Poste restante, and messages in bottles: sound recordings of Indian prisoners in the First World War

This essay analyses two sonic captures that were produced with prisoners of war (POW) in Germany during the First World War, in the way of engaging with the historical conditions of the production of those recordings by a group of German scholars in POW camps. The essay closely examines the texts spoken by a Gurkha in 1916 and by a Sikh in 1917 (Jasbahadur Rai and Sundar Singh). In my reading, the recordings are not presented as the speech samples they were meant to be, but as personal and meaningful texts. Using the concepts of a message in a bottle, borrowed from the theory on poetry in Osip Mandelstam's essay "On the Interlocutor" and the notion of poste restante, the essay reflects on the recorded texts as sounding messages from the past and their delayed reception by potential listeners.