Listening to Texts in Islamicate South Asia

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Recent scholars of Islamicate societies have keyed into Muslim approaches to hearing in South Asia. In particular, oral literatures are instrumental for circulating Islamic and affectual knowledges, but it is often the acoustic performance and sonic experience of these texts that carries life-transforming power. Complementing representational practices based on sight, hearing grounds social practice in the bodily realm of comportment, recitation, and proxemics, forming unique epistemologies in which local social practices and larger political concerns converge at the production and reception of sound. In this panel, we aim to engage with the burgeoning scholarship on the Islamicate ear by focusing on listening postures and practices in various social collectives in Muslim South Asia. Specifically, the papers in this panel aim to demonstrate how historical and ethnographic contexts of aural perception demand unique physical subjectivities of listeners (the so-called “adab” or manners of listening) as well as provide sonic forms which relate to literary and performance history as much as to sectarian divides and disillusionment with contemporary political systems. Nathan Tabor’s paper examines the way early modern recited poetry aurally constructed collectives to better frame period conceptions of the public sphere in Mughal India. Concentrating on contemporary poetry gatherings, Carla Petievich traces the shift of poetry’s lyric subject by comparing two Pakistani writers’ recited compositions in their socio-political contexts. Max Stille examines the manners of listening among sermon attendees in contemporary Bangladesh to understand attitudes toward religious interpretation and aurality.

Area of Study

• South Asia

Session Organizer

• Nathan LM Tabor, Western Michigan University

Individual Presentations

• Listening for Publicness in Recited Poetry in 18th-Century Mughal India - Nathan LM Tabor, Western Michigan University

• From Court to Public Sphere: How Urdu Poetry’s Language of Romance Shapes the Language of Protest - Carla Petievich, University of Texas at Austin

• Listening in Bengali Sermons - Max Stille, Heidelberg University