The human voice is an uncanny subject and its links with identity are complex

For philosopher Mladen Dolar, the voice belongs to that strange zone where we know now what pulls us to something, , a ‘je ne sais quoi’ of modern life with its fleeting magic and strange kinships

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In the sensory deprivation that is one lockdown after another, I’ve found some senses to take on new meaning. My sources of sanity these days have been the voices of people I love, both near and afar. I have returned to days-before-I-became-cool, preferring to call people rather than text. I leave voice messages and I exult in staring at my phone as it tells me that my interlocutor is ‘recording’.

You might imagine me to be an avid consumer of the new kid on the block, Clubhouse, the app that lets you drop in on and participate in many online conversations. I tried. Despite the plethora of rooms on tap, the only one that held my attention was hosted by the poet and translator Mustansir Dalvi and the theatre actor and storyteller Danish Hussain. The two read aloud the poetry of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, followed by Dalvi’s English translations, and the timbre of their voices recalled for me some other time of parlour intimacies and easy sharing of food and bonhomie. Despite my cynicism about all the talk of love, revolution and nation, I found myself enthralled.

Is it possible, though, to speak about voices without speaking of what the voice speaks about? In

A Voice and Nothing More , the philosopher Mladen Dolar argues that the voice both stands between and connects body and language, nature and culture, noise and meaningful articulation. Dolar opens his book with the story of an Italian commander asking his soldiers to attack the enemy. The soldiers stay still, in full comprehension, and yet mesmerised into inaction by his beautiful voice. Anthropology often considers voice to connote either aesthetics or meaning, but for Dolar, it is more suited to the realm of the uncanny, that strange zone where we know not what pulls us to something, a

je ne sais quoi of modern life with its fleeting magic and strange kinships.

Vocal prejudice

Such romanticisation, however, runs the risk of animating faith in some fundamental link between voice and identity. Long years ago, watching an online video of a Baul singer on a train offering a heart-breaking rendition of Arun Chakraborty’s ‘Lal paharir deshe ja’ , I was convinced that the bearer of the voice had discovered the meaning of life. I have often mistaken a deep baritone to signify depth of thought, and faintness of tongue as the umistakable clue to a barren inner life. Only very late did I begin to suspect that my understanding of beautiful voices may be suffering under the prejudices of gender, caste, class and race.

Here, it would be wise to pay heed to anthropologists who remind us that voice is not a universal category. Its standards, aesthetics and disciplinary modes vary across culture and time. It is also a category that we learn. Over the course of our lives, we wield voice to perform identities, in the plural. We take pleasure and bear pain in mimicry and performance, coaxing the voice into cadences greatly recognisable but also greatly surprising. We absorb social structure through speaking and listening. Is it a surprise, then, that we set so much store by the imagined links between voice and identity? For if we didn’t believe this, we’d have to give up on our own identities as elaborate hoaxes.

Tricky thing

And yet, there is many a slip between voice and lip. Look, for example, at anthropologist Lotte Hoek’s stellar ethnographic work on relatively unknown and invisible Bangladeshi female dubbing artists being asked to provide more “sexpression” for the hyper-visible heroines on screen. Expand on this to consider the general category of voice artists, where the voice is literally what stands between nature and culture. The voice emanates from a body different from the one it’s appended to. And in the case of radio artists, the voice floats unmoored, attached to an imagined body.

Is it better, then, to think of the voice as a trickster? Now you hear it, now you don’t. For only then can we account for those voices that we consider neither aesthetic nor meaningful. Only then can we expand our capacities to listen to the voices of the wild, the mad, the miserable, the incarcerated, the wilful, the disappearing and the ghostly. As Dolar argues, the voice is indeed an uncanny subject, something we have heard before and will again, and something that reveals things we know but prefer not to acknowledge.

The writer teaches anthropology for a living, and is otherwise invested in names, places, animals, and things.