Ameen Sayani, an iconic Radio Ceylon host, likely in the 1970s. Sayani has been celebrated as an eminent voice of the Pakistani soundscape, as well as a symbol of shared culture with India. Photo courtesy: Rajil Sayani and Srinivas Agarwal’s family / Isabel Huacuja Alonso, BioScope.

Radio’s role in making and unmaking Southasia’s borders

‘Radio for the Millions’ charts the medium’s role in popular cultures and state-making projects of the Subcontinent, rethinking long-held assumptions on transnational listenership

Preeti Raghunath is a lecturer at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. She is the author of Community Radio Policies in South Asia: A Deliberative Policy Ecology Approach (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

This April, the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations tweeted: "Get ready for a historic moment as the 100th episode of PM Modi's 'Mann Ki Baat' is set to go live on April 30th in Trusteeship Council Chamber at @UN HQ!" Mann Ki Baat is the monthly radio programme of the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, where he expresses his views on current events and shares his Hindu nationalist thought. Broadcast on All India Radio, it is a centrepiece of Modi's communication strategy, presented as his way of reaching out directly to the common Indian citizen. That Modi has persisted with his radio broadcasts since shortly after he took power in 2014 is testament to the lasting reach and power of what is today often seen as an outmoded medium (though Mann Ki Baat also goes out as a podcast for those more online-inclined). The show's 100th episode was broadcast globally, with even organs of Indian diplomacy roped in to make an event of it. The tweet by the Permanent Mission of India put on display not just radio's still-enormous communication potential, but also how nation-states and political leaders aim to retain control over it, even in the digital era, for use towards their ideological and strategic goals. With the anniversary episode and the tweet, Modi was looking to go global with a tool otherwise largely confined to his listenership within the borders of India.

Control over radio, as well as transnational listenership of the medium, is of course not a preserve of the present – much research and many books have captured the histories of these phenomena from various angles. Take, for instance, the scholar Anandita Bajpai's Cordial Cold War (2021), which looks at Cold War affiliations through the lens of sonic cultures in India and Germany. Or consider the remarks from 1994 by Krishna Chandra Sharma, a former director general of All India Radio, quoted in a 2008 paper by the researcher Alasdair Pinkerton: "The relationship between the BBC and Indian listeners has been one of love and hate. Love for the professional competence and hate as it represented the voice of a colonial empire. Even during the post-freedom period, more often than not a bias against India was discernible in BBC broadcasts in our conflicts with Pakistan, particularly on the Kashmir issue."

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