Project description
Loudspeakers transform religion and community relations in India
The arrival of the first loudspeakers in India during the 1920s increased conflicts within and between Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and the state, dismantled social boundaries, and gave rise to struggles over sounds in public spaces. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the LOUDSECULAR project is exploring the role that loudspeakers played in reshaping public space, religious power and community relations in Kerala between 1920 and 1960. It expects to shed light on the sonic history of secularism in the area, investigating how different religions compete over access to sounds in public spaces. The project’s goal is to uncover the soundscape of Kerala, focusing on conflicts over temple festival sound transmissions, church bells’ reach and the timing of the Islamic call for prayer.
Objective
When the loudspeaker arrived in 1920s India, it amplified existing tensions between the region's Hindu, Muslim, and Christian communities, transgressed established social boundaries, and sparked new contests over the public soundscape.
LOUDSECULAR is the first sonic-sensory history of secularism in Kerala, India (1920-1960). Moving beyond political and textual histories, this project investigates how the loudspeaker reconfigured public space, religious authority, and community relations. It explores a globally relevant question: how do different religions, with their distinct ideas about sacred sound, negotiate their claims to the public soundscape? Using a methodological mix of archival research and oral history, the research recovers Kerala's soundscape from non-sonic colonial and national archives. It analyses disputes over temple festival broadcasts, the reach of church bells, and the timing of the Islamic call to prayer. This approach reframes secularism not as an abstract concept imported from the West, but as a tangible, lived, and sensory negotiation – a practice shaped on the ground by the interplay of technology, religion, and state power.
The project will be led by Dr Shahal Bilavinakath, a scholar with native Malayalam fluency, under the supervision of Prof. James Mansell at the University of Nottingham (UoN). The project is strategically centred at UoN, a world-leading hub for sound studies, to support multi-sited research across key colonial archives in the UK and India, and fieldwork in Kerala. The project will produce three key outputs: two journal articles on the sonic history of Indian secularism, a dataset of the loudspeaker's proliferation and regulation, and public sound installations in the UK and Kerala. For Dr Bilavinakath, this MSCA fellowship is the crucial step to becoming a leading voice on the sound cultures of South Asia, uniquely positioned to address urgent socio-technological questions from the perspective of the Global South.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been human-validated.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been human-validated.
Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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NG7 2RD Nottingham
United Kingdom
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