2026 Theses Doctoral

Flow Nation: Sound, Space and Solidarity in South Asia

Raj, Ali

This dissertation examines the relationship of music and language with beauty and community in late-modern and contemporary South Asia. It investigates how the sound of language helped shape the Muslim public in South Asia, and define the imagination of nationhood and its discontents in Pakistan. It identifies ideas about the purity, fluency, and eloquence of language in Arabic rhetoric and Indo-Persian poetics, and their inheritance and transformation in Urdu literary production and music.

It does so via three distinct case studies that focus on musical and poetic prosody in the national anthem of Pakistan, phonology and writing systems in Urdu and Bengali, and theological concerns surrounding the Holy Qur’an and its reproduction via sound recording technology, respectively. It argues that solidarity in the Muslim community was advanced by the aesthetic dimensions of Urdu, which coalesced around its ability to flow, both in sound and meaning.

It demonstrates how flow achieved precision as Urdu’s dominant aesthetic principle within the larger dramaturgy of Muslim nationalism and colonial modernity, recast questions about the nature and representation of reality, and had implications for the cultural and political dispensation, as well as the media environments, of modern Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh.