Beats, bass and belonging: sonic populism in India

The populist turn in international relations (IR) has directed attention to aesthetic, popular cultural forms and affective practices constituting ‘the people’. Building on this insight, the article turns to sound as a less examined dimension of world-making through which belonging is produced antagonistically between those authorised to sound as the nation and those compelled to listen. The article develops sonic populism to explain how performances, circulation and listening assemble heterogeneous subjects into a national collectivity. Drawing on Hindutva sounds circulating through processions, chants, loudspeakers, DJ tracks, devotional music and digital media in contemporary India, it conceptualises the majoritarian sonic public as a formation in which culturally marked ‘people’ are made to appear coterminous with the nation. The conjunction of threatening content, amplification and repetition of these sounds constitutes sonic violence whose coercive force depends on harm through forced exposure, generating anticipatory fear and altering minority conduct. By demonstrating how violence becomes embodied and ordinary through sonic practices, the article advances debates on vernacular forms of far-right populism and reimagines popular sovereignty as an unequal sensory relation structured by whose presence can command audibility and whose exposure is rendered unavoidable.