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Abstract
Keramat Ali, a colonial soldier from Mymensingh in Bengal, was among the hundreds of people whose voices were recorded by the Prussian linguist Wilhelm Doegen in the Halfmoon POW Camp in Wunsdorf, Germany, during 1917–18. Some years later, Sawabali, an oilman from Sylhet, was recorded in 1934 by the Dutch ethnomusicologist Arnold Bake on board a ship sailing to Europe. Closely listening to these archival recordings in conjunction with one another, this essay considers the dual possibility of writing about sound and silence as historical evidence of empire while also writing microhistories of the worlds held within the recordings as worlds unto themselves, independent of the global and the imperial.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Priyanka Basu, Vebhuti Duggal and Christin Hoene for including me in the ‘Empire and the Senses’ workshop held at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK, from 10–11 June 2019, and for later inviting me to write this paper. I thank all fellow participants for their stimulation and insights. Yasmin Hossain and Axel Klein gave me a home in Faversham during the workshop. Ambarish Dutta travelled with me in Sylhet; Max Stille sent his book; and Debjani Das translated from the German. I am deeply indebted to all. I also thank Ali Ahsan, Haresuzzaman Hares, Britta Lange, Santanu Das, Sumankumar Dash, Rajarshi Ghose, Faruk Wasif, Robert Millis, Ben Rogaly, Alakananda Guha, Budhaditya Bhattacharya, Rajib Chakraborty and Labani Jangi for their knowledge and guidance. Finally, I am grateful to Kama Maclean and the two anonymous South Asia readers of my paper for their valuable feedback.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Early: New Poems (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2004), p. 32.
2. To find out more about the archive, visit The Travelling Archive: Field Recordings and Field Notes from Bengal [www.thetravellingarchive.org, accessed 11 Mar. 2021].
3. A good place to access Steven Feld’s seminal writings on acoustemology and anthropology and sound, as well as his recordings, is his website: Steven Feld [http://www.stevenfeld.net/, accessed 10 Mar. 2021]. Feld discusses his life’s work in some detail in his 2004 interview with Donald Brenneis: see Steven Feld and Donald Brenneis, ‘Doing Anthropology in Sound’, in American Ethnologist, Vol. 31, no. 4 (Nov. 2004), pp. 461–74. For Peter Cusack and Cathy Lane, see their personal websites: Peter Cusack [https://www.crisap.org/people/peter-cusack/, accessed 10 Mar. 2021] and Cathy Lane [https://cathylane.co.uk/, accessed 10 Mar. 2021].
4. Wilhelm Doegen’s recordings can be found at The Doegen Records Web Project [https://www.doegen.ie/, accessed 11 Mar. 2021].
5. For an overview of Bake’s life, see J. Brough et al., ‘Obituary: Arnold Adriaan Bake’, in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 27, no. 1 (1964), pp. 246–64 [259] [http://www.jstor.org/stable/612295, accessed 11 Mar. 2021]; also see Bob van der Linden, Arnold Bake: A Life with South Asian Music (Oxford: Routledge, 2019).
6. You can read about the exhibition, curated by Nida Ghouse and Nuria Querol, and see our video installation at The Travelling Archive’s website: ‘The Presence of Sound’, The Travelling Archive [https://www.thetravellingarchive.org/exhibition/the-presence-of-sound-2013/, accessed 11 Mar. 2021].
7. Britta Lange and Philip Scheffner, ‘The Halfmoon Files: Text Montage Based on a Lecture’, Marcie K. Jost (trans.), Transversal Texts (May 2007) [https://transversal.at/transversal/0708/lange-scheffner/en, accessed 9 Mar. 2021]. See also The Halfmoon Files [https://halfmoonfiles.de/en, accessed 11 Mar. 2021].
8. ‘The Travelling Archive in East London’, The Travelling Archive (2015) [http://www.thetravellingarchive.org/exhibition/travelling-archive-in-east-london-2015/, accessed 11 Mar. 2021].
9. The Lautarchiv’s website states that ‘[t]he collection…includes recordings of British prisoners of war and colonial troops held in captivity on German soil between 1915 and 1918 and later recordings made by Doegen in Berlin and held on field trips to Ireland and elsewhere’: ‘Berliner Lautarchiv British & Commonwealth Recordings’, British Library [https://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/Berliner-Lautarchiv-British-and-Commonwealth-recordings, accessed 11 Mar. 2021].
10. British Library Sound and Moving Image catalogue, Shelf marks C1315/1/745, C1315/1/747-1750. [http://cadensa.bl.uk/cgi-bin/webcat, accessed 3 Sept. 2021]
11. Puthi is written both with the nasal chandrabindu, as punthi, and without.
12. David M. Kane, Puthi-Pora: ‘Melodic Reading’ and Its Use in the Islamisation of Bengal (London: Sylheti Translation and Research, 2017).
13. Writer and scientist Qazi Motahar Husain, born in 1897 in Kushtia (he would be the same age as Keramat Ali), wrote in his memoirs about puthi-reading in his village as a youngster: ‘In the evenings, there would be punthi-path in the courtyard, where many villagers gathered to listen. There was a kind of punthi entitled Shahid-e-Karbala, Mezbahul Islam, Shahnama and so on. Another kind was the Jangnama, Amir Humza, Hatem Tai and so on. Yet another type was the Jaigun Bibi, Sonabhan, Surjoujal Bibi and so on. Mir Musharraf Hossain’s Bishad Sindhu was as popular as the punthi. My father too had a sweet voice, and he knew parts of many punthis by heart. He could recite from memory historical and mythological tales, from Hazrat Adom to Hazrat Muhammad, without a book in hand’: Qazi Motahar Husain, Smritikatha (Dhaka: Nabajug Prakashani, 2nd ed., 2007), p. 15, my translation, original in Bangla.
14. For a detailed discussion of the puthi, see Anisuzzaman, ‘Misro Bhasharitir Kabyo’, in Muslim Manas O Bangla Sahitya, 1757–1918 (Dhaka: Charulipi, 2012), pp. 111–56.
15. On this question of reading and remembering, see The Travelling Archive’s multimedia essay on recording the Manasa Mangal: ‘Barisal and Sylhet, Bangladesh. 08 to 18 August 2021. Manasamangal by Various Artists’, The Travelling Archive (2014) [https://www.thetravellingarchive.org/record-session/barisal-and-sylhet-bangladesh-08-to-18-august-2012-manasamangal-by-various-artists/, accessed 11 Mar. 2021].
16. Writing about George A. Grierson’s 1894–1928 Linguistic Survey of India project, historian Shahid Amin mentions the use of the biblical ‘Parable of the Prodigal Son’ as a ‘template passage…with slight verbal alterations to avoid Indian prejudices’. Amin adds: ‘The reasons, Grierson coyly remarked in a footnote, were that “it contains the three personal pronouns, most of the cases found in the declension of nouns, and the present, past, and future tenses of the verb”. Specimens of this crucial first passage used for comparative analysis were then not the writing down of how the “locals” spontaneously told this biblical tale in their own tongues’. Grierson held, and Amin quotes him, that ‘what was…aimed at [in this survey] was the acquisition of specimens in the home language of each translator’. ‘Those literate in English rendered it in their “native tongue” from the English Bible. Others accessed it by locating a version which they could read in another Indian language in a volume containing all the known versions of the parable in Indian languages specially printed for this purpose’: Shahid Amin, ‘Introduction: Linguistic Survey of India’, Digital South Asia Library, website under repair, copy sent on request on 10 April 2019.
17. Santanu Das, ‘Indian Sepoy Experience in Europe, 1914–1918’, in Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 25, no. 3 (Sept. 2014), pp. 391–417.
18. Ibid., p. 417.
19. David Arnold, ‘Death and the Modern Empire: The 1918–19 Influenza Epidemic in India’, in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 29 (2019), pp. 181–200.
20. ‘Influenza also connected with the unfolding political crisis as nationalist politicians sought to capitalise on Britain’s weakness and India’s hardship to win vital concessions…in a matter of months [Mohandas K. Gandhi] switched from recruiting soldiers for the Raj to riding the wave of anti-colonial discontent. Recovering from a protracted illness of his own, he called for non-violent resistance against the repressive Rowlatt Act and so sparked a fresh round of protest and defiance’: ibid., p. 189.
21. Heike Liebau, ‘A Voice Recording, a Portrait Photo and Three Drawings: Tracing the Life of a Colonial Soldier’, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) Working Paper no. 20 (2018), p. 2.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. As quoted in Golam Murshid, Bidrohi Ranoklanto: Nazrul-Jiboni (Dhaka: Prathama, 2018), p. 44.
25. Paltan is derived from the English ‘platoon’. The novelist Amitav Ghosh writes that it is ‘an interesting instance of a word which, after having been borrowed by Hindi (for its military application “platoon”) is reabsorbed into English with the slightly altered sense of “multitude”’: Amitav Ghosh, ‘The Ibis Chrestomathy’, Amitav Ghosh (2008) [https://www.amitavghosh.com/chrestomathy.html, accessed 11 Mar. 2021].
26. See Murshid, Bidrohi Ranoklanto: Nazrul-Jiboni, p. 47.
27. Britta Lange, ‘Archival Silences as Historical Sources: Reconsidering Sound Recordings of Prisoners of War (1915–1918) from the Berlin Lautarchiv’, in Sound Effects: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience, Vol. 7, no. 3 (2017), pp. 46–60 [https://www.soundeffects.dk/, accessed 11 Mar. 2021].
28. Details of these albums can be found on Dr. Alan Kelly’s searchable online database of recordings made by the Gramophone Company and its successor corporations during the 78 RPM era [https://www.kellydatabase.org/Entry.aspx. accessed 3 Sept. 2021]. The database has the performer’s name as the Bengali Double Company Chorus, while the HMV advertisement had it as the Bengal Double Company..
29. Shailajananda Mukherjee, Keu Bhole Na Keu Bhole (Kolkata: New Age, 1960), pp. 117–8, my translation.
30. See Santanu Das, ‘Reframing Life/War “Writing”: Objects, Letters and Songs of Indian Soldiers, 1914–1918’, in Textual Practice, Vol. 29, no. 7 (2015), pp. 1265–87 [1272–4].
31. It is impossible to translate or write down all the knowledge held in the sound. Ali Ahsan had said, ‘Tokhon ekdin raate taar husband shopno dekhe…tarpor shey confused hoye jaay’, using the English words ‘husband’ and ‘confused’, and they fit in so naturally with the Bangla. ‘Shey bole, tomra dujonei ei gharer modhye atka thakba’, Ali continues, and his way of speaking is marked by his place—a little bit Dhaka, a little bit Kushtia. There is a certain intimacy in this telling, which makes the characters seem like everyday people; this is no longer just a story about some distant holy land where Hazrat Ali, son-in-law of Hazrat Muhammad and blessed with divine powers, provides justice to people and shows them the way.
32. For Mohammad Saidur, see Habibullah Sirajee et al. (eds), Sakkhatkare Bangladesher Folklore Sadhak (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 2019), pp. 73–90.
33. Telephone conversation with Haresuzzaman Hares, stationed in Kishoreganj, Bangladesh, 1 Sept. 2020.
34. talkingstickstv, ‘Interview—Peter Linebaugh—The Magna Carta Manifesto’, 29:22 (21 Mar. 2009) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUhV3OtOOEM, accessed 10 Mar. 2021]; for more on Linebaugh, see Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008).
35. In Indian aesthetics, rasa means the essences or juices contained in a work of art or literature. Rasa is a Sankrit word but it exists in Bangla and many other Indian languages too. To be able to take in the rasa of a piece of work is to appreciate it, even taste its juices and sense its flavours, and feel empathy or anger or fear or so many other emotions, as there are many kinds of rasas. Rawsh-bodh (Bangla) is a feeling for the rasas. It is not a given but a highly-developed form of appreciation which comes from experience and knowledge.
36. Gautam Bhadra, ‘Kathokatar Nana Katha’, in special Kathokata issue of Jogasutra (Oct.–Dec. 1993), p. 256.
37. Britta Lange, ‘Poste Restante, and Messages in Bottles: Sound Recordings of Indian Prisoners in the First World War’, in Social Dynamics, Vol. 41, no. 1 (2014), pp. 84–100.
38. See Erika Brady, A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999), for a comprehensive history of the machine and its use by researchers in the field.
39. Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Nobel laureate poet, novelist, dramatist, essayist, songwriter of Bengal, whose songs are the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh, was also a pedagogue who set up a school as an ashram in Bolpur, Santiniketan, 160 kilometres from Kolkata, in the Birbhum district in 1901. The ashram grew to become a university, Visva-Bharati, and formally opened in 1921. Later, Tagore added a crop-cultivation and craft-based school to his university at Sriniketan, involving people from the neighbouring villages. To read about Bake’s relationship with Tagore, see Bob van der Linden, Music and Empire in Britain and India: Identity, Internationalism, and Cross-Cultural Communication (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 107–28.
40. On 25 Sept. 1920, Tagore gave a public lecture entitled ‘Some Village Mystics of Bengal’ at Leiden University. Bake was the student representative of the reception committee, but he did not speak very much to Tagore directly. Decades later, however, he recalled how, for him and his fellow students at the time, Tagore was the embodiment of ‘the peace of soul originating from the certitude of man’s union with God’ for which they were longing in their youth: Linden, Arnold Bake: A Life with South Asian Music, p. 3.
41. Letter from the archives of Rabindra Bhavan, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, India.
42. Moushumi Bhowmik, ‘Songs of Absence and Presence: Listening to the Wax Cylinder Recordings of Arnold Bake from Bengal (1931–34)’, unpublished PhD thesis, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India, 2021.
43. The Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak (1925–76) used the folk music of Sylhet in many of his films, especially marfati (Sufi devotional) and bichchhed gaan (songs of separation and longing), immortalised by the singing of Ranen Roychowdhury and Hemango Biswas. For an understanding of the sound of these songs, see the multimedia essay, Moushumi Bhowmik and Sukanta Majumdar, ‘A Boatman Named Ranen Roychowdhury’, The Travelling Archive (30 July 2018) [http://www.thetravellingarchive.org/tribute/a-boatman-named-ranen-roychowdhury/, accessed 12 Mar. 2021].
44. An introduction to the lascars in Britain can be found here, with a list of suggested reading: Florian Stadtler and Rozina Visram, ‘The Lascars: Britain’s Colonial Soldiers’, Our Migration Story [https://www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk/oms/the-lascars-britains-colonial-era-sailors, accessed 10 Mar. 2021]. For the Londoni villages, see Katy Gardner, ‘Lives in Motion: The Life-Course, Movement and Migration in Bangladesh’, in Journal of South Asian Development, Vol. 4, no. 2 (2009), pp. 229–51; and Katy Gardner, ‘Keeping Connected: Security, Place, and Social Capital in a “Londoni” Village in Sylhet’, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 14, no. 3 (2008), pp. 477–95.
45. Ali Ahsan and artist Labani Jangi of Dhubulia in Nadia, West Bengal, have talked about changing culture and political pressures on both sides of Bengal. Puthi is disappearing and in many instances being replaced by waz. In waz, Ali Ahsan explained, the speaker sermonises in God’s voice, hence he must be obeyed. Puthi-reading offers more equal participation of speaker/singer and listener. In this context, see Max Stille, Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh: The Poetics of Popular Preaching (London: I.B. Taurus, 2020), pp. 153–89.