https://press.umich.edu/Books/L/Listening-with-a-Feminist-Ear2

Anaar Desai-Stephens: One of the primary interventions of the book is this beautiful idea of “listening with a feminist ear,” which you explicate as attending “to aural and oral manifestations of social hierarchies. It is to heed the intersections of gender, sexuality, nation, and other vectors of identity, and to note how the aural forms of these constructs exclude as much as they include” (6). Can you talk us through how you developed this idea? What prevailing conversations – in cinema studies and in studies of South Asian cinema and music – necessitated this intervention?

Pavitra Sundar: Thank you so much for this opportunity to talk through some ideas at the heart of my book! The phrase “listening with a feminist ear” has been with me for a while, as far back as my dissertation, I believe. Initially, it was a nod to that project’s feminist moorings and my interest in how gender, sexuality, and nation were manifest in film soundtracks. This book, though, came into its own around the time sound studies began flourishing as a field. As I started to think of cinematic and musical analysis in relation to sound studies, I realized that we needed to think more about listening itself—what it entails, how we do it, and what listening makes possible. My insistence that we listen to the aural domain of cinema echoes the interventions of film music scholars and other feminist theorists of sound and voice in cinema. Decades on, there is still a need for that intervention, as cinema and media studies remains a very ocularcentric discipline. While South Asian cinema studies does exhibit this preoccupation with the image, ethnomusicologists have done much to elaborate the industrial and representational worlds of Indian film music. There is also robust discussion of the politics of voice (both in terms of playback singing and political speech, particularly in South India) and an emerging interest in sound studies. I’ve tried to build on these various, overlapping conversations to inspire greater attention to Bombay film soundwork and also greater reflexivity about listening.

The challenge is not just to shift or expand our object of analysis—from the visual to the aural, or better yet, to the audiovisual—but also to consider the relationship between that object and our method. What social hierarchies and axes of identity take form because of the particular ways in which we (scholars, audiences, fans) listen to Hindi cinema? How have we adopted certain ways of listening over time, and to what extent have those changed? What might it mean to shake off those conventions and practices? This is what I mean when I say that “listening with a feminist ear” is both critical and utopian in orientation. It tunes in to aural/oral constructs, but in so doing, it also opens a path to listening differently. The recognition that listening is political—that it has the capacity not only to objectify sounds, but also to unsettle wellworn habits of the ear—runs through the broader corpus of feminist scholarship on sound and music. Listening may be a sensory practice into which we are socialized and that we often repeat thoughtlessly, but it needn’t remain just that.

Anaar Desai-Stephens: Woven through the book is an attention to pedagogies of listening, and how we might listen otherwise. Can you say more about how viewers learn to listen in the broad ecosystem that surrounds Hindi cinema? Do you have thoughts about how we might explicitly learn to listen against the grain, that is, to work against our own listening habits?

Pavitra Sundar: An important thread in sound studies, and one that I develop in this book as well, is that listening is not a passive exercise but an engaged, interpretive activity. We cultivate ways of engaging with sounds over time, through exposure to various media and aural cultures. Films themselves direct us to listen in specific ways, as do particular genres and musical traditions. I was recently reminded of Vebhuti Duggal’s wonderful work on “becoming listener.” What exactly does it mean to call oneself a listener? She teaches us that radio listeners conceptualized their practice in layered ways—listening was as much about writing fan letters and running radio clubs as it was about tuning in to a radio station. Likewise, in Isabel Huacuja Alonso’s recent book (also on radio), we learn of how listening and talking are intertwined. My own emphasis is on the interface of listening and seeing, on how these modes of perception interact with and shape each other.

In my first chapter, I reframe playback singing using Michel Chion’s term “audiovisual contract,” which names how audiences give tacit assent to the conjunction of sound and image in cinema. But, of course, it’s because Indian audiences have agreed to a different contract than, say, American film audiences that it is commonplace to hear actors singing in a voice that is not their own in Bombay cinema. I lay out how gendered screen conventions and ideologies trained Hindi film audiences (from the mid-1950s all the way through the 1990s) to hear some women as good and others as sexy, immoral etc. As the media and cultural landscape shifted in the 1990s, so did the way audiences encountered, and interpreted, women’s singing bodies. The changes that economic liberalization wrought, particularly in the television and music industries, are also key to my second chapter. Chapter two traces how the Islamicate genre of the qawwali mobilizes the concept of listening (and listening publics) across seven decades. Generic shifts encourage different conceptions and habits of listening; they push audiences to adopt different understandings of the sound-image relationship. In my final chapter, I identify language politics as another formidable influence on how we listen—in this case, how we listen to speech in cinema. I discuss Hindi cinema’s hybrid tongues (Hindustani, Bambaiyya, and Hinglish) in relation to broader debates on linguistic nationalism, and postcolonial language politics more generally. In listening to characters’ dialects, idiolects, and accents, audiences call up complex racio- and ethnolinguistic imaginaries.

The sheer weight of these cultural and historical forces can be overwhelming. It can make listening seem overdetermined. But, if listening is a matter of embracing historically and socially specific conventions, then we may be able to teach ourselves to listen differently. The first step is attending to how we listen. We need to probe not just what we hear in films, but how we have come to hear femininity, accent, etc. in the ways that we do. I also find that thinking of ourselves as audiences rather than as viewers is helpful. You’ll notice that I use the latter term quite sparingly in the book, relying more often on audience. This word’s auditory roots cues the fact that we are always doing more than watching cinema.

Anaar Desai-Stephens: While reading, I found myself periodically struck and delighted by evocative, counter-intuitive descriptions of listening to cinema, viewing music, hearing bodies, and more. More than just turns-of-phrase, these quasi-synesthetic descriptions seemed central to your project of refiguring how we engage with cinema and cinema sound. How does this multimodal approach connect to your work of re-thinking the relationship between corporeality and sound, and the meanings attached to this relationship, in contemporary Hindi cinema?

Pavitra Sundar: Such a pleasure to know that those turns of phrase resonated with you! You’re right—what I’m trying to do is keep alive the recognition that sound and image work together. In a lot of cinema studies scholarship, including in works that focus on film sound, the body is understood primarily as a visual entity. The very notion of the voice-body relationship, for example, suggests that voice is a disembodied construct. Much of my writing on women’s voices, in this book and in other projects, challenges this arbitrary partitioning of the senses. Part of the difficulty is that assumptions about sound and image are baked into our conceptual vocabulary. Key terms used to parse voice and other cinematic sounds anchor listening in the image: concepts like onscreen and offscreen sound, voiceover, and acousmêtre turn on whether or not the purported source of a sound is visible. This image-centric approach flattens the endlessly pliable relationship between the aural and the visual, and ignores other ways of grasping materiality in cinema. While phenomenological critics have recast film spectatorship in tactile and kinaesthetic terms, their insights about corporeality are rarely extended to listening. That sonic and visual perception are intimately related comes through most forcefully in my chapter on playback signing, where I analyze the relatively recent shift to seeing women’s vocal labor, in paratextual material related to films, but also in other contexts and platforms. I argue that this shift in the visual representation of women’s bodies is crucial to how we now hear them. While I do not foreground this argument about the sound-image relationship as much in the rest of the book, I never lose sight (!) of the interplay of the aural and the visual. Multimodal formulations like the ones you mention—and also my choice to use Michele Hilmes’ term “soundwork”—keep me from slipping back into analytical habits that I think we need to shed.

Anaar Desai-Stephens: In the introduction, you write: “Studying soundwork requires that we listen as fans – voraciously and with little heed to conceptual borders that academic disciplines draw around diverse sounds” (11). Why did it feel so important to you to foreground pleasure, enjoyment, and personal proximity? What might this affective emphasis offer to scholars who work on seemingly text based areas such as film and literature?

Pavitra Sundar: Scholarship is an embodied, affective undertaking. It is driven by our personal interests, and shaped by histories of consumption, pleasure, and practice. But we rarely frame our labor in these terms. In not framing it as such, I think we risk reinforcing the divide between our work as academics and the rest of our lives.

Moreover, some of the categories that structure our scholarship do not function so strictly outside academic contexts. Listening cultures are porous and overlapping. People’s aural interests and practices often cut across genre, medium, time period, and language. By adopting a more playful, boundary-crossing approach—one that I suspect we all indulge in when we’re not fretting about disciplinary debates—we can get a better handle on interaurality. That is, we can understand how sound cultures and media that seem far afield from Hindi films can, and do, shape cinematic soundwork and listening practices.

Finally, the affective emphasis you’ve identified is also related to the reparative critical work that I think listening with a feminist ear can accomplish. For Eve Sedgwick, the reparative reading position is one that invites pleasure, experimentation, and surprise. I’ve tried to demonstrate through my analyses of Satya and Aligarh (in chapter three and the coda respectively) that listening across conventional sonic categories and pausing over odd, and oddly pleasurable sonic fragments, can be generative. Listening with a Feminist Ear is not simply a work of critique; it is also a work that dwells in the aural pleasures of Bombay cinema in the hopes of imagining alternative possibilities.

Anaar Desai-Stephens: One of the most exciting parts of the book for me, as a scholar of music, is your theorization of the materiality of speech through attending to language as sound. This is primarily explored in the third section of the book, on speaking, while you spend the first section of the book, on singing, exploring the materiality of the singing voice. How do you think about the relationship between these two forms of vocal materiality, methodologically and in terms of their relative realms of semiotic meaning? What political implications and possibilities are embedded in the shifting relationship between film sound, film speech, and film music in contemporary Hindi cinema?

Pavitra Sundar: I think of chapters one and three as complementary explorations of sonic materiality. There is a growing body of South Asian scholarship on the materiality of the singing voice, but the materiality of the speaking voice has received less attention. When cinematic speech is discussed, it’s framed as a question of style or political ideology. My own interest is in how listeners make sense of sound in Bombay cinema—the sound of vocal performance. I am less concerned with the semantic meaning of words, whether spoken or sung, than with the semiotics of voice. I am trying to work out how vocal materiality is made meaningful. How are gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity audible and tangible in speech and song? If in chapter one, vocal timbre is used to make moral judgments about women, in chapter three I find that the sound of words (accent, in particular) does similar work in relation to ethnolinguistic identity. In reframing language as sound, I find it helpful to think with Rey Chow, whose notion of the “xenophone” addresses how spoken language gets some cast as foreigners, as other. What I’m also trying to do in that chapter is blur the boundaries between speech and other kinds of cinematic sounds (ambient sounds, sound effects, and song lyrics). My hope is that in closing the distance between these various sonorous markers of place and identity, we can arrive at more capacious conceptions of sound and belonging in cinema.