Sound

Abstract

This chapter looks at the English language as part of global protest vocabulary where it is used to speak back to the Indian state. In a 2004 landmark protest against years of army presence in the state of Manipur in Northeast India, twelve women stood naked in front of the army base to protest the rape and murder of a young woman named Manorama by members of the armed forces. Raising the English-language slogan of “Indian Army Rape Us / We Are All Manorama's Mothers,” they used the language of the democratic state to challenge its authority. Northeast India as a geopolitical category and Northeast Indian literature as a body of work both become legible in the postcolonial state's use of English. The chapter argues that the women's political and phonological—figurative and literal—voice offers a decolonial lineage of a mother tongue in English. With a discussion of contemporary literature by northeastern writers like Temsula Ao and Yumlembam Ibomcha, it also reveals the emergence of the English language as specifically aural—an instance of speaking English, of Anglophony—as it represents the nonvocal and vocal soundscapes of military violence and human suffering.