LOUDSECULAR · Loudspeakers, Religious Publics, and the Negotiation of Secularism in Kerala, 1920-1960

When the loudspeaker arrived in 1920s India, it amplified existing tensions between the region's Hindu, Muslim, and Christian communities, transgressed established social boundaries, and sparked new contests over the public soundscape.LOUDSECULAR is the first sonic-sensory history of secularism in Kerala, India (1920-1960). Moving beyond political and textual histories, this project investigates how the loudspeaker reconfigured public space, religious authority, and community relations. It explores a globally relevant question: how do different religions, with their distinct ideas about sacred sound, negotiate their claims to the public soundscape? Using a methodological mix of archival research and oral history, the research recovers Kerala's soundscape from non-sonic colonial and national archives. It analyses disputes over temple festival broadcasts, the reach of church bells, and the timing of the Islamic call to prayer. This approach reframes secularism not as an abstract concept imported from the West, but as a tangible, lived, and sensory negotiation – a practice shaped on the ground by the interplay of technology, religion, and state power.The project will be led by Dr Shahal Bilavinakath, a scholar with native Malayalam fluency, under the supervision of Prof. James Mansell at the University of Nottingham (UoN). The project is strategically centred at UoN, a world-leading hub for sound studies, to support multi-sited research across key colonial archives in the UK and India, and fieldwork in Kerala. The project will produce three key outputs: two journal articles on the sonic history of Indian secularism, a dataset of the loudspeaker's proliferation and regulation, and public sound installations in the UK and Kerala. For Dr Bilavinakath, this MSCA fellowship is the crucial step to becoming a leading voice on the sound cultures of South Asia, uniquely positioned to address urgent socio-technological questions from the perspective of the Global South.