Moushumi Bhowmik gave a talk on Her Voices – Listening to/as a woman to women’s voices and silences, and beyond on 7 February as part of the HSRC talk series. Moushumi Bhowmik led the audience to think beyond simple binaries of men and women’s listening and utterance, where the politics of sound and silence is more complex and nuanced. Drawing from her experience as an artist and archivist who has travelled across places, she also takes lessons from artists and scholars who have worked and continue to work around questions of gender and the voice. Her session was centred around songs and interviews with singers from her archive, which demonstrated that the question is essentially one of power and resistance, where gender is one but not the only factor that determines our listening and voicing, muting, and unmuting. However, she argued that despite the dissonances, there are also threads very particular to women, which bind them in their use of their voices in their acts of voicing and being (her).

Home, displacement, borders, and the search for home are Moushumi’s main areas of concern and listening is her principal methodology. She is co-creator of The Travelling Archive, an archive of field recordings from Bengal (www.thetravellingarchive.org).

As she spoke of her travels across India, Bangladesh, and the UK to create and collaborate with artists and scholars across disciplines and languages, she threw light on the process of discovering one’s own voice through the voices of others. She spoke of her own process of unlearning certain gendered aspects of the gendered voice in song and singing, as voices are trained to fit the visible image of the singer, primarily with regards to gender. Moushumi also drew attention to the range of voices that women hold within them, and how the expression of these depends on the spaces they sing in.

February 2024