Constructing a Nation All India Radio and the Colonial Legacy

Public Culture, 2019

During his decade-long (1952–62) tenure as minister of Information and Broadcasting, B. V. Keskar spearheaded ambitious reforms to the national radio network, All India Radio. Keskar filled broadcasting hours with classical music programming, inviting musicians trained at renowned academies to perform and record. This essay argues that in the wake of independence, Keskar and his supporters sought to orchestrate a soundscape for the Indian nation through the medium of radio. In their attempts to train the ears of radio audiences and forge citizen-listeners, they also refined the meaning of citizenship in auditory terms. Administrators and broadcasters at AIR, however, assumed that citizen-listeners would be docile. Radio listeners proved the opposite. They protested against AIR’s music broadcasts by writing to magazine and newspaper editorials and by tuning their dials to foreign radio stations, whose broadcasts better suited their musical tastes.

2021

2000

The core of this thesis Is that radio remains an important communication tool for tribal communities llvlng ln remote hlll areas of South India. Some of the more salient findings relate to media uses and preferences ot people, suggesting that sophlstlcated negotlattons take place between audiences and media. These Include suspicion of televls!on and its impact upon work practices and education, the organization of time and space to accommodate radio and television Into people's busy daily lives, and the recognition that radio may be a more Innovative medium than television. These conclusions have been reached from an In-depth qualttative audience ethnographic study of three trlbal communities in Southern India. The Toda, Kola and Kannikaran are tribal communities living In Tamil Nadu, South India. The Toda and Kota live in the Nilgiri Hills. The Kannlkaran live in Kanyakumari district, the most Southern lip of India. This thesis critically analyses how tribal audiences use the neighboring low power radio stations, Doty Radio Station (ORS), and Nagercoil Radio Station {NRS) of state-funded All India Radio (AIR). It also explores how these stations ensure audience participation. Introduced in 1993, ORS is the only radio station located near the tribal communlUes in the Nilgiris hill area and serves distinctively like a community radio. ORS serves an empowering role lo the tribal communities by encouraging innovative 'feedback' and audience participation. Its remit also Includes cultural development and democratization of tribal communities liv!ng in the Nllgiris. AIR Is one of the largest radio networks in the world comprising nearly 200 radio stations localed ln the smaller towns and remote areas which enhances audience participation. Rad!o and televls!on have been under the direct control of the Government since Independence in 1947. After a long struggle for media autonomy, Jndla became the first country in Asla to grant autonomous status to electronic media In 1997, by the enactment and implementation of the 'Prasar Bharali Act. However, autonomous status !s

SOUTH ASIA RESEARCH, vol. 10, No. 1, May 1990

The Community Radio movement materialized in India with the establishment of first community radio in Annamalai University. Though it is well established part of development communication strategy worldwide to voice the concerns of the marginalized especially in under developed and developing societies it is quite recent in India that the agenda of community radio is being pursued vigorously especially after the supreme court landmark judgment about declaring the airwaves as public property. The paper explores the journey of community radio in India and briefly discusses the lessons learnt or the implications for India.

One of the extensively-talked and less-studied aspect of cricket’s consolidation as a game of national passion in India in the age of decolonization was the way in which it was publicized through the multilingual radio commentaries broadcasted on the state broadcaster All India Radio (AIR) from 1960s onward . While there had been few instances in colonial period when test matches were broadcasted on air for part of the day, they were predominantly in English and did not attract listeners on any significant scale. The situation changed little until the 1960s when AIR made a significant policy move to introduce test broadcasts in Hindi and other Indian languages chiefly Bengali and Tamil. Among them, the cricket broadcasts in Hindi were further crucial as they were part of the post-colonial Indian state's efforts to promote Hindi as the national language of the Newly-Independent nation. While such multilingual broadcasts increasingly broadened the social base of cricket in India which was by then predominately elite in its nature, it simultaneously led to the wider construction of a distinct Indian identity. Such an effort of vernacularizing cricket through the Hindi and other Indian languages commentaries was started in the swinging era of 1960s when the nation was witnessing unprecedented language-conflicts over a range of issues.The proponents of Hindi and other Indian languages were making a variety of cultural, political and emotional claims to ensure their linguistic representation in the emerging lingua franca. With such language conflicts and antagonisms reaching crescendo in late 1960s, post-colonial Indian state sought to rule its subject through linguistically reorganized units thus acknowledging the centrality of language as a mode of governing and accommodating the ethno-cultural diversity of the nation. The project of launching multilingual cricket broadcasts was clearly guided by this understanding and was in fact part of the sociology of rule that sought to define India as a territory composed of linguistically reorganized units. The project was thus deeply political and manifested tensions, fissures and contradictions of the emerging nation—state system. In the following section, I attempt to locate some of the aspects of this politics of vernacularization through the lens of cricket.

Asian Sound Cultures: Voice, Noise, Sound, Technology , 2023

As previous research on the role of the radio in (post)colonial India has shown, radio broadcasting is deeply implicated in the narratives of empire and postcolonial nation-building. Radio thus becomes seemingly synonymous with the imperial project during colonialism and with the national project in the postcolonial period. In this chapter, we shift scholarly attention to public discourse and audience formation during the early years of radio in colonial India (1925 and 1936). We analyse how early radio impacted people’s perception of space and place by re-structuring the geographies of ‘home’, ‘world’, and ‘empire’. We also show how the radio affected audiences along the rural-urban divide, re-configuring their understandings of sound, technology and listening.

As it begins to spreead its antennas in India, community radio raises certain conceptual issues that need to be clarified for the benefit of practitioners and academics alike. For instance, should it be conceived primarily as a tool for development or as a medium for democratization and perhaps eventual radicalization? Should it be viewed as a means of building communities and strengthening communal bonds where these exist, or as a vehicle for taking the underprivileged from their place on the wrong side of the digital divide on to the ramp to globalization's information superhighway and then to the space of global discourses and conversations1? Not the least, is it reflective of a Western nostalgia for gemeinschaft that has little relevance in countries like India, where modernity has not been able to erase traditional lines of communication and the bonds these foster? It is necessary to address these issues, because the binaries presented above do sometimes appear mutually exclusive. I do not claim to have an answer to these questions; the aim of this short essay is only to initiate a discussion.

Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 2012

The Community Radio movement in India was ushered in with high hopes and expectations in the 90s' decade of the last century. It was foreseen as a convenient and comprehensive instrument of development of the masses at grassroots level. However, over the years several factors and developments have undermined the original primary goals of the medium and diverted it towards some not so important goals with passage of time, thereby depriving the organizations and citizens concerned about deriving developmental benefits out of the medium. The author makes an effort at trying to analyze why this is happening while at the same time discussing a brief development of the medium in the world of mass communication, specially in the Indian subcontinent. It is also sought to be seen if the Government of the country is somewhat wary of fully opening up this media for preventing release of a more mass-oriented media than other media. The author also attempts at highlighting the medium's s...