Incomplete Listening, Unfinished Writing: Sound and Silence in Archival Recordings from the Early Twentieth Century

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.