“On July 13, 1974, the broadcaster Abdul Jabbar read a letter on the airwaves from Mohammed Shafi, who wrote from Karachi to ask if someone could tell him if his former hometown of Bulandshahar in India still had large mango orchards. A few months later, Jabbar read a response to that letter from a listener in Bulandshahar who wrote about the city’s orchards and reassured Shafi and other listeners that Bulandshahar’s mangoes were as tasty then as they had been before Partition. This interchange took place on All India Radio (AIR) Urdu Service’s most popular program: Āvāz De Kahāṅ Hai (Call to me. Where are you?).”
From news about World War II to the broadcasting of music from popular movies, radio played a crucial role in an increasingly divided South Asia for more than half a century. Radio for the Millions examines the history of Hindi-Urdu radio during the height of its popularity from the 1930s to the 1980s, showing how it created transnational communities of listeners.
I discovered this book through Aanchal Malhotra’s In the Language of Remembering which shares the letters about the taste of Bulandshahar’s mangoes as exchanged over the radio. I was intrigued by how radio bridged the distances created by borders and connected people across countries.
Radio for the Millions examines the history of radio, particularly Hindi-Urdu radio, from the 1930s during World War II, to the 1980s when radio was eclipsed by the rise of television. It captures its impact on politics, language, culture, and how people engaged with radio across news, music, and drama broadcasts in providing both information and entertainment to the common man.
The book is divided into three sections. The first covers radio news during World War II and the aims of various governments to influence opinion via radio broadcasts. The second section moves into the first decade of independence when All India Radio (AIR) set out to redefine the meaning of citizenship in auditory terms. Consequently, Indians started tuning into Radio Ceylon which not only influenced the way people listened to Hindi-film songs but helped them forge a unique relationship with this music. Language played an important role here with people moving away from the binary understanding of Hindi and Urdu languages to Hindustani which was seen as a “utopian symbol”—a “point of desire.” Finally, the third section captures the seventeen days of drama of the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War, the inauguration of AIR Urdu, and their ‘Letters of Longing’ service which connected people separated by partition.
Born from a decade of research in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Radio for the Millions draws on various official government documents, broadcast recordings, letters to radio stations, personal diaries, and numerous oral interviews with broadcasters and dedicated listeners of the time.
I especially loved the chapters about music with the creative radio programming introduced to engage listeners and allow for an interactive experience with the radio station.
The book is an absolutely fascinating story of how historical moments of intense cultural and political change moved the debates about the meaning and purpose of radio broadcasting to the forefront. Moreover, I enjoyed the author’s thesis in her study of radio history arguing that radio forged a transnational soundscape defying borders and identities even as the Partition had rendered the idea of a united India a political impossibility.
A walk down memory lane for the generations that are more than familiar with the value the medium held in their lives, and a chance for later generations to revisit history from an entirely new perspective, Radio for the Millions ignites beautiful memories of one’s aural senses.
Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders by Isabel Huacuja Alonso. Published in January 2023 by Columbia University Press.
Book 13 of 2024.
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