The Lazy Eye

The ecology of urban sound in late nineteenth-century Calcutta wove together multilingual, multi-sited sonic practices and sensibilities that preserved the memory of space and of being-in-place as a peculiarly multisensory experience of social life in city spaces. I would imagine that visualising a sound map of Calcutta in the long nineteenth century might at first seem like an impossible undertaking. Surely, sound and sounding space would have been ‘done’ differently in the inner chambers of the andarmahal, the baithak-khana, the nat-mandir, and the Hatibagan-Chitpur theatres? More difficult still, how do we listen to the moving body that slips in and out of these real-and-imagined spaces of the city? Has she left us with an archive of her lived space? Here, as in elsewhere, Gauhar Jaan became my muse by default. While scholars of nineteenth-century Bengal have extensively documented and analysed the vast body of Gauhar Jaan’s recorded work available to us today, very little attention...