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.
Isabel Huacuja Alonso argues that despite British, Indian, and Pakistani politicians' efforts to usurp the medium for state purposes, radio largely escaped their grasp. She demonstrates that the medium enabled listeners and broadcasters to resist the cultural, linguistic, and political agendas of the British colonial administration and the subsequent independent Indian and Pakistani governments. Rather than being merely a tool of nation building in South Asia, radio created affective links that defied state agendas, policies, and borders. It forged an enduring transnational soundscape, even after the 1947 Partition had made a united India a political impossibility.
Huacuja Alonso traces how people engaged with radio across news, music, and drama broadcasts, arguing for a more expansive definition of what it means to listen. She develops the concept of radio resonance to understand how radio relied on circuits of oral communication such as rumor and gossip and to account for the affective bonds this talk created. By analyzing Hindi film-song radio programs, she demonstrates how radio spurred new ways of listening to cinema. Drawing on a rich collection of sources, including newly recovered recordings, listeners' letters to radio stations, original interviews with broadcasters, and archival documents from across three continents, Radio for the Millions rethinks assumptions about how the medium connects with audiences.
Isabel Huacuja Alonso is an assistant professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University.
Title: Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders
Author: Huacuja Alonso, Isabel
ISBN: 9780231206617
Binding:
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Publication Date: 2023-01-03
Number of Pages: 312
Weight: 0.4451 kg
Radio for the Millions is a fantastic work of radio history and South Asian historiography. It is meticulously researched, making use of an extensive range of archival collections across India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, as well as oral-historical interviews with radio broadcasters. Focusing on radio as a medium and following radio waves across the national borders of South Asia, this book is an excellent contribution to the project of decolonizing sound studies and the project of denationalizing South Asian history. -- Amanda Weidman, author of Brought to Life by the Voice: Playback Singing and Cultural Politics in South India
This pathbreaking study shows how an attentiveness to the political and cultural potency of radio sounds reframes our understandings of histories in South Asia. Huacuja Alonso illuminates the relationship between aurality and orality, inviting us to lend an ear to voices and sounds on the radio waves that transcend and complicate borders, states, identities, and cultures in South Asia. -- Kama Maclean, University of Heidelberg
This ambitious and wide-ranging book takes seriously radio as a medium and music as a central form of sensorial engagement that defied borders and communal affiliations. Spanning India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka from the colonial to the postcolonial periods, it explains how a subcontinental popular culture endured in spite of multiple partitions. -- Durba Ghosh, Cornell University
Radio for the Millions challenges neat historiographies often developed from and/or by state archives. Huacuja Alonso reminds us that the oral and aural are indeed messy and complicated yet necessary registers for understanding national, political turmoils. Hindi-Urdu broadcast radio has long been a site of both (state) nation-building and (community) place-making by listeners. Radio for the Millions is an exemplary study of why listening is such an integral component of history. -- Dolores Ines Casillas, author of Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-Language Radio and Public Advocacy