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Sound Studies, Religion and Urban Space: Tamil Music and the Ethical Life in Singapore

The Hindu Thaipusam festival is the most important religious event of the year for Singapore's Indian minority population. However, drumming in the Thaipusam procession has been illegal since 1973. For some Hindus, this creates a sense of imminent danger, as drumming is believed necessary to sustain the trance of devotees undergoing penance. Such tensions culminated in 2015, when plain clothes policemen forcibly halted Hindu drummers during the Thaipusam procession, and a brawl ensued. In this article, I describe the long history of controversy surrounding Hindu drumming in Singapore, which goes back to the nineteenth century. Surveying the influence of liberal notions of the relations between sacred sounds, public space, discourses on heritage and postcolonial governmentality, I argue that the ‘soundscapes of modernity’ are not always homogeneous but may be fragmented and pluralistic, involving contestations over the efficacy of sacred sounds and debates on where they should be located on the streets of today's ethnically diverse global cities.