Communities of Sound: Religion, Displacement, and Caste in the Bay of Bengal

Communities of Sound: Religion, Displacement, and Caste in the Bay of Bengal book cover

Communities of Sound: Religion, Displacement, and Caste in the Bay of Bengal

Author(s): Carola E. Lorea (Author)

  • Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
  • Publication Date: 7 April 2026
  • Language: English
  • Print length: 474 pages
  • ISBN-10: 0819502243
  • ISBN-13: 9780819502247

Book Description

Sounding untouchability across postcolonial borders /> />Communities of Sound brings together insights from religion, anthropology, sound, and migration studies to explore the sonic traces of untouchability and forced migration across the Bay of Bengal. Based on an immersive, multi-sited ethnography with Matua devotees—a low-caste, Bengali-speaking Dalit religious community fragmented by Partition, war, and postcolonial displacement—the book explores how sound sustains identity across fractured geographies. Using richly detailed descriptions, the book follows traveling archives of song, story, and ritual performance through West Bengal, Bangladesh, and the Andaman Islands. These sonic practices—congregational singing, drumming, and itinerant storytelling—forge belonging beyond nation-states, connecting the Matua’s fifty million members across borders and seas. In a world dominated by visual culture, Communities of Sound centers listening as a mode of knowledge and care, revealing how sound shapes our sense of self and cosmos. More than scriptures or doctrine, it is sound—entangled with authority and power—that binds this transregional Dalit movement and animates its collective action. The book is generously illustrated and references an online companion with video and audio examples.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“With its sustained focus on sonic and sensory aspects of the Matua diaspora’s religious system, the author provides an admirably provocative contribution to acoustemology within an understudied but significant Hindu devotional tradition.”–Frank J. Korom, School for Advanced Research

About the Author

CAROLA E. LOREA is junior professor for the study of religions at the University of Tübingen, Germany, where she leads the ERC-funded project MANTRAMS: Mantras in Religion, Media, and Society in Global Southern Asia. She is the author of Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman (2016), and editor with Rosalind Hackett of Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North: Senses, Media and Power (2024).

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