Description
Book SynopsisRadio for the Millions examines 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.
Trade ReviewRadio 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 IndiaThis 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 Inés Casillas, author of
Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-Language Radio and Public AdvocacyIsabel Alonso provides a captivating history of radio that sits at the intersection of sound studies, cultural history, and the politics of nationalism in modern South Asia. In this virtuosic tale, we read about the policymakers, artists, singers, political figures, and poets who inhabited a broader transnational space in South Asia. . . This book will benefit an expansive community of readers, including academic communities in the disciplines of history and ethnomusicology and specifically readers interested in the cultural history of sound and music -- Pouya Nekouei * Not Even Past *
Skillfully and imaginatively highlights the place of [radio] in the broader historiographies of nation-building, language, and the public sphere. -- Faiz Ullah * The Book Review (India) *
An original and truly fascinating work. * H-Soz-Kult *
A fascinating story of the history of radio in South Asia. -- Mehru Jaffer * The Citizen *
The book makes an important contribution, especially in unearthing and resurrecting liminal voices, which make up what I would call a kind of archaeology of Southasian media. * Himal Southasian *
Table of ContentsList of Figures
Note on Transliteration
Introduction: Tuning In to a Radio History
Part I: Radio News And World War II1. News on the AIR
2. Netaji’s “Quisling Radio”
Part II: Music And Postindependence Radio3. The “Sound Standards” of a New India
4. Radio Ceylon, King of the Airwaves
Part III: Dramatic Radio and the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War5. Radio Pakistan’s Seventeen Days of Drama
6. The AIR Urdu Service’s Letters of Longing
Conclusion: Call to Me. Where Are You?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
