Prasar Bharati CEO, Sh. Jawhar Sircar's Definitive Article about All India Radio-A Must-read for all who have loved or love Akashvani

Remembering Akashvani

By Jawhar Sircar

Chief Executive Officer,Prasar Bharati

Few people may be aware that United Nations has declared  13^th of February as World Radio Day, because the resolution is just two years

old. It was on this day in 1946 that the United Nations Radio was

established,

and though belated, the humble radio has finally been given

its pride of place. It helped connect billions through very affordable

receivers and can, therefore, claim to be prime ‘democratiser’ of

infotainment in the modern world. What began in the early part of the

nineteenth century with physicists like Faraday and Maxwell working on

exciting theories and experiments in electro-magnetic waves reached its

peak when Hertz (remember ‘mega-hertz’?), Branly, Tesla, de Mousa,

Braun and other pioneers demonstrated that ‘wireless telegraphy’ was

actually feasible. In November 1894, our own Jagadish Chandra Bose

literally ‘rang a bell’ in Calcutta without any connecting wire, while six

months later, on 7th of May 1895 (Russia’s ‘Radio Day’), Alexander

Popov displayed the first ‘radio set’.

But it was Marconi who obtained the first patent in March 1897

and immediately set up his British Marconi Company and also the first

radio station in the world, on the Isle of Wight. This Italian would move

fast and far in life, and in 1909 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics,

with Karl Braun. But it was San Jose, California, that showed the world

that it was destined to become the ‘Silicon Valley’, when that very year,

Charles Herrold constructed the first really operational radio station. As a

farmer’s son, he was familiar with ‘broad-casting’, i.e., the scattering of

seeds by hand, and he gave us this term to tele-communications. Radios

would soon became the lifeline for ships out on the seas, more so during

distress, and as expected, it was developed in the First World War to

communicate with troops on the battle-front.

As soon as the war ended, civilian use picked up and in August

1920, a station in Argentina began regular entertainment broadcasts,

Detroit, Michigan issued the first known news broadcast. With typical

American business sense, KDKA in Pittsburgh went on the air on

November 2, 1920, with the Presidential election results, heralding in

commercial broadcasting. Several broadcasters in the USA followed, but

the BBC would take two more years to start its first broadcast: on 14th

November, 1922. In typical governmental style, the Postmaster General

took some months to sign the licence, but BBC had already embarked on

its mission and had started spreading its services throughout Britain.

The sudden newspaper strike of 1926 gave it unprecedented popularity

as the sole medium available, and the radio had finally arrived.

  India did not lag behind, and even as the BBC picked up speed,

Bombay started its own Radio Club in 1923, while the Presidency Club of

Madras also set up its own radio facility in 1924. The early adventures

covered tiny circles, but by 1926, some enterprising businessmen got

together in Bombay and formed the Indian Broadcasting Company. The

IBC installed the first proper radio station in Bombay on 23rd

of July

1927 and followed it up with another in Calcutta on 26th

of August. The

number of licensed radio owners was, however, just three thousand and

by March 1930, the company had thus to wind up. By then, the British

Indian government had finally got its act together and followed the

advice of BBC’s founding director general, John Reith, who had been

trying in vain from 1923 to convince successive Viceroys on the merits of

public service broadcasting. The Crown quickly took over the sick

company’s assets and on April Fools’ Day of 1930, the Indian State

Broadcasting Service (ISBS) was formed. It parent department,

Industries and Labour, tried to offset the costs of the new service by

increasing duty on receiver sets.

 In December 1932, BBC’s Empire Service was extended to India,

but matters would greatly improve when Reith sent Lionel Fielden to

assume charge in August 1935, of the newly-created office, Controller of

Broadcasting. Described as “brilliant but impetuous….very highly

creative” and someone the “system looks on with disfavour”, Fielden

proved these epithets as he went about his job like a man possessed. By

January 1936, he gave Delhi its radio station, at Kingsway Camp:

ruffling many feathers as he went about in his brusque ‘must do’ style.

“I quarrel frightfully with all the Secretaries and Deputy Secretaries”, he

bemoaned to Lord Keith, “and I don’t see how I can do anything else”.

The establishment wanted a bland, officious media, but Fielding tried

hard to air the voice of India, as he heard it. When he invited a noted

critic of the Raj, Verrier Elwin, to speak on the radio on (yes, on) Empire

Day, he won strong enemies but several friends among Indians. On the

8^th of June of that year, the ISBS was re-named ‘All India Radio’, Tagore

re-christened it as Akashvani, the voice that comes over from the skies,

through a poem that was penned in 1938, for the inauguration of

Calcutta’s Short Wave service.

Within a year, the Second World War broke out and Britain had to

act fast in India as Nazi propaganda was reaching over the Short Wave

Radio. News bulletins in India had already been centralised and even the

regional services were given their ‘ready scripts’ from Delhi: a practice

that continues till today. Their daily number was now hiked to 27. We

may recall an interesting episode when a ‘Congress Radio’ was set up on

3^rd September 1942, just a few days after the Quit India Movement. It

claimed to be from “somewhere in India” and played quite a cat and

mouse game with the police, as the portable radio station shifted locations.

But on the 11^th November,

the young group of freedom fighters

were caught in their act and the Police Commissioner of Bombay

squarely accused Ram Manohar Lohia of being the mastermind.

As British left the shores of India, AIR had only 6 stations

covering four metros and Lucknow along with Tiruchirapally, while the

Princely States of Mysore, Travancore, Hyderabad and Aurangabad had

four, of their own. There were just two and a half lakh receiver sets for

a population that exceeded 325 million. This would soon change, as

Nehru made radio one of his priorities for uniting the new India that

Churchill predicted would “soon breakdown under its own anarchy”. By

1961, the number of radio stations trebled and by 1981, nearly a

hundred centres catered to an estimated 90 million radio receivers.

There are 413 stations today, of which 218 are studios that originate

programmes: varying from just a few hours a day to 24x7. In addition,

195 relay centres carry different broadcasts: mainstream Akashvani,

Vividh Bharati, FM Rainbow or Gold and local multi-purpose Radio

stations. Though Short Wave is on its way out and Medium Wave

appears to be stagnating, it is FM that rules the wave and 391 of AIR’s

587 transmitters are FM, with more being added every month. It can be

heard quite clearly on mobile handsets, that will soon hit the billion

mark, but FM’s range is quite limited.

Among the most remarkable achievements of AIR was its Vividh

Bharati service which began in October 1957, i.e., five years after Radio

Ceylon had started and had managed to garner a huge following of

Hindi film song lovers across the sub-continent: all because AIR was

stopped by the then I&B Minister, Dr BV Keskar. He promoted classical

music, which captivated an unparalleled number of enthusiasts, but he

also banned “cheap and vulgar” filmi songs over Akashvani. Vividh

Bharati could, however, overtake Radio Ceylon within just a few years,

and, in the process, it helped unite India. Most Indians submerged their

inherited ‘differences’ of language, religion or region, in favour of an

emerging pan-Indian, supra-national identity. Despite the protests from

intellectuals, there is no denial that Hindi film songs became the ‘link

culture’ and is the shared sentimental heritage of not only the masses,

but even of upper echelons. For several decades before the cheap tape-cas it was Akashvani’s Vividh Bharati that not only

captivated Indians but released it from the confines of only the few who

could afford movie tickets or could possess expensive gramophones. To

the man in street, Akashvani stood for filmi geet and sombre news bulletins.

But AIR is or was more than that: it had radio plays, feature

shows, radio talks, large doses of classical music, quiz and poetry

competitions and school based programmes, as well as a very rich

archives that is yet to be tapped fully. The agricultural revolution in

India owes an enormous debt to the broadcasts of AIR, and also DD,

before and after it was delinked from AIR in April 1976. AIR also picked

up ‘rural broadcasting’ from where ‘community listening’ had started

before Independence, and strengthened it with what the farmer needed:

weather reports, market prices, agricultural tips, animal husbandry,

health and hygiene. By 1960, the number of community sets had

reached 50,000 and in the late 1960’s, the problem of power and

batteries that valve-based radios had faced would be over, as the

transistor revolution transformed India.

 The two wars in the 1960s provided Akashvani a unique

opportunity to galvanise the nation as never before. The India that

appeared fragmented in 1947, with fourteen distinct provinces of the

British and 565 Princely States, stood like a rock in 1962: behind her

soldiers fighting on icy high altitudes. Vividh Bharati started its Jayamala

programme to cheer the armed forces, with Nargis, Lata, Asha, Mukesh,

Naushad, Manna Dey and the who’s who of the film world leading it.

Then rolled out other unforgettable programmes, like Inspector Eagle,

the Bourn-vita Quiz Contest, Filmi Mukadama, Antakshari, Man Chahe

Geet, Sangeet Sarita, Chhaya Geet, et al.

 We may also remember that All India Radio actually lived up to its

name, for it never discriminated against singers and artistes like Ghulam

Ali, Mehdi Hasan, Nusrat and Rahat Fateh Ali, Mohsin Khan, Mira,

Monalisa, Shafqat Ali Khan, Abida Parveen, Adnan Sami and others who

were Pakistanis. Its radio waves united souls in music and a shared

history that the politics of a ‘Two Nation theory’ had rendered asunder.

*Edited article was published in Indian Express, dated 13 Feb 2014 with the title
 “Riding the waves, a shared history”.

This article has been updated with changes in Data till May,2014
Source of Article:
http://jawharsircar.org/assets/pdf/World_Radio_Day-Remembering_Akashvani_Jawhar_Sircar.pdf