Gandhi’s Voice, Mass Politics, and the Arrival of Public Address Technology in India, 1927–1931

Abstract Historians often draw on texts of public speeches in an effort to understand the politics of the past, while seldom pausing to consider if they were audible at the time. This is particularly relevant to the case of anti-colonialism in South Asia between the two world wars, when political speeches were typically delivered to mass open-air audiences and audibility must have been a considerable challenge. Historians have assumed that the arrival of public address systems in India overcame this problem, but a focus on the phase of its implementation, as both speakers and audiences gradually became acculturated to the ways in which microphones and loudspeakers mediated public speaking, shows how unreliable they were, introducing new dynamics and challenges to the processes of both speaking and listening. Adopting an intermedial, multisensory approach and focusing on speeches by M. K. Gandhi, who sought to dominate inter-war anti-colonialism in British India, this article looks for ways of understanding how political messaging operated in contexts where being able to hear a speech was not a given.