Revolution on the Airwaves: An Account of India’s Tumultuous Radio History
In Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders, Isabel Huacuja Alonso demonstrates how radio created transnational communities of listeners and broadcasters, who defied colonial and postcolonial governments’ stranglehold over the medium and maneuvered it for their own purposes.
For nearly half a decade starting in October 1952, All India Radio [AIR] stopped playing Hindi film songs on all its stations. On the behest of the then information and broadcasting minister BV Keskar, the public broadcaster filled the gap in programming by heavily promoting Indian classical music. A staunch traditionalist, Keskar firmly believed that the government had the responsibility of weaning the “masses” of the newly-independent nation away from their “unfit musical sensibilities,” namely, “degrading” and “Westernised” film songs, and training them to appreciate classical music. To that end, he first set up a censorship committee to screen Hindi film songs aired on AIR and proposed that such songs not exceed ten per cent of its programme time.
When the film industry retaliated, he banned them altogether.
Keskar’s paternalistic project, however, found few takers. Fed up with AIR’s high-handedness, radio listeners across India tuned in to a radio service in neighbouring Ceylon (later Sri Lanka), which, at the time, had started its own Hindi film song programmes. Their shifted loyalties made Radio Ceylon a household name in India. At the height of its popularity, shows like Binaca Geetmala, hosted by the legendary Ameen Sayani, purportedly reached millions of listeners.
In contrast, AIR’s audiences shrank during this period. In 1957, Keskar was forced to reverse his unofficial ban and launch Vividh Bharti, a music station whose film song programmes emulated the style and format of Radio Ceylon.
This about-turn is emblematic of the many ways in which radio in the subcontinent, despite being a state-led project, managed to elude the state’s grasp, Isabel Huacuja Alonso writes in her recent book Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders (Columbia University Press, 2023). An Assistant Professor at Columbia University and a historian of sound media and modern South Asia, Huacuja Alonso’s book follows the evolution of Hindi and Urdu (and, more importantly, Hindustani) radio between the 1930s and the mid-1980s. By following the subcontinent’s airwaves during this period, she demonstrates how radio created transnational communities of listeners and broadcasters who defied colonial and postcolonial governments’ stranglehold over the medium and maneuvered it for their own purposes.
The heyday of radio in South Asia coincided with the most tumultuous period in its history, framed by anticolonial struggles, multiple partitions, nation-building projects, communal violence, and military conflicts. This book focuses on three key events or periods that were particularly transformative for radio history. The first is the Second World War when German radio stations began to spread Nazi propaganda in India, prompting the British colonial administration to disseminate its own take on the “good war” and leading to the birth of AIR. The second is the initial decade after independence when the postcolonial government actively deployed AIR for its own nationalist, communal, linguistic, and cultural agendas. Finally, the India-Pakistan War of 1965 saw radio being used by both governments, but especially Pakistan, to mobilize nationalist energies and engage in “moral-raising campaigns”. In each of these cases, states tried to tighten their hold over the airwaves, but as Huacuja Alonso shows in this book, that’s also when they faced the most powerful challenges.
Essentially, Radio for the Millions explores that in-between space where radio was both a divisive and a unification project: complicit in hardening state borders and rendering them malleable, and acting as a tool of nation-building and a site for forging transnational alliances.
Her key argument in this book is that radio’s “transnational collaborative nature” made such pushbacks possible. To make this point, she undertakes an extensive research of radio stations in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Germany, Singapore, and Tokyo, using varied sources such as archived broadcasts and broadcast transcripts, listeners’ letters to radio stations, interviews with broadcasters and listeners, their diaries and memoirs, newspaper articles, and government documents. These underexplored archives shed light on the continuities between how imperial and postcolonial governments controlled the radio, and throw up many lesser-known anecdotes along the way.
These anecdotes reveal, for instance, how the anticolonial nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose emerged as a “radio voice” during WWII, and how Bose’s Azad Hind Radio broadcasts shaped the secrecy and rumours that surround his afterlife. While Lord Mountbatten is infamous in the subcontinent for presiding over the disastrous 1947 partition, the book shows how the last British viceroy to India inadvertently laid the ground for Radio Ceylon to become a national sensation in India. And while the 1965 war is remembered in India as a territorial dispute, Radio for the Millions unearths its role in solidifying a Punjabi-centric nationalism in Pakistan and leading to the 1971 split of Bangladesh.
Focusing on these alternative radio histories allows Huacuja Alonso to read against the grain. For instance, while Bose’s resistance to British imperialism is well documented, historians and biographers have largely ignored or underplayed his close associations with and sympathy for fascist governments. By dwelling on Bose’s wartime radio broadcasts, Huacuja Alonso is able to trouble those dominant readings.
Radio for the Millions is full of such unexpected and circuitous connections that the author deftly weaves together across its 250-odd pages. It covers three genres of radio broadcasting, namely, news, films, and radio dramas. While news became instrumental in disseminating propaganda and counterpropaganda during the war years, radio dramas were used extensively by Radio Pakistan to whip up nationalistic sentiment during the 1965 military conflict. But it is Hindi films and film songs that, perhaps because of their transnational appeal, receive the most attention in this book. Unsurprisingly, these are also the most delightful sections of the book.
As Huacuja Alonso’s older interviewees in India recount, trips to film theatres were few and far between and gramophone records were expensive. In Pakistan, Indian films were often not available in cinemas or were banned during periods of heightened geopolitical tension. Thus, most people across the subcontinent could only experience films and film songs through the medium of radio. Film song countdown shows, like Radio Ceylon’s Binaca Geetmala, song request programmes like AIR Urdu Service’s Awaz De Kahan Hai, and even programmes that only dealt with film-related topics, shaped what Huacuja Alonso calls “an aural filmi culture.” By encouraging listeners to write letters to radio stations, these programmes allowed them to forge a “public intimacy” with not only broadcasters but also other listeners. And of course, film songs on radio made these intimate connections possible.
Essentially, Radio for the Millions explores that in-between space where radio was both a divisive and a unification project: complicit in hardening state borders and rendering them malleable, and acting as a tool of nation-building and a site for forging transnational alliances. This is best illustrated by the author’s lively exploration of AIR Urdu Service’s song request programme Awaz De Kahan Hai. The service itself was launched during the 1965 conflict between India and Pakistan, and broadcast news and discussions intended to act as counterpropaganda to the jingoistic nationalistic programmes run by Radio Pakistan. To draw in audiences in West Pakistan, the service filled some of its broadcasting hours with Hindi film songs that were banned on Radio Pakistan at the time. But AIR broadcasters soon discovered that the service was also getting interest from audiences in western and northern India, and began to design programmes for transnational audiences.
The idea for Awaz De Kahan Hai came to host Abdul Jaffar after he saw an editorial by a Pakistani radio listener arguing that Radio Pakistan should at least play pre-Partition Hindi film songs. On his programme, Jaffar not only played these songs but also read letters from listeners about their pre-Partition memories. These letters enabled Indian and Pakistani listeners to engage with each other at a time when the physical borders between their nations had become impassable. When Karachi-based Mohammad Shafi inquired about the mango orchards in his former hometown of Bulandshahr (Uttar Pradesh), another listener wrote to reassure him that the city’s mangoes “were as tasty then as they had been before the Partition.” When Kartar Singh, who had migrated from Lahore during the Partition, asked about his favourite Palace Cinema, a woman from Lahore responded that it “continues to be a lively place.” And so it was that an Indian government-funded radio service meant to sway public opinion in Pakistan about the war allowed audiences in both countries to form intimate and emotional bonds with each other, essentially challenging their respective government’s policies and ideologies.
Even so, Huacuja Alonso’s nuanced analysis cautions against seeing these “alternative” radio projects as necessarily progressive or emancipatory or as straightforward stories of resistance. Some like Radio Ceylon were money-making enterprises, others like the Axis Radio stations during WWII and Subhas Chandra Bose’s Azad Hind Radio either spread or were linked to fascist propaganda, and yet others like AIR’s Urdu Service were ultimately nostalgia projects that failed to lead to any social change, she explains. Yet, she insists, it is crucial to pay attention to these projects. By subverting colonial censorship, postcolonial governments’ nationalistic, communal, and linguistic agendas, and hardened borders, these projects curtailed the power of states.
Besides dictating the content of broadcasts, states also wielded control over the airwaves by determining broadcasting language. Keskar’s controversial ban on Hindi film songs was perhaps driven as much by their language as his view of them as “vulgar” and “irrational cocktails of western dance tunes,” suggests Huacuja Alonso. Hindi films of this era as well as their songs spoke in a syncretic Hindustani, and in some cases, drew heavily on Urdu poetic traditions. As such, they did not fit the communal idea of India as primarily Hindu with a Sanskritised Hindi as the nation’s dominant language, she adds.
And so it was that an Indian government-funded radio service meant to sway public opinion in Pakistan about the war allowed audiences in both countries to form intimate and emotional bonds with each other, essentially challenging their respective government’s policies and ideologies.
In fact, the move to eliminate Hindustani from the national consciousness began even before Keskar’s term, when his predecessor Vallabhbhai Patel bifurcated AIR’s programming into Hindi and Urdu in 1946. Needless to say, the number of stations broadcasting in Hindi far exceeded those in Urdu. Against this backdrop, “[n]ot only did AIR’s campaign link classical music to the revival of an imagined ancient Hinduism and favor Hindu musicians over Muslim, it also promoted a Sanskritized version of Hindi—devoid of Arabic- and Persian-origin (read Muslim) words— as India’s national language,” Huacuja Alonso notes. But in this case too, the state’s linguistic project met with limited success. Even as Hindustani was disappearing on AIR, it survived on alternative radio channels like Radio Ceylon whose Hindi service hosts used an inclusive language that was “neither ‘Hindu Hindi’ nor ‘Muslim Urdu’”, she adds.
While Radio for the Millions is firmly rooted in the period before the 1980s, the issues that animate its 200-odd pages serve as a reminder, in Mark Twain’s words, that “history never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in the current Hindu nationalist government’s tangible push to make Hindi the dominant language. While its proposal to impose mandatory Hindi in schools across the country has been stalled for now, several new laws have Hindi names, and recent cabinet agendas have been prepared in Hindi as have been the prime minister’s speeches. On radio airwaves, the prime minister’s monthly radio monologue Mann Ki Baat also uses a heavily Sanskritized Hindi.
At the same time, the syncretic Hindustani that Huacuja Alonso says survived on the subcontinent’s radio airwaves and in Hindi film songs in the mid-twentieth century is now largely invisible. While Rizwan Ahmed notes an erosion of the proper pronunciation of Urdu sounds in Hindi films and their songs, others have noted a decline in the use of Urdu itself.
Though radio itself is well past its heyday, the medium remains a site for assertion of state power, albeit in smaller ways. In April this year, the government issued an “advisory” to all television channels and community radio stations to broadcast the hundredth episode of Mann Ki Baat. That this was a diktat, and not an advisory as the government had termed it, is evident from the fact that community radio stations were also “advised” to send as proof audio clips of the broadcast immediately after its completion. More overt forms of control and surveillance are evident in television, especially in TV news, and on the internet.
Against this backdrop, Radio for the Millions offers its readers a historical context for the majoritarian tendencies that undergird the contemporary political landscape. Whether it is the current government’s stifling hold over the media or its intention to suppress cultural and linguistic diversity, Huacuja Alonso’s study is a timely reminder that such instances of state control are as old as the nation-state itself. More crucially, by recounting the ways in which state-led agendas were continually thwarted or subverted, her book warns us against ceding too much power to the state. Where power exists, resistance and subversion—however fragile and contentious—is seldom far behind.
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Sohel Sarkar is an independent writer, editor, and feminist researcher currently based in Bengaluru. Her work has appeared in Himal Southasian, Bitch Media, Whetstone Magazine, and Color Bloq, among others. You can find her on Twitter: @SohelS28 and Instagram: @sarkar.sohel10.
