This short review takes up three books with differing focus—the first focuses on the history of radio broadcasting in South Asia, cutting across India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka; the second emphasizes the modes in which dialogues, sounds and songs from Bombay cinema circulate and perform cultural tasks, and the last examines what it means to think about that ubiquitous ‘thing’ called an accent, which inflects sound with race, region and more. While the first two books under discussion are united by their focus on region, the last stands at a tangent insofar as it privileges concept and method rather than any kind of geographic unity. Nevertheless, I position all three books as interventions in Sound Studies from South Asia given their geographic and conceptual concerns.
Each of the three books foregrounds listening and the sonic as sensuous ways of inhabiting the world, while being attentive to the historical, political and social contours of the same. Each book works with multimedia and intermedia concepts and methods, nevertheless, they concern themselves chiefly with one form: radio in Alonso; cinema in Sundar; and language in Rangan et al.