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Radio and the Raj: broadcasting in British India (1920–1940)1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2008

ALASDAIR PINKERTON
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Extract

India offers special opportunities for the development of broadcasting. Its distances and wide spaces alone make it a promising field. In India's remote villages there are many who, after the day's work is done, find time hangs nearly enough upon their hands, and there must be many officials and others whose duties carry them into out-of-the-way places where they crave for the company of their friends and the solace of human companionship. There are of course, too, in many households, those whom social custom debars from taking part in recreation outside their own homes. To all these and many more broadcasting will be a blessing and a boon of real value. Both for entertainment and for education its possibilities are great, and yet we perhaps scarcely realise how great they are. Broadcasting in India is today in its infancy, but I have little doubt that before many years are past, the numbers of its audience will have increased tenfold, and that this new application of science will have its devotees in every part of India.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , April 2008 , pp. 167 - 191
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2008

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Footnotes

1

The term ‘Radio and the Raj’ was used by Partha Sarathi Gupta in his account of early radio in India. See P. S. Gupta, Power, Politics and the People: Studies in British Imperialism and Indian Nationalism (London, 2002), pp. 447–480.

References

2 H. E the Viceroy Lord Irwin, speaking on the inauguration of the Bombay station of the Indian Broadcasting Corporation (IBC), quoted in: Lionel Fielden, Broadcasting in India: Report on the Progress of Broadcasting in India (Delhi/Simla, 1940), p. 1 (Emphasis added).

3 Misra, M., ‘Untold: An Indian Affair: Episode 4 The Road to the Raj’, Takeaway Media and Channel 4 Television (TV Broadcast: October 2001)Google Scholar. See also Kaul, C., Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India, 1880–1922 (Manchester, 2003)Google Scholar

4 See, for example, Ferguson, N., Empire: How Britain made the modern world (London, 2003), in particular pp. 146–154.Google Scholar

5 Goradia, N., Lord Curzon: The Last of the British Moghuls (New Delhi, 1997)Google Scholar

6 Gupta, Power, Politics and the People, p. 447. In this volume, Gupta provides an excellent review of radio's early development in India.

7 The commercially-driven British Broadcasting Company, Ltd. had been established in 1922, with John Reith as Managing Director, as a joint venture of British (ie. Marconi Company) and American commercial interests (inc. General Electric and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company). The remit of the company was to establish a national network of radio transmitters – by integrating many of the transmitting stations owned by the shareholding companies – and to provide, critically, a national broadcasting service. However, following the publication of the Crawford Report (2 March 1926), which called for the dissolution of private broadcasting, moves were made to create a non-commercial, crown-chartered, British Broadcasting Corporation (launched on 1 January 1927). For a more detailed illustration of this early BBC history, see, for example, A. Briggs, The BBC: The First Fifty Years (Oxford, 1985), and Briggs, A., The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. 2: The Golden Age of Wireless (London, 1965)Google Scholar.

8 Gupta, Power, Politics and the People, p. 447.

9 Briggs, A., The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. 1: The Birth of Broadcasting (London, 1961)Google Scholar.

10 Motwane was not a radio engineer or technician, but as a young Parsee entrepreneur alive to the commercial possibilities of radio. See, for example, Fielden, Broadcasting in India. Also, on the development of broadcasting in the Madras Presidency, see P. Thangamami, History of Broadcasting in India (Madras, 2000).

11 Motwane's broadcasts were made under the call sign/radio designation “2-KC”. He subsequently went on to form the “Chicago Radio Company” based in Bombay, which still specialises in the manufacture of radio and public address equipment. Source: http://www.chicago-radio.net/aboutus.htm (accessed online: 6 December 2006).

12 The cooperative venture between The Times of India and the Bombay Post & Telegraph Office took place during August 1921. The transmissions could be heard in Poona (Puna), approximately 100 miles southeast of Bombay. A. Peterson, Early Radio in India, Radio, Heritage Foundation (undated), Source: http://www.radioheritage.net/Story23.asp (accessed online: 22 May 2005).

13 Fielden, Broadcasting in India, p. 3. Lionel Fielden was the Government of India's Director of Broadcasting between 1935–1940. This publication was an official review of the emergence and development of Indian broadcasting, since the early 1920s.

14 Estimates suggest that a dozen, or more, radio stations were developed in India between 1920–1927. These were all experimental in nature, and many did not survive more than one day of broadcasting. See ibid.

15 BBC WAC E1/897/1: Correspondence: John Reith to Sec. of State for India. Although the British Broadcasting Company was a privately-owned entity, Reith was already (by 1924) advocating and emphasising the benefits of broadcasting as a “public service”.

16 Reith, J., Into the Wind (London, 1949)Google Scholar. See also Kaul, C., ‘Monarchical Display and the Politics of Empire: Princes of Wales and India 1870–1920s’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 17, No. 4, 2006, pp. 464–488CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 The Committee on Broadcasting (1925) chaired by the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, commonly known as the Crawford Committee, proposed that broadcasting in the UK should be placed under the trusteeship of a public corporation.

18 For a more nuanced context of post-War finances and economics in British India see Gupta, Chapter 2, ‘State and Business in India in the age of Discriminatory Protection, 1916–39’, in Power, Politics and the People, pp. 111–166.

19 Reith, Into the Wind, p. 113

20 BBC WAC E1/897/1: Correspondence: John Reith to Sec. of State for India.

21 IOR/L/PO/3/1: Broadcasting in India; Private letter from Lord Birkenhead to Lord Irwin (15 July 1926) (Emphasis added).

22 An internal memorandum, with almost identical wording had been circulated within the India Office during July, and had been sent to the Viceroy on 15th July (IOR/L/P&J/8/118.Broadcasting in India: Policy).

23 D. Wilby, ‘BBC Under Pressure: The General Strike 1926’, BBC Heritage (undated). Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/heritage/in_depth/pressure/pdf/generalstrike.pdf (accessed online: 11 August 2006).

24 Reith, J., ‘Forsan’, Parliamentary Affairs, XVII, I (1963), pp. 23–30Google Scholar. See also Paulu, B., ‘United Kingdom: quality with control’, The Journal of Communication, 28, 3 (1972), from p. 52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Ibid., p. 26.

26 IOR/L/PO/3/1. Broadcasting in India; Private letter from Lord Birkenhead to Lord Irwin (15 July 1926) (emphasis added).

27 IOR/L/PO/3/1. Broadcasting in India; Private letter from Lord Irwin to Lord Birkenhead (9 September 1926).

28 Ibid.

29 Gupta, Power, Politics and the People, p. 35. Despite the rejection of his concerns and ideas, Birkenhead was gracious enough to record a speech for the inauguration ceremony of the IBC. It was cut into a gramophone record and flown to India in time for the station's opening – and was, as Eric Dunstan, was to point out, “the first occasion that the voice of the Secretary of State for India will be heard in this country”. See IOR/L/PO/3/1: Broadcasting in India. Letter from Eric Dunstan to Lord Birkenhead (7 July 1927).

30 Reith, Into the Wind, p. 149.

31 The most successful of India's radio clubs, the Madras Presidency Radio Club, was finally forced to close down in October 1927. See Fielden, Broadcasting in India.

32 Ibid.

33 BBC E1/897/1. Letter: Dunstan to Reith (July 1927).

34 Fielden, Broadcasting in India, p. x. By mid 1928 it is clear that John Reith at the BBC had received reports of the IBC's (and Eric Dunstan's) troubles. He attempted to help by writing to the representatives of the lucrative British radio industry (inc. Metro-Vickers and the British Thompson Houston Company) in the hope of interesting them in the commercial opportunities available in the Indian radio environment. BBC WAC E1/897/3: Indian Broadcasting.

35 Zivin, J., ‘The Imagined Reign of the Iron Lecturer’, Modern Asian Studies, 32, 3 (1998), p. 725CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 See Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. 2.

37 Fielden, Broadcasting in India, p. x.

38 A BBC internal memo from 7 March 1928 suggested that the “European type” programming being pursued by the IBC could only ever hope to attract c. 35,000 subscribers (maximum). BBC E1/897/3.

39 IOR/L/PO/3/1: Broadcasting in India; Private letter from Lord Birkenhead to Lord Irwin (15 July 1926) (Emphasis added).

40 Pendakur, M., ‘All India Radio’ in Encyclopaedia of Radio, V1, ed. Sterling, C. H. (2003), p. 35Google Scholar.

41 Fielden, Broadcasting in India, p. x.

42 See again Gupta, Power, Politics and the People, pp. 111–166.

43 Reith's diary entries from around this time provide a vivid account of the attention he dedicated to the question of Indian broadcasting. See Reith, Into the Wind, pp. 113, 204–207.

44 See, for example, Hale, J., Radio Power (London, 1976)Google Scholar.

45 By December 1930 only 7,719 active radio licences were in force. Fielden Broadcasting in India, p. x.

46 IOR/L/P&J/8/118: Broadcasting in India: Policy. The Government of India accepted the advice of the Retrenchment Advisory Committee and elected to close down the broadcasting service. The capital assets were to be “sold outright for what they could fetch”. This was, in turn, confirmed in a Press Release issued on 9 October 1931.

47 IOR/L/P&J/8/118: Broadcasting in India. Policy Letter to Undersecretary of State for India (24 November 1931).

48 Fielden, Broadcasting in India, p. x.

49 Ibid.

50 Briggs, The BBC: The First Fifty Years, p. 110.

51 Fielden, Broadcasting in India, pp. 1–2.

52 Zivin, ‘The Imagined Reign of the Iron Lecturer’, p. 726.

53 H. E Lord Irwin, speaking on the inauguration of the Bombay station of the Indian Broadcasting Corporation (IBC), quoted in Fielden, Broadcasting in India, p. 1.

54 Ibid., p. xi. However, as Zivin recognises, while there was a growing confidence in the development of centralised broadcasting, this was often bought at the cost of localised, culturally connected village broadcasting, see ‘The Imagined Reign of the Iron Lecturer’, pp. 734–735.

55 Figures sourced from Fielden's 1940 official report to the GoI, detailing the development and “progress of Indian broadcasting”, see Broadcasting in India, pp. 23–25. Fielden illustrates well the growing importance of ‘native listening’ by concluding that: “On the basis of these figures it would seem that there is some justification for the continuance of European programmes, at any rate from some stations of the All India Radio network” (p. 24).

56 Fielden, L., The Natural Bent (London, 1960), p. 204Google Scholar.

57 See, for example, Low, D. A., Britain and Indian Nationalism: the imprint of ambiguity, 1929–42 (Cambridge, 1997))CrossRefGoogle Scholar and his earlier work, Low, D. A., Eclipse of Empire (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar.

58 This is in stark contrast with the Falkland Islands government who, along with Governor Arnold Hodson, had been energetic in their support for the development of broadcasting in the colony.

59 V.S.S (1937) Map shows India's chain of Broadcasting Stations actual and prospective, and the areas covered, Journal of World, 2 July 1937. Enclosed in IOR/L/I/1/445. Correspondence regarding Broadcasting in India.

60 Fielden, The Natural Bent, pp. 126–127.

61 Gupta, Power, Politics and the People, p. 161.

62 Zivin, ‘The Imagined Reign of the Iron Lecturer’, p. 721.

63 Strickland, C. F., CIE., ‘Broadcasting in Rural India’, The BBC Year-Book 1934 (London, 1934), pp. 43–44Google Scholar (Emphasis added).

64 Washburn, P. C., Broadcasting Propaganda: International Radio Broadcasting and the Construction of Political Reality (Westport, 1992)Google Scholar.

65 Strickland, C. F., ‘Broadcasting in the Indian Village (address to the East India Association)’, The Asiatic Review, XXX (1934), p. 14Google Scholar.

66 Ibid.

67 Zivin, ‘The Imagined Reign of the Iron Lecturer’, p. 729.

68 The very fact that Strickland's 1934 article, ‘Broadcasting in Rural India’, appeared in the BBC Year Book seems, to modern (post-Suez/Falklands/Hutton) eyes, editorially questionable.

69 Strickland, ‘Broadcasting in Rural India’, p. 44.

70 Ibid. The BBC had “promised to loan a transmitter to the Association as soon as the receiving end of the scheme had taken shape”, p. 44.

71 BBC WAC. E4/1 Empire Service Policy (1927).

72 Ibid. (Emphasis added).

73 Ibid.

74 Walker, A., A Skyful of Freedom: 50 years of the BBC World Service (London, 1992)Google Scholar. Walker provides a useful illustration of the Empire Service's “competition” in Chapter 2: The Totalitarian Challenge, pp. 26–35.

75 Reith, Into the Wind, p. 205.

76 News of this development seemed to spread rapidly through the ‘wireless world’. By January 1935, an article appeared in an American academic journal ‘officially’ confirming progress in India: “At the moment of writing this review, official news comes to hand of definite steps to be taken at once by the Government of India to develop broadcasting in that highly populated and politically complex country”. See A. R. Burrows, ‘Broadcasting Outside the United States’, Annals of the Association of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 177, Radio: The Fifth Estate (1935), pp. 29–41.

77 BBC WAC E1/896/2. Correspondence: Willingdon to Reith, September 7, 1934. See also Reith, Into the Wind, p. 206.

78 Gupta has noted that home department officials “regarded themselves as the ultimate authority in matters of imperial security and looked at other departments like industries and labour [the seat of broadcasting] as de haut en bas”, see Power, Politics and the People, pp. 462–463.

79 BBC WAC E1/896/2.

80 A. Boyle, Only the wind will listen: Reith of the BBC (London, 1972), p. 269.

81 Reith, Into the Wind, p. 270.

82 As Reith's biographer, Andrew Boyle, points out, rather more acerbically; “His [Reith's] burning ambition was to become Viceroy of India, and that broadcasting post might have been a useful stepping stone.” See Boyle, Only the wind will listen, pp. 270–271.

83 Ibid, p. 113. Writing in 1949, it seems safe to assume that by “subsequent events” Reith was referring to the rapid growth of the ‘Quit-India’ movement during the early-mid 1940s and the subsequent move towards independence in 1947. It is also presumably a reference to the religious tensions and tragedies provoked by partition along religious borders.

84 Walker, A Skyful of Freedom, p. 27.

85 And or, as Boyle has implied, politically motivated, see Boyle, Only the wind will listen.

86 Reith, Into the Wind, p. 233.

87 Ibid. Reith notes that at about the same time the Government of Palestine also requested a member of the BBC staff to take control of broadcasting development. This practice became increasingly common (and a BBC policy) during the 1950s as Britain's African colonies began developing broadcasting systems. See C. Armour, ‘The BBC and the Development of Broadcasting in British Colonial Africa 1946–1956’, African Affairs, 83, 332 (1984), pp. 359–402.

88 Fielden, The Natural Bent, pp. 126–127. See also opening quotation of this section.

89 Brass, P. R., The Politics of India Since Independence (Cambridge, 1992)Google Scholar.

90 Gupta, Power, Politics and the People, p. 94. While ‘provincialisation’ was in essence a ‘liberal’ policy (politically) it nonetheless smacked of “divide and rule” in the Indian context. See also Danzig, R., ‘The Many Layered Cake’, Modern Asian Studies, VIII (1974), p. 64Google Scholar.

91 Reith, Into the Wind, p. 206.

92 Ibid.

93 E1/896/2. Minutes of meeting at India Office (18 October 1934).

94 Fielden, The Natural Bent, p. 146.

95 Gorman, M., ‘Sir William O'Shaughnessy, Lord Dalhousie and the Establishment of the Telegraph System in India’, Technology and Culture, 12, 4 (1971), pp. 596–597CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

96 Letter from Reith to Lionel Fielden (13 August, 1935), quoted in Fielden, Broadcasting in India, p. 147.

97 Fielden, The Natural Bent, pp. 146–147 (Emphasis added). This somewhat echoed those sentiments that had, previously, been advanced by C. F. Strickland.

98 Ibid., p. 145.

99 Ibid.

100 Ibid., p. 144.

101 Fielden, Broadcasting in India, p. 1.

102 Zivin, J., ‘Bent: A Colonial Subversive and Indian Broadcasting’, Past and Present, 162 (1999), pp. 195–220CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

103 Awasthy, G. C., Broadcasting in India (Bombay, 1965)Google Scholar.

104 Fielden speculated that unless Indian broadcasting could acquire an ‘All-India personality’ within one year, central control of programming would succumb to provincial particularisms, whereby “every state would have its Luxembourg, its jazz or Indian equivalent, its advertisement racket, its playing-down-to-the-lowest-common-denominator-of-taste”, The Natural Bent, p. 145.

105 Ibid., p. 193. As Amanda Weidman has recognised, AIR “commanding in its grandeur and yet ethereal at the same time, seemed to capture the potential power of radio in India, a medium as simple and invisible as the air itself but capable of carrying so much” (p. 469), see Weidman, A., ‘Guru and Gramophone: Fantasies of Fidelity and Modern Technologies of the Real’, Public Culture, 15, 3 (2003), pp. 453–476CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

106 A. Peterson, Early Radio in India, Radio Heritage Foundation (undated), Source: http://www.radioheritage.net/Story23.asp (accessed online: 22 May 2005).

107 Gupta, Power, Politics and the People, p. 466.

108 NAI: Home-public-1936-File No. 106/36. Minute by E.M Jenkins, 13 January 1936.

109 Fielden, Broadcasting in India.

110 Lionel Fielden had already noted Maurice Hallett's resistance to the development of radio broadcasting in correspondence with John Reith. In one letter dated 28 January 1936 he suggests that both Hallett and Craik (Home Department member of the Viceroy's Executive Council) “hate broadcasting with bitter, unreasoning old-fashioned hatred”, BBC WAC E1/896/3.

111 IOR L/P&J/7/54. Minute: R. A. Butler (21 October 1936). Rab Butler was Undersecretary of State for India from 1932–37 and thus had played a central part in drafting the Government of India Act (1935). See Butler, R. A., The Art of the Possible (London, 1971))Google Scholar.

112 See Fielden, The Natural Bent, and Zivin, ‘Bent: A Colonial Subversive and Indian Broadcasting’, for a fuller account of these encounters as well as Fielden's associated difficulties.

113 Zivin, ‘Bent: A Colonial Subversive and Indian Broadcasting’.

114 Mary Procida has recognised the importance of ‘autobiography’ in the latter days of the British Raj as an often-self conscious mirror on late-imperial life, and questions of political legitimacy. See Procida, M., ‘“The greater part of my life has been spent in India’: Autobiography and the crisis of Empire in the twentieth century”, Biography, 25, 1 (2002), pp. 130–150CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

115 Fielden, Broadcasting in India, p. 198.

116 Zivin, ‘Bent: A Colonial Subversive and Indian Broadcasting’, pp. 216–220.

117 Saxena, M. L. (1937) ‘The All India Radio’ in The Modem Review, ed. Chatterjee, R. (1937), pp. 446–448Google Scholar.

118 Fielden's official 1940 report on Indian broadcasting is a vivid display of his considerable achievement. Despite these, licence subscriptions were still only 92, 782 by the end of 1940, see Broadcasting in India, p. xiv.

119 Zivin, ‘Bent: A Colonial Subversive and Indian Broadcasting’.

120 The author thanks the editor and referees attached to the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for their supportive comments. Particular thanks are also due to Professor Klaus Dodds of the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, for his critical insights and reflections. This research was funded by an ESRC Doctoral Studentship (2003–2007).