Indian Sound Systems - a Currency of Political Othering or a Tool of Ambient Violence?

The past decade has witnessed an exponential growth in anti-Muslim and anti-minority violence in India. Hindutva – a Hindu nationalist political ideology encompassing the cultural justification of Hindu nationalism and the belief in establishing Hindu hegemony within India – has gouged at the pre-existing communal and social rifts in Indian society, making the divide even deeper. Here, sound systems have served as an imperative technological tool in advocating for or against the dominant political discourse of otherization across the country. While on one hand the sound system technologies have been utilized for relaying antagonizing content and disseminating propaganda by political agencies, on the other hand sound systems have equally been utilized to spread knowledge against the state propaganda and ideology. Sound systems in India hence end up occupying an interesting space between different ideological systems and need to be understood as part of a larger socio-political fabric – one which is equally informed by technology and mediality. Yet the fact that these sound systems dwell on the threshold of an ambient-physical violence cannot be ignored. Consequently, my research will shed light on how the Indian sound systems as technological and political tools and as socio-cultural assemblages are thought machines/ apparatus capable of catalyzing imagination and mobilizing movements through sound and sonic media. I further shed light on how these sound systems utilize sound as a tool of ambient violence - one which dwells at the threshold of physical and ambient urban violence, antagonizing the minorities and the masses to the brink of actual physical violence. In doing so, I highlight how these sound systems have ritualized ambient urban violence as a show of soft power in the political landscape of India.