📚 Southasia Review of Books - October 2023
The Southasia Review of Books is a monthly newsletter that threads together our latest reviews and literary essays, curated reading suggestions on all things books-related from Himal’s extensive archive, as well as interviews with select writers and their reading recommendations.
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Hello reader
Welcome to another edition of the Southasia Review of Books!
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This month, Preeti Raghunath reviews Isabel Huacuja Alonso’s Radio for the Millions, charting the medium’s role in popular cultures and state-making projects of the Subcontinent and rethinking long-held assumptions on transnational listenership. Preeti highlights Huacuja Alonso’s message that “the study of media forms, and in particular sound media, is fundamental to the study of history,” and that “South Asian radio history is South Asian history.” The review essay takes us through the use of radio broadcasting by the Axis powers in the Second World War and the history of British imperial broadcasting in the Subcontinent, and also covers the popularity of Radio Ceylon’s Hindustani broadcasting in India and Pakistan, bringing together communities of listeners even across hostile borders.
Preeti reflects on the current state of the media in Southasia, and how nation-states and political leaders continue to try and control the media in the digital age. She also looks at the ability of the region’s communities to actively shape media output, with newer forms of popular DIY media serving as spaces for creativity and openness.
Take a look below for a special interview with Preeti, plus her recommendations for further reading.
In another essay from Himal’s pages this month, Gajendran Ayyathurai reviews Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India by Douglas Ober. Exploring overlooked aspects of Buddhism in Southasia and beyond, the book highlights the casteless and anti-caste legacies connecting ancient and modern Buddhists. Gajendran writes that irrespective of the violence of brahmin-centric canonisation and brahminical censorship, modern Buddhism remains archived in diverse ways that are waiting to be unearthed, as Dust on the Throne itself evidences.
We also published an excerpt from Descent into Paradise by Daniel Bosley, documenting his work as a journalist and editor at a local news outlet in the Maldives. In his reporting on the country’s volatile political landscape, its struggles for justice, its reckoning with climate change and more, Bosley exposes the gaps between the Maldives’ pristine image as a tourist destination and the fragile realities of life on its islands.
The excerpt follows various Maldivian governments’ promises of land reclamation and mega-development projects, to the detriment of the environment and atoll communities and their culture. The United Nations’ recent projections suggest the Maldives’ population will rise by close to a million by mid-century, with a full two-thirds of its people being drawn to the capital, Malé. However, pledges to relocate communities to the Greater Malé area do not take into account the costs of mass migration and the political and social problems reported by previously relocated communities.
Interview with Preeti Raghunath on radio’s role in making and unmaking Southasia’s borders
Shwetha Srikanthan: In the review, you write that Isabel Huacuja Alonso’s Radio for the Millions makes an important contribution in unearthing liminal voices which make up an archaeology of Southasian media. Could you tell us more about this?
Preeti Raghunath: The study of media is oftentimes limited to constituencies that are recognised formally. This can be seen in the way we look at only certain kinds of media or some actors in the study of media policy, for instance. Nowhere is this more evident in the way we demarcate the study of media by national boundaries, almost considering the nation-state as a natural unit of research. Alonso’s book makes an important contribution by dislodging this overt focus on the national, to allow us to get acquainted with the in-betwixt or the liminal. This, the author does, by allowing voices that straddle the fluid borderlessness that Southasia offers, and the interplay between being contained within national boundaries and crossing over. By unearthing the histories of this form of radio listenership, we are introduced to an archaeology of the media. This is evidenced through the sounds and songs from Hindi-Urdu radio broadcasting that Alonso digs up, allowing us to sample a slice of the past.
SS: What do Radio Ceylon and All India Radio’s transnational listenership tell us about the cultural and political possibilities of radio in Southasia
PR: Radio has always been an important medium in Southasia, owing mainly to its cost-effectiveness. In addition, it has been seen, deployed and managed as a strategic national, and now, commercial asset. In its heyday, Radio Ceylon’s popularity over All India Radio’s broadcasting showcased an important attribute of Southasian radio – that of listening to its plural peoples’ diverse aspirations and tastes. The strict guidelines made for AIR then reveal how it was seen as a strategic tool to mind and monitor the tastes of its audiences. However, cultural fluidities, much like the airwaves, are a fact of Southasian life. Radio Ceylon’s popularity then was a testament to this.
SS: Southasia is home to a diverse media landscape with larger political, economic, social, cultural and legal structures at play. In a previous article for Himal, you’ve written about community radio encounters in the region – could you tell us about community-based broadcasting and its role in democratising the media?
PR: Community-based radio broadcasting is seen as a third tier of radio broadcasting, after public and private radio. The nomenclature can differ according to policy contexts – community, community-based, alternative or local radio. Whatever the name it is known by, this form of broadcasting is about people. It is about protecting airtime and/or radio spectrum to allow communities to access them in order to articulate themselves in their own languages. It is also about tuning in to these articulations and conversing with them. Community-based broadcasting has aspired to allow people and their communities to have their voices be counted and heard in a media landscape that is crowded and that privileges the loudest. This, by definition, is what democratising the media would mean.
SS: The review also discusses the decline in the quality and credibility of news television, and how, even in the digital era, nation-states and political leaders retain control over radio for their ideological and strategic goals. What are some of the ways in which states and corporations regulate and govern media?
PR: The nation-state has been powerful in shaping and governing media since the withdrawal of colonial rule in the larger region. The 1990s were an inflection point when we saw the state sharing space with private players and eventually having its role diluted. Today, many argue that we are witnessing a comeback by the nation-state. However, what we certainly are witnessing, at least in the Indian context, is how in the name of digital and data sovereignty, the state is being taken over by and handed over to home-grown Big Tech – a criticism that is usually levied against Silicon Valley technology corporations for controlling the digital media space. This is perhaps a paradox, where we see the state working overtly to relegate its role to corporations, and is especially characteristic of a heightened neoliberal media system. However, it is a good idea to remember the origins of digital media in the military internet to place this imperative for control in historical perspective.
SS: Could you tell us about the current state of the media in Southasia and how it’s shaped by Southasian communities – for example, through newer forms of popular DIY media like podcasts?
PR: Even as I mention Big Tech and internet histories linked to the militaries, one cannot deny the ethos and vision behind the creation of the World Wide Web towards foregrounding publicness. This was most evident in internet subcultures of the 1980s and has since always remained a strand of digital culture. People and communities do continue to shape the media, especially with the ubiquity of mobile phones in Southasia, which is home to a large mobile-first digitally connected population. The ease of using various mobile apps to record podcasts, design text and typography using apps like Canva, and record short and feature films using mobile phone cameras is a game-changer from times when media production costs were really high. This, of course, reflects the liberatory potential of such media as well.
Preeti Raghunath’s reading recommendations for notable works on the media in Southasia
Sanjay Asthana’s India’s State-Run Media: Broadcasting, Power, and Narrative is a good book to get acquainted with to understand the shape public-service broadcasting in India has taken. Communications, Media and the Imperial Experience: Britain and India in the Twentieth Century by Chandrika Kaul presents an imperial history of media, allowing readers to explore historical trajectories that have contributed to the making of the media in the modern world. The volume Asian Sound Cultures: Voice, Noise, Sound, Technology, edited by Iris Haukamp, Christin Hoene and Martyn David Smith, presents an expansive anthology in the form of a cartography of sound cultures in the Asian continent. For acquiring an understanding of how the Global South features in conversations on internet governance, Internet Governance and the Global South: Demand for a New Framework by Abu Bhuiyan is a great start.
This month in Southasian publishing
Here at Himal’s editing desk, a few new releases especially caught our eye this month.
In Forgotten Foods: Memories and Recipes from Muslim South, edited by Tarana Husain Khan, Claire Chambers and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley (Picador India, October 2023), historians, scholars, scientists and chefs come together to document ideas of hospitality, accessibility, family, social class and more in Muslim kitchens in Southasia.
For more on the topic of food, in an essay we published this month, Burhan Majid looks at how the consumption of a variety of meat plays a significant role in perpetuating social barriers and caste and class hierarchies in Kashmiri Muslim society.
Despite all that has been written on sports in India, there remains a growing gap – where are all the women? This month also marks the publication of Sohini Chattopadhyay’s The Day I Became a Runner: A Women’s History of India Through the Lens of Sport (HarperCollins India, October 2023). Sohini presents the stories of nine women athletes from diverse backgrounds told through as an alternative account of the history of independent India. The book foregrounds commentary on sexual violence, caste and the many other challenges faced by female athletes, and also the courage and determination of women athletes in the face of poverty, restrictive social conventions and patriarchy.
Another forthcoming title that caught our attention is Gentle Resistance: The Autobiography of Chandi Prasad Bhatt, translated by Samir Banerjee. Bhatt is a pioneering environmentalist known for his activism in the Chipko Movement of the 1970s to protect forests from commercial logging and the Indian government’s deforestation policies in Uttarakhand. For more on the Chipko Movement and its organisers, read Manisha Aryal’s cover story for Himal in 1994. As Manisha writes, for all that it might have developed into, Chipko as a definable movement wound up too quickly, its energies sapped by excessive adulation.
The ecologist Madhav Gadgil, another important figure in Indian environmentalism, published A Walk Up The Hill: Living with People and Nature this August. In this memoir, Gadgil reflects on his life and work as a leading researcher in the fields of ecology and biodiversity, particularly in the Western Ghats, and offers a deep study of environmental movements across India as well as community-centred approaches to conservation.
The New India Foundation announced the longlist for the 2023 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize for nonfiction books about modern and contemporary Indian history. Read an excerpt from one of the ten longlisted titles, The Journey of Hindi Language Journalism in India: From Raj to Swaraj and Beyond by Mrinal Pande (Orient BlackSwan, August 2022), looking at the rise of Hindi print in India since the early 1970s.
Until next time, happy reading!
Shwetha Srikanthan
Assistant Editor, Himal Southasian