Introduction
In the Ancient texts of the Vedas and Upanishads, Hindu cosmological thought advocates the theory of Naad-Brahman, translated as the Sound of Brahman. It posits that the universe originated from a primordial sound or naad––a divine vibration from which all forms of existence, both living and nonliving, have emerged. However, this Brahmanical theory has been challenged by some contemporary artists and musicians from eastern India who are attempting to develop an alternative hermeneutics of sound through noise. By creatively engaging with sounds typically perceived as disruptive, they seek to craft a new language of resistance against the historical injustices of caste-based oppression. This story intends to ask: can noise help us comprehend a lesser-known history of India, built upon the invisible debris of what might be called caste acoustics?
History of Noise Music
In 1863, German physicist and physician Hermann von Helmholtz defined environmental sounds as non-musical, and thus they came to be identified as noise. Half a century later, before the First World War, Italian futurist painter and composer Luigi Russolo challenged this view in his groundbreaking manifesto The Art of Noises (1913). Russolo challenged the predominant perceptions of music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by arguing that the modern world is shaped by industrial machinery and urban chaos. It demanded a new artistic language of expression that could capture the essence of modernity’s vital component: noise. Russolo criticized the elitism of concert hall music and argued that everyday industrial sounds like screeching metal, clattering machinery, hisses, and natural sounds such as wind, thunder, and water should be included in musical compositions. During the post-World War II era of experimentalism, American composer John Cage sowed the seeds of avant-garde music in his seminal piece 4’33’’ or Four Minutes Thirty Three Seconds (1947-48). His 1937 essay, “The Future of Music: Credo,” laid the groundwork for noise-based underground artists like Suicide (1970), Jack Ruby (1973), and Lou Reed (1975) who explored themes of gender, race, and class in the late twentieth-century USA. Decades later, in post-war Japan, a different but radical sonic movement emerged in the form of Japanoise. Artists like Merzbow (1979), Hijokaidan (1979), and Incapacitants (1981) produced eccentric auditory experiences using distorted sounds that rejected not only Western musical aesthetics but also the restrained, hierarchical, and often repressive norms of Japanese society. From the late 1970s through the 1990s, Japanoise became a visceral response to Japan’s hyper-modernity, consumerism, and emotional suppression. Today, this genre has earned global recognition, popularity, and acceptance under the label of Noise Music. But, in tracing its genealogy, I noticed that the Indian context remains largely absent from global academic discourse.
As an anthropologist and music practitioner, I ask: Why is the Indian noise music scene almost invisible on the global map? Why do frameworks for recognizing and legitimizing noise as music remain tethered primarily to Euro-American and Japanese lineages? Is it because the genre has not developed here as prominently as elsewhere? On the contrary, I have personally encountered a vibrant community of Indian artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers who, directly or indirectly, engage with the cultural politics of sound versus noise. Yet, they receive little attention. This gap calls for a critical reflection on how noise and resistance configure across cultures, particularly within Indian sonic lifeworlds, and how it might reshape our understanding of what noise music is.
Broad-Casteing Loudness, Speech and Silence
Patna-based sound artist, writer, and filmmaker Piyush Kashyap (35), known as Zeropowercut, built a pair of speakers with cardboards, broken buckets and sink strainers that played the voice of a Dalit woman:
Humra pe atna kachra feka gaeel ki hum naali jaisan jaam ho gayeeni
Naretiye mein duniya atak gayeel baa
Bhitar nafrat bharke khured rahe ho
Khured khured ke shareer mein ched ho gaya hain
Usi ched mein samay ko jakre huye ho
Din raat beet rahaa hain, tum jakre huye ho
It can be translated as:
So much garbage was thrown at me, I got jammed like a drain
The world is stuck in my throat
I kept scratching, filled with hatred
I scratched and scratched until a hole formed in my body
Through that hole, I’ve clung to time
Days and nights are passing, yet I remain stuck in it
The kitchen sink-strainer, stained with human saliva and decomposed waste, replicated a Dalit throat filled with the toxins of sticky, unreleasable pain. A distorted buzz is created by stitching together distinct sounds: traffic noise, festival sermons, car engines, blips, crackles, honks, and beeps ensounded the distorted lifeworlds of Dalit-Bahujan people, whose bodies often become assemblages of vital fluids and decomposed waste. The boundary between the pure and the polluted is blurred; distorted like the aural and visual disruptions created by Kashyap in his bucket-container installation.
Born into a Hindu household in a Muslim-dominated neighborhood, Kashyap has self-trained his ears in a way few others could. He detects the invisible signals of caste hierarchy encoded in the daily, mundane sounds and sights of his surroundings. In his film Broad-Caste (2024), Kashyap presents a provocative critique of caste through a scrutiny of devotional loudness, in which he boldly contends that “myths […] are becoming louder and louder” these days, particularly with the unprecedented use of festival loudspeakers. In explaining the hazards of loudspeakers, he says that the loudness is meant “to ensure that the listening body feels nothing but the broad-caste of power.” Kashyap argues that the uncensored loudness of religious slogans and festivals becomes a “vehicle for caste propagation,” often mediated through technologies of broadcasting. That’s why he calls it broad-caste, and not broadcast. “For the caste system to sustain,” he asserts, “it is important that people are dissociated from their own sufferings.” This dissociation, Kashyap explains, is made possible through the “saturation of media technologies.” Be it films, television, news, or local festivals, all forms of broadcasting technology, in one way or another, serve to reinforce a hegemonic soundscape that numbs the senses, through which a human feels. By engineering the thick vibrations of Hindutva-inspired beats and larger-than-life sound systems, Kashyap suggests that the “feeling of self-abjectification” is subtly induced among the weak, reducing people to lesser beings or “pawns.” They are left with no choice but to be repeatedly assaulted by the sonic intercourse of broad-caste, violating the laws of consent.
When an Indian student of Latin American literature at Jawaharlal Nehru University, with no background in music, evolves into a nationally celebrated figure known as the “Dalit Rapper,” Sumit Samos does not represent the accidental rise of a hidden musical prodigy. He is a product of the contemporary caste hierarchies that operate within the elite institutional spaces of Indian academia. Born into a Dalit family in Tentulipadar village of Koraput district, Odisha, with no formal training in music or the performing arts, Samos learned to deploy rap music as a tool of resistance against caste oppression, inspired by the traditions of protest music in Latin America. Today, he is recognized as a prominent voice in India’s anti-caste movement. Through raps written in Hindi, Odia, and English, Samos channels his anger and critiques casteist prejudices within his own institution, often celebrated for its progressive ideals.
Listening to long speeches and debates against casteism on campus often felt “tedious” to him. The bulk of jargon-laden phrases sounded like noise; difficult to relate to. Samos claims that the verbally sophisticated expressions in English failed to capture the precarity and vulnerability of his own experiences. Something was missing. That’s why he sought to create his own medium of expression, something more accessible and relatable to others.
Despite being a politically left-dominant space, JNU still appears to be “an alien campus” to Samos. “Most students come from elite colleges such as Jadavpur, DU, or Presidency,” where the majority belong to the upper castes, he pointed out. Samos claims he can “sense caste,” especially through “how people speak and how they carry themselves.” Even after gaining admission to one of the country’s most elite institutions, he lamented that it was “definitely not a space for me. I needed to have a voice, a space for myself.” It is crucial to understand that, for Samos, caste hierarchies within the university were often mediated through the textual sophistication of language. This is something he wanted to challenge. Samos “barely knew English” but made it a point to learn it. Eventually, he chose to deploy sound over text as a means of reclaiming his voice, agency, and, most importantly, his space. He quickly recognized that his experiences were not merely personal but part of a broader collective experience. Writing anti-caste rap thus became a way to “represent that experience,” grounded in a shared sense of vulnerability.
However, Samos also warned that rap is not merely a tool of representation, used to speak about slums, poverty, and corruption. It is meant to critically “analyze” the social structures that produce precarious living conditions. For those who were denied the right to read, think, and interpret scriptures, Samos believed, analysis was the actual form of resistance. Thus, Samos deployed sound not only as a tool of expression but as a tool of critical analysis. He used it to question and dismantle the hierarchies propagated through textual apparatuses, because he believes that deep-seated caste hierarchies in Indian elite educational institutions still persist and thrive through the appropriation of text as a medium of reinstating authority.
Inscriptions of Pain: Urine, Cowdung, and Distortion
National award-winning singer-songwriter, composer, and member of the Kolkata-based Bangla rock band Fossils, Rupam Islam, throughout his three-decade-long career, has deployed sounds of distortion as a tool for articulating pain or jontrona. Distortion first emerged in 1950s Chicago and London, as Black blues and early rock musicians pushed amplifiers to their limits to create a gritty, electrified sound that captured the entire era’s racial tensions, Cold War anxieties, and the spirit of rebellious youth culture. In India, distortion acquired renewed significance in the context of class and caste-based struggles. For instance, in his song Dewali Pee (2018), Islam begins with a sonic collage of heartbeats, ambulance sirens, traffic noise, ticking clocks, and firecrackers. He sings, “baajir motoi pechchap berochche chhutey,” which means, “the urine splashes like firecrackers,” followed by the provocation, “amra holam jontrona projatir chele” — “we are the sons of a pain-born lineage.” At an early age, Islam witnessed caste-based discrimination against his Muslim father, when upper-caste Bengali bhadraloks allegedly washed their verandas with cow dung after the father-son duo visited their homes. He later publicly renounced religion, identifying as an atheist and non-believer in Islam or any other faith. But Rupam never disavowed his pain, suffering, and humiliation as a Muslim outcast. Instead, he artistically channeled them through the harsh textures of distorted guitar riffs and the angry timbres of screams and growls. These sounds, according to him, carry material traces of human suffering and enable voices of resistance.
“Halla atna ba ki aapan awaaz sunai naikhe det”
“In all this noise and shouting, I can hardly hear myself.”
The Dalit man’s voice amplifies through the broken bucket. The water inside forms ripples from the vibrations of his vocal cords. Kashyap ends with a haunting image of a child innocently closing his ears to shut out the noise of festival loudspeakers. “The child sits next to loudness,” he said, “but the ears are covered, distracted, yet the loudness seeps in.” His closing remark portrays the tyranny of sound and what it does to the tender organs of a child’s body, his ears and heart, akin to what it does to the nation and its vulnerable populations, bodies, and neighborhoods. Before the eardrums explode, Kashyap reminds us, “disembodied by loudness, we feel nothing.” Loudness, he claims, can create a lethal state of numbness, where the oppressed begin to acclimatize to unfeeling the world, wherein they dissociate from their own sufferings. They become “Shudra-fied.”
Anthropologist Steve Goodman (2012), in his study of Israel-Palestine warfare, showed how sound bombs or sonic booms, which are high-volume, deep-frequency effects produced by low-flying jets that travel faster than the speed of sound, can be weaponized to control bodies and create psycho-physical environments of fear among civilians. In India, where the loudness of festival sound systems exerts a psycho-physical impact on minds and bodies, Kashyap is pointing to something serious. He tells us that the ability to feel is essential to human existence, especially when it comes to reclaiming the suffering of marginalized populations like the Shudras/Khudras/Lesser Beings. Therefore, the histories of caste oppression, the pain, injustice, and discrimination are not merely matters of record or archive. For these histories to endure, caste must be remembered and recognized through feeling; it must be carried in flesh and blood. If we try to hear through Kashyap’s ears, loudness functions as a numbing force that dulls the listener’s capacity to feel. It benumbs the Shudra heart, distancing it from its own pain. Perhaps the vibrations of sacred sound (Naad-Brahman) appear as a noisy buzz that touches the body as an anesthetic balm, or what Kashyap calls Barham––a Bhojpuri distorted form of the original Sanskrit word Brahman, infused with the Hindi word marham or ointment. It is like a physico-chemical substance that deafens the ears, detunes the heart, and hallucinates the mind from the irreparable wounds of historical injustice.
Conclusion
In his book, The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory (2012), Indian political theorist Gopal Guru argued that the everyday experiences of Dalits, especially their feelings, are important tools of knowledge-making practice. He questioned the idea that theory should only come from abstract thinking or texts. Instead, he argued that real-life experiences of caste; the sufferings, shame, humiliation, and how they affect the body and emotions should be at the heart of constructing theories. Guru further cautions that theorizing someone else’s experience without care can reinforce forms of oppression. His co-author, philosopher Sundar Sarukkai, however, contends that even non-Dalit scholars can also offer meaningful theoretical insights. Despite their differences, both agree that interpreting caste-based experience comes with an ethical responsibility: one must reflect ethically and responsibly on the experiences they seek to theorize.
Kashyap, Samos, and Islam, although divergent in their experiences, methods, and approaches from one another, their creative use of distortion, static and buzz, vibrating broken buckets, speaking sink-strainers, rippling waters, rhythmic raps, and DJ beats tends to design an anti-caste genre of noise music. In his seminal book Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977), French philosopher Jacques Attali describes noise as a political force of rupture that disrupts the existing social order and signals change. As he writes, noise “makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible. It heralds the future.” Through an entire repository of neglected sounds, abandoned objects, and painful experiences, the Indian version of noise music creates a language of counter-resistance meant to disturb and unsettle the primordial purity of the Brahminic cosmic order. Kashyap calls this the pursuit of “de-brahminis[ing]” sound. From their work, it is increasingly evident that caste is not only inscribed in the “psyche” or the “mind” as B.R. Ambedkar wrote in the Annihilation of Caste (1936), but flows through the veins and arteries. It precipitates on the skin, accumulates in the bones, rests upon the hands that enact labor and feet on which we stand, floats in the air we breathe, and most quietly, vibrates in the ears; its delicate tympanic membranes. The ears of an ordinary Indian citizen, knowingly or unknowingly, shape and are shaped by the acoustics of caste, either through silencing or amplification of undesired sounds and neglected voices. Therefore, acknowledging the labor of noise music in India can be a humble attempt to cultivate ethically attuned ears that not only sustain the physiological equilibrium of the human body as per biological theories but also reflect, refract, and re-constitute the social, cultural, and historical (im)balances of the world.
References
Ambedkar, B. R. Annihilation of Caste: An Undelivered Speech. New Delhi: Arnold Publishers, 1990. Originally written in 1936.
Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Vol. 16. Manchester University Press, 1977.
Cage, John. “The Future of Music: Credo.” Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York: Continuum (1937): 25-28.
Goodman, Steve. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. MIT Press, 2012.
Guru, Gopal, and Sundar Sarukkai. The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Helmholtz, Hermann LF. On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music. Cambridge University Press, 2009. Originally written in 1863.
Russolo, Luigi. The Art of Noise. Glover, VT: Something Else Press, 1913.