coming together to produce a local technical local hyphen technical relationships. This is the sense in which I'm thinking the vernacular and in fact, if at this point if I may steal one of your arguments about about the accent. There is a listening through you know when you for instance when you talk about Bombay or you talk about the presence of Marathi or other such languages in and through Bombay cinema and so on. I think for me that would be just such an interesting way to think about the vernacular techniques of sound that perhaps just at the level of I mean specifically with what I remember of your argument and forgive me if I'm indicating it. But, but I think at the level of your argument it, you know, I'd want to think of it as probably cinema sound accent language that would be the kind of cluster or constellation however you wish to put it. Whereas I'm thinking of it in terms of yeah linguistic affective community so linguistic affective communities of in this case in the order to but could equally be for so many other things. So yeah I think maybe local hyphen technical is a provisional kind of placeholder. And so yes, I do think that there's a way in which what I'm saying wouldn't be particular only to say in the order that there'd be a certain kind of abstraction in terms of you know, one could think about how it works out in Tamil or in Bangladesh or even another language I mean why not French. You know, let's let's actually have those kinds of conversations we've kind of assumed we know how your American Technicity is also unfolding, you know, along certain lines. Yeah, that's sorry that's about what I have for now. Yeah, no that sounds really interesting and I think I was just so so many key sound studies concept just as in film cinema studies are coming out of a your American context right that when I resonate when there are concepts that come out of a South Asian context for instance that resonate. But I want them to travel. So that was partly it was a sort of political. That was the motivation right for asking you to talk about the one I know. Thank you. Thanks. I have to, I still have to work this out as I said some I'm thinking of, I am hoping local technical kind can travel. How do we think this because I suppose my once one more thing one thing that I'm hesitating about and, and this again may actually go back to that one very fundamental central tension that you identified between sound movement on the one hand and place on the other is how does one think that kind of not and it's a very naughty coming together. You know. So I think there's a way in which. Yeah, one. I also have to think much more about much more about this. Thank you Vibhuti and Pavitra. There are a few questions already coming in so I think we should start taking them. The first question is lovely talk, can you talk about the parasocial relationship between the RJ and the audience. And what kind of celebrities come across and what kind of celebrity status of the RJ the magazine discuss magazines discuss. Thanks, that's a great question. Yeah, actually there's a, there's a great sort of, I like the way you face it as a parasocial relationship because I tend to think of it as the RJ is or at that point in time the radio announcers own kind of oral stardom. So, you know, having their putting out photographs of the radio announcers in these magazines, interviewing them for them, writing letters to the radio announcers sending them gifts, receiving gifts from them inviting them to weddings. And having them come down for special gatherings into their towns being organized by these radio listening clubs, these were all part of the kind of relationship between the radio announcers and you know the audience listening in at that moment in time. In fact, several radio announcers of particularly a radio salon talk about with men's fondness members of these radio listeners clubs with whom they'd become friends with over the years whom they'd kept up correspondence with, and so on. Yes, I hope that the next question is from Dawn Jordan. What do you yourself love love about listening in your own life practice case. What do I love about listening in my own life practice in my own life practice. Is that the, did I get the question correct. Yeah. I will have to think about that when I'm not entirely certain except that I think I grew up in a world where the radio was a familiar site. More importantly, it was something that I think filled my days for a huge part of it. Because I've always sort of seen myself or thought of myself as a listener. I suppose that's what interests me thinking about listening. The next question is a slightly long one. I'm going to read it out from Anandita Bajpayee. Thank you for this amazing talk as someone who's researching on international broadcasters, which were very popular in India around the same time that Vibhuti covers. I was wondering what the idiosyncrasies of this particular case may be from my own ethnographic work with listeners clubs of Durcheville and Radio Berlin International. I realized that the same listening publics could be part of for my and want music as well as part of other listening spheres, whereby they listened to avoid music, particularly appreciating that these international broadcasters were not the typical Prishi program, but they were also not about music only. Let us not forget listening audiences in UP and Bihar have a fascination for news. So going by that would becoming a listener also point to simultaneous other registers. Yes, actually, thank you so much for this point, Anandita. I completely do take it. I do use the film song, but as I said, I'm using the film song also fairly strategically. But I also use the film song because it really does. And this is what I would like to go back to. It's one of the most dominant sounds of certainly of the mid 20th century and continues to be so. So I absolutely do not dispute that the news could equally become another register or that there were, you know, radio listeners clubs for Durcheville and Radio Berlin International or even for for that matter. One would say the BBC, because there's actually a lot of reportage and a lot of coverage of the BBC at this particular point of time. So certainly it would. However, what I think, and this is this is probably where I would make a specific claim for cinema here is that I think we would underestimate perhaps at our own peril. This is the sheer popularity and the sheer spread of even, you know, something like Binaka Geetmala. Binaka Geetmala was as popular for Amin Sayani as it was for the film songs. But certainly the fact that I mean to go back to something like the ban on film songs in AIR producing a listenership that just doesn't want to hear AIR thereafter after the film songs are banned. I think just forces us to think off the film song in a certain kind of specificity. However, I certainly hope that the coming listener is not dependent only upon the film song as a conceptual category or concept. Yeah. Thank you. The next question is from Sitara Pracha. The question is, I'm a paper and our practice of listening is often a challenge to newcomers to the practice. My feeling is that listening is the hope of our troubled world. How significant then that people are often frightened by the power of becoming as much a listener as a teller. Can you comment on the relationship between fear and listening? I will have to very honestly apologize for not being able to answer this question. Unfortunately, I have neither come across this kind of relationship in the kind of material I work with. And I fear that I know too little to be able to say anything here. So I do apologize. Thank you for the question. I'm sorry, I'm not in a position to answer it. The next question is from Natasha Lodges. Thank you for your wonderful talk and Professor Sundar is thoughtful questions. I come from the issue of listening as a historian of Western classical music, as well as someone who broadcasts. I wonder whether all those magazine entries were genuine, firstly, are written by magazine editors to encourage more listeners or to popularize particular songs. What financial models did the radio stations operate on and did they need listeners or advertising for revenue. And I wonder whether the need to hear one's name on the radio reflects a need for visibility within a community to perform culture for one's friends, for example, to hear one's name when listening together to give status. Thank you. Thank you so much Natasha. If I may sort of quickly disaggregate some of the points that you've made and respond to them. Whether all the magazine entries were genuine or not. To be honest, it's slightly difficult to say these magazines are not easily available. They're not, they're not part of any official archives. They're part of old radio listeners, private papers. Most of them have thrown them away. Because they're little more than rubbish. In fact, the gentleman who very kindly lent me his set of papers with a whole cross section of these magazines would keep saying to me. Why do you need these, you know, these are not relevant. They have a few important articles, but the rest of it is irrelevant. They're just irrelevant. These are not important. So I'm not as, but nevertheless, he was one of the people who would be writing into these I mean one of the reasons he had this collection of magazines was he was someone who'd be writing into them writing into the radio shows. That's part of this world subscribing to these several magazines and so on so forth. So while it's not possible, certainly to say that all the articles were genuine. I do not see this set of magazines at least having a relationship with popularizing songs on air, not the magazines. But the requests for songs, however, were another matter. There's a lot of, if you look at the newspapers of the time and there's a lot of debate on to what extent the requests for these songs was genuine. So the fact that there would be these hundreds of thousands of requests coming in from towns that the met that Metropolitan India had never heard of. These are all these were places that were considered figments of imagination and the fact that there would be these thousands and thousands and thousands of letters and requests for songs coming in from there. There there was a tremendous anxiety about whether or not these were genuine requests. These requests used to sometimes or and the number of requests would sometimes have perhaps not financial implications necessarily, but certainly implications about popularity and therefore perhaps circulation of films and film songs run time on air on the radio. In terms of the financial models that the radio stations operated upon, well, state radio stations didn't were owned and broadcast and was supported by the state. Vivek Bharti launched in the late 50s, early 60s is the first commercial radio station to the first state radio station that was that allowed commercial broadcasting or advertising on it. Radio Salon, Radio Goa, Radio Jalandhar all took on commercial broadcasting as well. I mean they were commercial broadcasting and they did use advertising for revenue. So for instance, again, to go back to Amin Sayani and Binaka Geetmala the very famous program from this radio program from this period that that's often remembered that was sponsored by Sibhaka for a very long time it was Sibhaka Geetmala because that was the name of the toothpaste brand that used to sponsor the show. On the visibility within a community and the name hearing the name on air I think the hearing the name on air is a more complicated story than that. I, it's, it has to do with community popularity but also the popularity of the name of a town. And as, so the Fermayesh is, and I won't get into the Fermayesh at length right now but that's that's a whole other paper. Sorry. I hope that helps address the question. Thanks Vibhuti. Next question is from Charu Singh. Vibhuti, thank you for a captivating talk that rendered me utterly your listener. Two thoughts of thinking further. Number one is the moment of inscription of becoming a listener. Actually about becoming a writer for many people who would never consider such writerly expression. What is the place of register as variety of language for a particular purpose, or in a particular communicative situation in unpacking mid 20th century listening practices and reports of listening. Here I'm thinking of the relatively high register of the usage Shrota, which listening, which listening ecologies are film song listeners being disembed and re embedded within. Once again, fabulous talk. Thank you Charu both fantastic points. Is the moment of inscription the moment of the listener becoming writer as well and really about writing as much. Perhaps yes, but as I hope I, I am, I am thinking aloud here because this is a portion of the argument that I'm still developing. I'm also thinking definitely of inscription practices of say stamping one's name on postcards in the process of sending for matches and that stamping of the name on the postcard could happen even if you were illiterate. Do we want to consider that stamping as a certain kind of writing. That's a question mark for me. But all I all I would, all I would do is that so would it become a process of writing as well for people who are never considering writerly expression. Yes. But that's why I would think of writing to within or placing writing within a certain kind of fold of listening I don't want to push it or divorce the two from that so two points for me to, you know, my quick responses but I do need to think about this more and unpack this further. The second is the question of register that you point out and I think that's again extremely interesting. Where, where is Shrota coming from how is the usage being looked at that's something I need to look into at something I have not done yet. I have one portion of this work that I really hope to unpack is actually the question of is the question of language it's something that I haven't yet kind of really kind of thought through. But I also think that I'm also also wondering about the use of certain kinds of standard words in radio talk. So for instance, if instead of Sunnevala, which is literally here or the person who's listening, the word comes up as Shrota once and becomes acceptable usage and then simply gets repeated, repeated across radio announcers repeated radio stations and repeated across the listeners themselves and adopted therefore in that language. However, this is a speculative answer to your to your point. And in terms of, you know, which listening ecologies of film song listeners being disembared with from and being re embedded within. I think that's actually in some senses that's the kind of question that I'd like to be moving to moving towards as I kind of trying unpack further what what this techniques of sound could look like. So thanks. Thanks very much for both those points. Thank you so much. And I think it's time to wrap up and also we don't have any further questions. Thank you so much to you, and to Pavitra. And also, thank you for staying up so late and I know you have an early morning class tomorrow. And so apologies and thank you for joining us today. Thank you for putting this together. It really was a pleasure. And to Pavitra for such a lively discussion. I wish we had more time to continue with this. But thanks once again, thank you to our audience who joined us tonight. Our next talk is next week, first of March, same time. And we have we had done from Oxford University, who's going to speak on women's work in war and famine. From her research on the Second World War. So do join us. And thank you once again for participating tonight and stay well, stay safe and see you next week. Thanks.