ACCA Podcast · ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)

Suvani Suri with Aasma Tulika, Uzma Falak, Shareeka Helaluddin, Mehak Sawhney

·47 min·3 clips

Gangana Jha demanded a Brahmin gramophone operator, and the compromise produced earplugs, overhearing, and a separate recording track.

A record begins with dust. Gramophone discs sit in a forgotten British Library trunk, found by accident while collections move around. Then the firsts start piling up. The narration moves through archival digitization, old news reports, and century-old sounds that the Digital South Asia Library has made reachable online. The archive feels uneasy, not neutral. Its trail runs into the LSI, the colonial project headed by George A. Grierson, where voice can be sorted, captured, and governed. The episode lingers on a Sanskrit recording setup built to keep speaker and operator apart with rooms, switches, and tightly controlled audibility. Caste shows up in the act of listening. The operator must not physically hear Sanskrit, then gets metallic earplugs meant to block even stray access to the language. But the barrier leaks. The earplugs become odd receivers, carrying vibrations, harsh tones, inaudible frequencies, and scraps they were supposed to shut out. Bad transmission turns into evidence. Through that failure, the operator overhears a subdued conversation between Gangana Jha and Grierson about colonial language, voice, and lossless transmission. The piece keeps shifting registers. Acoustic signals, phonological units, and tympanic membranes sit next to hierarchy, purity, and future preservation. Listening becomes political. What gets blocked or cleaned away comes back as slippage, misrecognition, corrosion, and another recorded channel. Near the end, the sound widens: All India Radio, soldiers, barking dogs, rattling bottles, trucks, boots, explosions, tinnitus, and repeated inaudibility. The final question stays open. How many forms of silence can be identified? The answer seems to involve archive, caste, empire, technology, and the room itself.

As heard by us

An archive story about colonial listening, corrupted transmission, and the uneasy work of preserving voices.

The episode traces a line from a discovered trunk of gramophone discs in the British Library to digitized archive material and an early colonial survey built to capture languages on record.

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Why you'd press play

If you like archives that talk back, press play on this accidental history of mishearing.

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