Madhavi Murty
Talk Title: Sonic India: Composing the ‘People’ in Popular Culture and Political Rhetoric
October 1, 2026, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm CT
This is a Zoom-only (remote) talk and will not be held in-person.
Register for Zoom attendance here.
Presentation Description: My research is invested in an analysis of nationalism and capital that centers sound. It studies the ways in which the category ‘people’ gets defined sonically in India between 1930 and 2020. As a book-length project, Sonic India aims to make the ideological work of constructing nationalisms and its relationship to capital audible. In this presentation, I focus on two different soundscapes, both of which purport to be the ‘sound of the people.’ First, we will briefly discuss the “angry young man” films of the 1970s and the sonic construction of anger and violence within this set of popular cultural artifacts. I am interested in how this anger is sonically defined as being ‘of the people’ and the processes through which Hindu nationalism then uses the category ‘people,’ constructed within popular culture as such. Rather than assume the categories ‘people’ and even ‘populism’ as ontological givens, ultimately, I am interested in how these are sonically constructed and then channeled by authoritarian nationalism to constitute itself as a hegemonic force. Second, is the sonic composition of ordinariness and commonness, a melodic rendering of ‘the people’ that strives to define capital and nation as strange and absurd. I will discuss this soundscape by considering certain films from the 1950s and the 1960s as well as the recent remake of Forrest Gump in India. This second soundscape, within contemporary public culture, aims to constitute itself as a counter-hegemonic force, working to define commonness in ways that disable it from becoming the warranty for Hindutva neoliberalism.
About the Speaker
Madhavi Murty is an associate professor in the department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She taught for several years in the Feminist Studies department as well. She is a scholar of cultural theory, Cultural and Media Studies as well as Gender and Feminist Studies. Her regional area of expertise is South Asia, especially public culture in India, and her empirical work is located there. Her first book, Stories that Bind: Political Economy and Culture in New India (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2022) won the International Communication Association’s (ICA) 2023 Outstanding Book Award. She is currently working on her second book, Sonic India: Sound and the Making of Folk Nationalisms.