Gandhi’s Politics was also a politics of sound

What did Gandhi hear when he heard a crowd sing?

The question sounds almost incidental to the history of India's freedom movement. It is not. For Gandhi, music was rarely an ornamental accompaniment to politics. A bhajan could discipline a gathering, a prayer could become an argument about religious coexistence, and a song associated with nationalism could force a more difficult question: who, exactly, was being asked to sing?

Gandhi's relationship with music was neither that of a professional musician nor that of a passive admirer. He was suspicious of music pursued merely for pleasure or technical virtuosity. What interested him was its capacity to move people, communicate ideas and cultivate what he regarded as moral qualities. Lakshmi Subramanian's Singing Gandhi's India: Music and Sonic Nationalism places this relationship at the centre of Gandhi's political practice, arguing that prayer and music need to be understood as part of the making of political communities.

That makes Gandhi's repertoire worth examining not as a collection of favourite songs, but as a record of the kind of public he was trying to create.

The song before the speech

The experiment began well before the mass politics of the 1920s and 1930s.

In South Africa, at Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm, Gandhi incorporated communal prayer into a disciplined routine of collective life. The practice travelled to the ashrams in India. Singing became part of the rhythm of work, prayer and self-examination.

The important point was not musical sophistication.

Gandhi preferred compositions whose words were accessible and whose melodies could be carried by ordinary voices. He was interested in what happened when people who might otherwise remain separate performed the same act together. His prayer gatherings consequently became spaces where political arguments could follow devotional singing, and where religious vocabulary itself became a subject of discussion.

Music was therefore not simply communicating a political message.

It was helping produce the audience for that message.

Kabir's unsettled voice

Kabir fitted this project unusually well.

His poetry could draw from Hindu and Islamic vocabularies without settling comfortably inside either. Gandhi's attraction to Kabir was therefore not merely literary. The simplicity and accessibility of medieval bhajans mattered to him, but so did their capacity to unsettle fixed boundaries.

Yet it would be too easy to turn Kabir into a ready-made symbol of Gandhi's secularism.

Gandhi was not simply importing an already modern idea of religious pluralism into his prayer meetings. He was using a devotional vocabulary to make an argument about how people should live together.

The song did not erase religious identity. It asked whether religious identity could coexist with a shared public life.

The emotional force of Kabir's words came precisely from that tension: devotion without easy ownership, faith without an uncomplicated boundary.

Meera and the individual voice

Meerabai brought another kind of intensity into Gandhi's repertoire.

Her devotional poetry is deeply personal — the voice of an individual addressing the divine against the expectations of the social world around her. Gandhi could place that intensely private devotional language inside a collective prayer meeting.

There was something politically useful in that transformation.

A crowd could sing a song born out of individual longing and, for a few minutes, inhabit it collectively.

But Gandhi did not approach Meera as an aesthete. He was less concerned with the technical dimensions of a composition than with its words and its ethical resonance. This was consistent with his wider suspicion of music detached from a moral purpose.

The repertoire thus repeatedly moved between two scales: the solitary believer and the assembled crowd. Gandhi needed both.

The Sikh shabad, the Christian hymn, the Quran

The prayer meeting became more complicated as Gandhi expanded its vocabulary.

Its repertoire included bhajans associated with Kabir, Meera, Tukaram and Surdas, Sikh devotional traditions, Christian hymns and readings from the Quran and Avesta. Gandhi was particularly moved by Christian hymns such as Abide With Me.

The point was not simply that Gandhi was willing to borrow from different religions.

He was trying to establish a public in which no single devotional vocabulary could claim the entire political space.

But this was also an experiment with limits.

A prayer meeting could contain multiple traditions; it could not automatically make every participant equally comfortable with every tradition. By the 1940s, Gandhi's meetings themselves became sites of protest and boycott, with objections raised from both Hindu and Muslim sides over the religious content of the prayers.

Pluralism, in other words, did not eliminate disagreement.

It made disagreement audible.

Raghupati Raghav was not just a tune

Few sounds became more closely identified with Gandhi than the Ramdhun, Raghupati Raghav Rajaram.

Its political importance lay partly in Gandhi's attempt to give the song a meaning beyond a narrowly sectarian invocation. The version associated with his prayer meetings acquired the phrase Ishwar Allah Tero Naam, placing Hindu and Muslim names for God within the same refrain.

But even here, the history is less neat than the familiar popular version suggests.

The addition of Ishwar Allah is often attributed to Gandhi. Accounts associated with Gandhi's musical practice trace its use at a 1947 Noakhali prayer meeting to his grand-niece Manu, after which Gandhi asked that it be sung regularly.

That detail is revealing.

Gandhi's repertoire was not a frozen canon handed down unchanged. Songs were adapted, contextualised and made to carry political meanings appropriate to particular moments.

The Ramdhun could therefore become an expression of religious accommodation without ceasing to be a song rooted in Hindu devotional vocabulary.

That ambiguity is precisely what makes it historically interesting.

When the nationalist song became difficult

The clearest test of Gandhi's sonic politics came with Vande Mataram.

The song had enormous anti-colonial power. It had been sung in nationalist meetings and processions and had become associated with resistance to British rule. Gandhi himself had once regarded it primarily as a patriotic invocation of the motherland.

But the political context changed.

Sections of the Muslim community objected to the song's religious associations. Gandhi's position consequently evolved. In 1939 he wrote that he would not risk a quarrel over Vande Mataram at a mixed gathering, and later clarified that if someone objected to its singing in such a setting, it should be dropped.

This is an important qualification to the idea of Gandhi as a promoter of nationalist song.

He was not arguing that every national symbol had to be accepted by everyone simply because it had acquired historical importance.

He was asking what happened when a symbol that had once unified a political movement began to alienate part of the public that movement claimed to represent.

For Gandhi, the answer could be restraint.

Sound in the street

His sonic politics extended beyond prayer.

During the freedom struggle, prabhat pheris turned early mornings into political processions. Groups walked through streets singing devotional and nationalist songs, transforming sound into a public summons. Colonial authorities objected to the processions and portrayed them as disruptive to civic order. Gandhi defended them because he understood the singing as disciplined political action rather than uncontrolled emotional display.

Gandhi did not celebrate noise simply because it was nationalist.

He wanted disciplined sound.

His idea of music was tied to self-control, contemplation and duty. A crowd singing together was politically valuable precisely because collective expression was supposed to remain governed by restraint.

That makes his politics of sound more complicated than a simple story of mobilisation.

He was trying to teach a crowd how to behave while giving it a voice.

The contradiction at the heart of the repertoire

Gandhi's musical politics contained a persistent contradiction.

He wanted collective singing, but not blind conformity.

He used religious language, but resisted its monopolisation by any one community.

He valued accessible bhajans over musical virtuosity, but did not dismiss the authority of trained musicians.

He used nationalism as a source of mobilisation, but distrusted nationalism when it became merely strident or emotionally intoxicating.

The Telegraph's account of Subramanian's work underlines this utilitarian dimension of Gandhi's relationship with music: he tended to judge music by its purpose rather than by pleasure or artistic virtuosity alone. At the same time, his engagement with the musical world intersected with wider attempts by figures such as Vishnu Digambar Paluskar and V.N. Bhatkhande to construct a modern national musical identity.

Gandhi was therefore participating in a much larger transformation of India's musical public.

He was also trying to discipline it.

When the repertoire could no longer contain the violence

The final test came during the years of Partition.

By then, Gandhi's prayer meetings were taking place against a backdrop of communal violence. The repertoire continued to include the very sounds meant to make religious difference bearable — the Ramdhun, readings from the Quran, bhajans and hymns.

But the violence outside the prayer meeting could not be sung away.

The significance of Gandhi's music at this stage lies partly in that failure.

His sonic politics could create a temporary community. It could provide a language for coexistence. It could make a political argument without a speech.

It could not, by itself, resolve the political conflicts tearing that community apart.

And Gandhi increasingly turned to music not only as a means of mobilisation but as a source of consolation.

In 1947, M.S. Subbulakshmi recorded Hari Tum Haro Jan Ki Peer at Gandhi's request for his birthday. The recording reached Delhi after being made at an All India Radio studio in Madras. After Gandhi's assassination four months later, Subbulakshmi's rendition of the same bhajan was broadcast again.

A song that had been sent towards Gandhi in a moment of political darkness became part of the soundscape of mourning after his death.

What remains of Gandhi's sound

The technology surrounding political sound has changed radically since Gandhi's time. Microphones, radio and gramophone recordings were already transforming the reach of political voices during the late colonial period; today's public sphere has multiplied those possibilities through television, digital platforms and social media.

The contemporary politics of sound is therefore louder and faster than Gandhi's.

But his questions remain recognisable.

Who gets heard?

What kind of crowd does a song create?

When does collective expression become coercion?

And when does a national symbol cease to unite because some citizens no longer hear themselves inside it?

Gandhi's repertoire offers no simple answer.

That may be its most useful legacy.

Kabir, Meera, the shabad, the hymn, the Ramdhun and Vande Mataram did not produce one seamless national voice. They produced an argument about whether different voices could inhabit the same political space.

For Gandhi, perhaps, the test of a political song was never merely whether millions could sing it.

It was whether, after the singing ended,they could still live together.