ABSTRACT
Anyone speaking about communication in today’s Western cultural area will not necessarily think of sound as an independent medium of expression and communication, and anyone studying texts is interested in their content and will hardly be aware that texts also always have a material quality — their sound — and can be perceived in a sensory and emotional way. When Europeans think of sound, they think of music or noise, and not of textual traditions. If they think of texts, they think of the written word and semantic meaning rather than sounds and rituals. We understand words and texts as message bearers and discursive bodies. This is typical of Western culture, and increased substantially since the Renaissance and the Reformation. In Hinduistic India, things are different. Text, sound, and ritual belong together. Both orality and sonality enjoy great cultural significance. This has had a distinct influence on how people approach texts, and the marks left on perception, habitus forms, and social practice. It has affected not only a stronger sensory and emotive appropriation of the subject but also generated quite particular symbolic forms. In everyday life as well as in scholarly traditions, we find great focus on the sonic dimension. There are complete sound rites, as also an exceptionally rich religious and secular literature in the Sanskrit idiom that uses language and sound poetically and reflects it philosophically. The importance of sound and its perception has led to rites, models of cosmic order, and abstract formulas. Sound serves to stimulate religious feelings, to give them a sensory form and embody them, to facilitate thinking in structures, and also to train abstract and formalistic thought. It has given rise to world views which differ substantially from those in the occidental world, and from Christian concepts of the Divine.
