Sound, Urban Space, and Religious Authority: Protestant Missionary Listening Practices in the Colonial City of Madras, South India

This paper  examines the Protestant missionary enterprise within the sensory and spatial dynamics of early 19th century Madras, treating the city as a site of competing religious, social, and political orders. Drawing on insights from historians and anthropologists of the senses, it explores how missionaries encountered and sought to regulate the urban soundscape. Reflecting on the methodological challenge of accessing a pre-recording auditory world through textual traces, it argues that missionaries' writings reveal attempts to control sound as part of broader projects of Christian moral discipline and colonial governance. In a Madras marked by unstable sovereignties and emergent urban modernity, the regulation of sound became a medium through which missionaries negotiated authority and reordered everyday life. Attending to sonic practices thus illuminates the entanglement of religion, embodied practice, and imperial power in the production of colonial urban space.

Aparna Balachandran is Associate Professor of History, University of Delhi. Her research and teaching interests are on the urban, legal and sonic histories of South Asia. She is the co-editor of Iterations of Law: Legal Histories from India ( OUP, 2019) and co-author of Archives and Access ( Centre for Internet and Society, 2011). She is currently working on a monograph on early colonial law and governance in the city of Madras and a collection of essays on sound and urbanism in colonial South India.