Radio for the millions : Hindi-Urdu broadcasting at the crossroads of empire

“Radio for the Millions” is a transnational history of radio broadcasting in Hindi and Urdu in South Asia. It focuses on specific moments of intense cultural and political change when debates about broadcasting came to the forefront across the late colonial period through the immediate post-independence era (1927-1971). Following the outbreak of World War II, British colonial administrators, despite their initial distrust of radio, turned to the new medium in a belated and improvised attempt to garner Indian support for the Allied Forces. In the decades following independence in 1947, the new leaders of India and Pakistan similarly attempted to foster allegiance to governments and to fashion national identities through state-run broadcasting networks—AIR and Radio Pakistan, respectively. Both imperial and national radio campaigns, however, met with mixed success. Sometimes, they were rejected by listeners altogether. Other times, government radio projects won immediate success, only to politically backfire soon after. British imperial and later Indian and Pakistani state-run stations, however, were not the only ones on the airwaves. During WWII, pro-Axis and revolutionary stations, including Subhas Chandra Bose’s Azad Hind Radio, but also radio programs in Hindi-Urdu from Japan and Germany, filled India’s airwaves bringing news of the war from an Axis perspective to listeners in India. After independence, commercial stations such as Radio Ceylon changed the soundscape of the post-colonial subcontinent, making film music an integral part of people’s everyday lives. In the following pages, I argue that it was these stations, which contested state-run radio’s linguistic, cultural, and political campaigns, that won the hearts and minds of listeners in South Asia. “Radio for the Millions” demonstrates that the medium of radio was never merely a tool of the colonial government or its Indian and Pakistani successors, and highlights the varied ways in which the medium not only escaped governments’ grip, but also made it possible for broadcasters and listeners alike to build lasting connections across state-imposed borders