Spanning diverse South Asian religious traditions, the panel brings together four papers that collectively explore how sonic practices are associated with the bodies of the performers and audiences. A nuanced theoretical engagement with questions of embodiment is interwoven through all four papers. Two papers focus on performance practices of Adivasi communities, examining oral storytelling alongside songs, possessions, puppetry, and visual practices. A third paper examines the biography and “visionary” experiences of a blind Baul musician in Bengal, focusing on musical mastery as associated with a lack of visual faculty. The fourth paper reflects on the embodiment of orality as experienced by the author while working on Kabir's poems. These papers represent diverse, unexamined sonic practices from communities marginalized from mainstream narratives of South Asian religious traditions.
Are Tactile Studies, Olfactory Studies, and Gustatory Studies coming down the track? The visual and sonic came first, perhaps because seeing and hearing, more than the other senses, are involved with complex processes of human communication and conceptualization. But all the senses, along with the mind (regarded as a sense organ in Indian analyses of consciousness), are deeply intertwined in human experience and knowledge production. Studying North Indian religious poetry that is both literature and music, I approached it through oral traditions and aural experience, producing two books that contributed to Sound Studies in India. I have come to see Sound Studies as an avenue to Full Body Studies. In this paper, I will present three poems of Kabir, first as literature, then as song, inviting the audience to notice their own experience and to consider the implications of uniting mind and body in their own work.
During my on-and-off fieldwork with the Baul ascetic musicians over the past six years, I most recently interviewed a respected elder at his home in West Bengal, India, in August, 2025. Based on this ethnographic data, I will argue that my informant's devotional singing practice and aural relationship with the goddess led him to visualize her speaking to him. This suggests that innovative devotees can effectively interiorize the process, relocating the ritual within the body. This blurs the boundaries between tantric (ritual emphasis) and bhakto (emotional emphasis), categories often misunderstood as distinct. His case study exemplifies resilient aurality as he mediates between the devotional interiority and the horrifying exteriority of the cremation ground. We witness his radical inverse sacrifice, and visions that do not require eyes. Through oral narrative, this paper documents a rare example of synesthetic religious vision without sight, underscoring the need for future research.
This paper examines how Thakar Adivasi performers in Pinguli, Maharashtra assert agency through heritage tourism and audio-visual Ramayana storytelling. For centuries, these artists performed intermedial forms—chitrakathi painting, string puppetry, and shadow puppetry—within systems of hereditary patronage tied to the Sawantwadi court, where caste hierarchies structured performance conditions. Today, the Gangavane and Masge families have reoriented these traditions through heritage infrastructures that bring audiences into spaces they control and worlds they imagine. I argue that sound plays a crucial role in this transformation. In performance traditions where audience attention is directed primarily toward visual objects—paintings or puppets—the performers’ bodies are partially obscured. Yet the singing and narrating voice asserts authorial presence and embodied knowledge. As paintings, puppets, and video circulate increasingly as commodities within tourist and media economies, sound remains an embodied practice that resists commodification.
This paper examines two distinctive practices of orality and aurality among Bhīl Adivasi communities in northeastern Gujarat and southern Rajasthan. Drawing on ethnographic research among Bhīl performers and devotees, it analyzes how orality and aurality are understood as material substances that can accumulate within and transform the human body. The study focuses on two devotional practices: the singing of bhajanvārtās (devotional song-narratives) during the ritual of dhuṇvu, and the listening to kathāvārtās, narrative discourses circulated among Bhīl devotees initiated into the BAPS Swaminarayan tradition. In dhuṇvu, sung words are believed to reside within the body prior to their release through song, ideally emerging from the heart to generate events of ecstatic possession. In kathāvārtā, attentive listening allows sacred narratives to accumulate within the body, forming what practitioners call śabda śarīra, a “body of words”, which is a vessel for cleansed senses, memory, mind, and consciousness.
| Archana Venkatesan | avenkatesan@ucdavis.edu | View |