Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema by Pavitra Sundar (review)

Pavitra Sundar's Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema presents a conceptual, theoretical, and methodological inquiry into the aural and oral hierarchies of Bombay cinema. Using Michele Hilmes's term "soundwork," which encompasses music, speech, and noise, Sundar seeks to harness and recuperate a multitude of listening formations in order to uncover the conscious and subconscious elements of the auditory.¹ To that end, she turns to aspects of song, speech, vocal timbre, accent, and even gesture that tend to be ignored or deliberately denigrated, thereby stretching the soundwork of cinema.² She further stretches the concept by incorporating industrial and technological developments from television, radio, cassettes, music industries, and the digital into the study of film, foregrounding cinema's intersection with these extra-cinematic sonic worlds and rendering soundwork as an unbounded entity.

In Listening with a Feminist Ear, Sundar envisages an ambitious project that not only maps the aural but transforms it into a site of theoretical and methodological inquiry. The book aims to register how listening is institutionalized and to put forward potential alternative readings based on specific modes of listening for unrecorded/muted histories. Previous works in Indian sound studies such as Peter Manuel's work in Cassette Culture (1993), Gregory Booth's ethnography of film musicians in Behind the Curtain (2008), and Aditi Deo and Vebhuti Duggal's work on sound in technology have all argued for a distinct character of sound in Indian film and media studies.³ Neepa Majumdar's work on playback singing, female stardom, and politics of respectability in Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! (2009) and her other essays on sound have advocated for a concept of the aural that rests "beyond the song sequence."⁴ While Bombay cinema's intrinsic link with film songs has been studied by these scholars, Sundar's book on soundwork allows us to explore an interdisciplinary understanding of cinema's sound that points to the porosity of borders, both the borders of what constitutes sound itself and the borders that divide scholarly inquiry. By de-privileging the cultural hegemony of the visual, Sundar's book makes an important intervention in numerous fields at once, including sound studies, performance studies, media studies, film studies, cultural studies, and gender studies.

Above all, Sundar hopes to develop a sonic sensibility, what she dubs, "listening with a feminist ear."⁵ A feminist perspective on soundwork necessitates the dual task of unlearning the hegemony of the image, a dominant vector in contemporary scholarship, and training the ear to listen, thereby elevating sound to an equally important cultivated practice.⁶ To this end, Listening with a Feminist Ear starts from a polyphonic understanding of soundwork as a site of culture and politics. Sundar encourages us to critically discern the socio-political and industrial discourses that shape our ways of listening and illustrates how listening constructs our epistemological understanding of films.

Given the ambitious scope of Sundar's inquiry, Sundar first maps the industrial and social contract of sound-image relationship in Indian cinema and shows how cinematic speech, song, and sound design become sonic projects undertaken by the nation-state through the apparatus of radio and television. Sundar then focuses on the role that speech and silence play in creating tangible conceptions of identity on-screen. In the key formative chapters, Sundar explores both historical and material approaches to singing (chapter 1), listening (chapter 2), and speaking (chapter 3). Throughout the book, Sundar studies a wide range of socioeconomic transformations in post-independent India—from the newly independent India's use of radio in the 1950s to the rise of new televisual aurality of satellite TV in the 1990s—to render legible links between soundwork, language, mediated cinematic styles and traditions, and geographies.

With an unwavering focus on the listening publics, Listening with a Feminist Ear argues that "pleasures and politics of cinema...