The Sonic Body Politics: Dalit Musicking and Aesthetics

Music is central to the cultural force; thus, it plays a distinctive role in organizing social, economic, and political spaces. For Dalits in India, the 'practice of caste' embodied in the Dalit body as a source of ritual dirt disavows their musical art from attaining cultural recognition and respect. Hence, their music is ascribed as vulgar, noisy, and chaotic (Gondhal). Against this backdrop, this paper investigates Dalit musical art in the form of 'Bhimgeet' (songs on Ambedkar, an anti-caste leader) and its relationship with sonic spatiality in the urban slums of Mumbai. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I show how sound in the form of noise emanates from the spatial and social enacts on the body, thus shaping corporeality and aesthetics in producing sounds and, hence, music. Focusing on the body concerning sound, I argue that Dalit musicians place the 'gut' at the center of their musical expressions that acquire a discursive meaning in the sonic resistance to subvert the Hindu caste religiosity and aesthetics. In this effort, the sonic body is theorized from the operative framework of marginality to define its aesthetic value.