The Imagined Reign of the Iron Lecturer: Village Broadcasting in Colonial India

Abstract

In the decade preceding the consolidation of All India Radio (circa 1936), there was an alternative model for broadcasting in India. It rejected the premise that there was a national audience, a national culture, or a national politics, or that radio's key function was to create them. In these negations of broadcasting's nation-statist implications, this model for Indian radio departed from the standard of the 1930s for the mass medium in the Western democracies and authoritarian states alike. Decreeing that discrete local services were the natural correspondent to the subcontinent's fractured social landscape, the model affronted the legitimacy of Indian nationalism. In this it mirrored the conservative face of colonial rule.