Material Lives of Cold War Radio Pasts in India

Abstract

This article explores radio’s material legacies by exclusively focussing on the trajectories of radio-objects, which travelled between foreign broadcasting stations and their Indian listeners during the Cold War years. The presence of such objects in listeners’ homesteads/private collections even today and their affective relationship(s) to them can enable us to examine how radio materially permeated the larger social fabric of listeners’ everyday lives, not just through sound but also a plethora of things. Zooming in on gifts, souvenirs, letters, photographs and memorabilia, the article shows how radio-objects enabled Indian listeners to perform difference and distinction locally, to imagine and experience foreign countries through landscape-objects, to establish networks of South-South epistolary exchange, and to ‘see’ both co-listeners and radio hosts through travelling photographs.

Mr Badri Prasad Verma ‘Anjaan’ has been an ardent international short-wave radio listener since 1965. In April 2022, I visited his homestead in Gola Bazar, a rural township 70 kilometers away from the north Indian city of Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, in search for material traces of his radio listening days. During this trip, I was generously shown all the objects which Mr Verma has received from different radio stations since the 1960s. Epistolary exchanges, QSL cards, radio guides and reception reports have been neatly filed and carefully archived in cupboards within the intimate space of his bedroom. Each radio station has one or several folders. Over the past fifty plus years of dedicated radio listening, Mr Verma has also kept record of each show by several stations, describing the contents of individual features in painstaking details. As several cupboards in his bedroom (Figure 1) were opened and materials pulled out of the shelves, we soon found ourselves amidst stacks of documents, files and folders that gradually took over all available empty space in the room, making it a living archive that resounded with vibrant radio-pasts. In a room adjacent to the bedroom, two iron cupboards are used for storing several other radio-objects. The door of one of the cupboards is covered with stickers from several stations ranging from Voice of America (VOA), Deutsche Welle (DW), Radio Berlin International (RBI), Radio Tashkent, Radio Sweden, Radio Nederland, Voice of Free China (Taiwan), NHK Japan to Radio Praha and Radio Beijing (later renamed China Radio International), among others (Figure 2). The cupboards house Grundig, Siemens and Sony radio sets, which Verma won in DW competitions; silk tablecloths from China sent by Radio Beijing; boxes with pin-badges from all kinds of stations; peak caps, plastic or cloth bags and slides of landscape sceneries of the GDR from RBI; torch lights; besides calculators, wrist watches, notepads, pens, frisbees, flags and pennants, cassettes with show recordings, vinyl discs with music, and photo albums.

Figure 1 In Badri Prasad Verma Anjaan’s bedroom where each shelf is testimony to his radio listening days since the 1960s, Photo: April 11, 2022, Jyothidas KV ©Bajpai.

Figure 2 Cupboard in Badri Prasad Verma Anjaan’s homestead with stickers sent by different radio stations, Photo: April 11, 2022, Jyothidas KV ©Bajpai.

These two rooms are a living testimony to the material remnants of the vibrant acoustic field of international radio listening in Cold War India, which this article aims to capture. Though the ways of archiving and preserving such sonic pasts may differ from one homestead to the other, Mr Verma’s bedroom is, in fact, illustrative of several homesteads I have visited since 2018, whereby things serve as material reminders of a time when radio sets and radio listening were ubiquitous in urban and rural India alike.

Focusing exclusively on objects that travelled between foreign broadcasting radio stations and their listeners in India, this article contributes to Cold War radio research by zooming in on radio’s material legacies and how a medium, which is essentially ephemeral and evanescent was materially rendered present through things. As the opening vignette shows, radio in rural India was not just a sonic presence, it also entered household spaces through things– gifts, souvenirs, letters and photographs. Exploring these things’ trajectories presents us with much wider networks of connectivity and communication in the Cold War than those that have so far been explored by radio scholarship. In tracing these trajectories, the article will engage with discussions on what a material history of radio could look like, how things unravel radio-pasts as sites of South-South entanglements and how radio-objects become windows to keepers’ biographies. It thus calls for a new approach to understanding how stations were perceived both at the time of transmission as well as listeners’ ongoing relationship to them in present times. Radio reception histories have primarily relied on listeners’ letters (to radio stations) and sources from institutionalised radio archives as the sole means to reconstruct how programmes or personalities were perceived historically. Following the movement of things exchanged between stations and listeners shows how radio did not stop when the sound knob was turned off. They point to pockets of sedimentation, whereby radio became ubiquitous for much longer after the transmission was over. At the same time, radio-objects direct us to a larger domain of studying popular cultures of collective listening, ‘seeing’ and experiencing distant places, writing letters, photography and talking politics.

The article begins with a brief introduction to scholarship on radio listening cultures in India. The ensuing sections trace (i) the material lives of radio-objects in Indian homesteads and how they became a means to perform difference and international connectivity locally; (ii) how travelling landscape-objects enabled listeners to imagine and experience a wider world; (iii) how letters as radio-objects informed South-South epistolary exchanges and how they are today preserved as archived sources in private collections; and finally (iv) how travelling photographs, on the one hand, enabled listeners to ‘see’ their radio hosts and co-listeners, and on the other, how as radio-objects they serve as autobiographical objects, narrational tools, that enable listeners to recount fragments of their life trajectories. Each of the sections engages with hitherto unexplored material aspects of short-wave listening histories and their ensuing transnational networks of connectivity during the Cold War years.

The article draws upon fieldwork conducted in the states of Bihar (2018–19), Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh (2022) in India, where I have been tracing the histories of listeners’ clubs of foreign broadcasting stations during the Cold War. The listeners, whose narratives I closely cite throughout the text, have varied educational and class backgrounds and different professional trajectories (poet and author, chemistry teacher at a college, chemistry professor at state university, goldsmith and bangle-maker, construction-site raw material supplier, grocery and all-purpose shop owner, homemaker, Assistant Statistical Officer). However, two commonalities in their social/demographic profiles are that none of them comes from a big metropolis. Barring two interlocutors, who ran their listeners’ club from Jaipur (capital of Rajasthan) though originally coming from small districts in Uttar Pradesh, all interlocutors were listeners based in small townships, rural districts, or medium-sized cities. In all cases, Hindi is not the listeners’ mother tongue or first language of communication, with Maithili, Bhojpuri, Awadhi or Rajasthani being the languages of everyday use. I first discovered these listeners in the sound tapes of Radio Berlin International’s (RBI, foreign broadcasting station of the German Democratic Republic) Hindi Service programme, where their names were regularly announced on different features. 200 magnetic tapes of the show (aired between 1988–90) are housed in the RBI holdings of the Deutsches Rundfunk Archiv (DRA) in Potsdam, Germany.¹ My search for the station’s Hindi Service moderators, three of whom were later employed at Deutsche Welle, and most of whom I have been interviewing since 2018 in Berlin, Bonn, and Cologne, led me to Sabine Imhof. In her nine years at RBI, Imhof not only moderated on air but was also the main person responsible for responding to listeners’ letters on behalf of the Hindi Service. During one of the interviews, Imhof shared a collection of photographs which listeners had sent to RBI Hindi Division in the 1970s-90s. Most of these photographs bore listeners’ spatial coordinates on their back-sides. This led me to a search based on postal addresses in Madhepura, Bikaner, Jaipur, Fatehpur Shekhawati, Narnaul, Azamgarh and Gola Bazaar, Gorakhpur. While several listeners have perhaps moved to new locations, most of those whom I could find successfully still live at their old residential addresses. I conducted interviews in Patna, Bihar in 2018, in Madhepura, Bihar in 2019, and in Bikaner, Jaipur (Rajasthan) and Gola Bazaar (Uttar Pradesh) in 2022. Some of the listeners are still connected to each other via social media. My search for more listeners based on postal addresses and listeners’ networks continues even as this article is published.

Radio in Cold War India

Radio broadcasting has helped re-configure spaces and people across the globe since its very inception in the 1920s. There is a substantial and continually expanding body of research on radio and the Cold War.² In Europe, scholarship exists on Western broadcasters which specifically targeted audiences in socialist countries or those on the other side of the ideological divide (such as Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, BBC’s German Service and Radio in the American Sector (RIAS)).³ There is also a burgeoning field of scholarship on Cold War radio in African contexts.⁴

Like most postcolonial contexts, in India too, radio became a powerful instrument for projecting the new nation. The colonial regime was aware of the power of the medium as a ‘magical device’ for reaching out to rural audiences as well as its potential in becoming an instrument of nationalist agitation against the British Raj.⁵ During World War II, India became a ‘geopolitical hotspot’ for competing Allied and Axis broadcasters.⁶ In independent India, radio served as a state tool for consolidating the nation, under strict governance of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.⁷ On a more international level, the Cold War ushered a renewed world-wide emphasis on radio broadcasting as a channel for public diplomacy and soft power. With the transistor radio enabling a wider reception of international wavelengths from the 1960s onwards, new contact zones emerged for local Indian listening communities. While the state-run All India Radio (AIR) was considered one of the crucial vehicles of nation building in the newly independent nation-state’s five-year plans, international broadcasting services also paved their way to Indian ears.⁸

Thus, since the early Cold War years, non-aligned India became a battlefield for acoustic competition and sonic affiliation for both the power ‘blocs’ and for several broadcasting stations across the ‘Iron Curtain’ divide. Some of the most popular stations with a listener base during the Cold War years were VOA, Radio Ceylon, Radio Beijing, Radio Tashkent, Radio Budapest, NHK Japan, Radio Praha, Radio Moscow, BBC World’s Hindi Service, DW and RBI. Scholarship on radio in South Asia has attracted historical attention in several contexts. Research on the origins of radio broadcasting in colonial India; on community radio and its presence in people’s everyday life, especially when referring to rural and ‘remote’ India; radio and nation building projects in postcolonial India; on radio as a producer of ‘national’ culture; the nationalization of Indian classical music through radio; the intersecting trajectories of All India Radio and Bombay Cinema– these are some of the themes which have been well explored.⁹ Within the domain of international broadcasting, however, especially during the Cold War years, research has primarily been limited to systematic studies of BBC, with hardly any attention paid to the plethora of other stations that catered to Hindi speaking audiences.¹⁰ And yet, as a brief glimpse into the private collections of Badri Prasad Verma, with which this article began, points out that several international stations had dedicated listeners, particularly in semi-urban and rural parts of the country. Tracing these entangled radio pasts can shed light not only on the hitherto unexplored trajectories of international broadcasters (those that do not have colonial origins like the BBC) but help unpack their competitive trajectories in a wider Cold War context.

In the 1960s up to early 1980s, television sets were a rarity in most of India (particularly so in non-urban contexts) and radio was still the only means for people to connect with a wider world. Community radio finds its origins in the rituals of collective listening. Especially in rural India, where radio sets and transistors were a luxury even in the 1980s, collective listening was commonplace and played an instrumental role in the formation of listeners’ clubs. Listening to international broadcasters enabled listeners to produce active sites for enacting as well as co-shaping acoustic registers of Cold War international affinities and local internationalisms. Tracing the history of these radio stations can thus offer a vibrant field of entangled interventions from the ground, whereby listeners do not just listen, but also speak back. The sonic field therein becomes a space of technological innovation, transfer and techno politics on the one hand, and political communication and the making of global publics in the Cold War on the other.¹¹

A highlight for most Indian listeners when it came to foreign broadcasters was that listeners’ names, queries and exchanges were often read out in the mailbag programmes of shows. This was different from listening to one’s name on the pharmaish programme of All India Radio or Radio Ceylon, whereby listeners requested the station to play specific Bollywood film songs by writing their requests on postcards.¹² Going beyond the focus on songs, international broadcasters offered listeners the possibility to acquire knowledge about the host country, its people and their everyday lives, as well as their political position in the Cold War, while simultaneously establishing a channel of intercultural communication. For Indian listeners, particularly listeners’ clubs, hearing one’s name announced on the radio implied that one did not just hear one’s name in isolation but in company. One was simultaneously recognized on air and in local collective presence as has been recounted to me by several listeners in interviews. In towns and villages, it also meant receiving prizes, gifts, souvenirs and rewards through post. Most interlocutors narrate how seeing one’s name on a post bag or package that came from abroad sparked pride in oneself. These packages thus become a material marker of recognition, a means of being seen by ‘foreign’ radio stations. In the sections below, I explore the material legacies of international radio stations in India by focussing on different kinds of mobile radio-objects and listeners’ affective ties to them.

Displays of difference: radio-objects and their local material lives

As mentioned in the opening, there were a variety of things that travelled from the host country of individual radio stations to Indian homesteads by registered post. These included, among others, Grundig, Siemens and Sony radio sets (DW); T-Shirts, handkerchiefs and silk tablecloths (Radio Beijing); watches (DW), pens (NHK, Japan); pennants, posters and plastic bags (RBI); pin-badges (all broadcasters); landscape objects in the form of calendars, view-cards and slides (DW, RBI, Radio Tashkent and Radio Moscow) etc. These mass-produced objects of everyday presence in their host countries, came to acquire a personalized value upon their arrival in Indian listeners’ homesteads. While some such as shirts, badges, watches and caps were proudly worn by listeners, others such as miniature books, pennants and flags, calendars were exhibited on living room walls and vitrines.

As emerges from my conversations with most listeners, it was important for them to be ‘seen’ with these gifts from abroad within their local contexts. Alka Chandel, an RBI listener from Jaipur, tellingly narrated ‘At the time when we got these things from abroad, we felt very superior.’¹³ Kushal Chand Lakhotia, who ran his own radio listeners’ club for several stations said ‘Usually my wife did not support my radio passion. She would be annoyed with how stuck I was to the set all day. But when the things arrived as gifts, especially radio sets from Deutche Welle, she would calm down and be happy.’¹⁴ Rajendra Swarnkar recounted an episode of how he surprised a relative with a T-Shirt from China. When participating in a competition for Radio Beijing, Swarnkar requested that in case he wins the competition, as an exception, his prize be sent not to his usual club address but a different postal address. The T-Shirt, which he eventually won, became an invaluable gift for his brother-in-law. ‘These things had their special “charm”’, Swarnkar recounted.¹⁵ For people in his vicinity, they were ‘priceless’. In fact, very often things also became sites for jealousy and longing.

People were jealous when they saw the presents these radio stations sent me. Some would openly ask me for advice on how they could also start writing to radio stations in order to get such objects. But there were also those who stole some of the things. For example, one or two of the pin-badges, which I had received in multiples went missing after I showed the same to a visitor in my house. Very often, if things came by regular post, people at the post office would open packages and then gifts would go missing. This is why in all my letters I would ask stations to send things by registered mail.¹⁶

Listeners’ clubs also showcased objects that members had received from radio stations at club exhibitions. These exhibitions were photographed events which neighbours were invited to attend. Photographs of the same staging individual stations locally were then sent back to the broadcasters as material evidence of club activities and their loyalty to particular stations (Figure 3).

Figure 3 Photograph of a club exhibition sent to Radio Berlin International by the RBI Listeners’ club founded by PN Dougall in Naya Nangal, Punjab, undated, Private Collections Sabine Imhof currently Private Collections @author (the collection will eventually become a part of the RBI holding of Deutsches Rundfunk Archiv, Potsdam, Germany).

Travelling radio-objects became a means to perform one’s international connectedness. The fact that one had received gifts from another country, from people at radio stations whom one had not even met in person, proved one’s networks in the wider world. At the same time, things were a material marker of distinction in one’s local social context. To wear a shirt or a watch which could not be purchased in India, own a radio set that came from West Germany, and to have a rare fabric (Chinese silk) adorn one’s living-room table was a display of difference and distinction. Whereas these objects were perhaps commonplace in their country of origin, they were imbued with a personalized value by keepers in India. They were thus rendered inalienable as precious radio-objects.

Seeing the world through radio: travelling radio landscape-objects

Landscape images of the foreign broadcasting stations’ country of transmission were a common and popular item that was sent to listeners on a regular basis across the globe. While visiting listeners’ homesteads in Rajasthan, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, I was struck by how several listeners had carefully preserved such photographic landscape images as a part of their private collections for over almost four decades. Usually sent in the form of a postcard or a ‘viewcard’ (as it was popularly called by listeners), a radio QSL card, a collection of paintings or photographs (reproduced in multiples) in the form of a booklet (Figures 4, 5, and 6), published images in miniature books, or as slides accompanied by a simple slide-viewer (Dia Betrachtor) (Figure 7), these images served as travelling landscape-objects. They brought the landscape sceneries, both on the countryside and urban (of the broadcasting nation), closer to the imagination of those behind radio sets in India, thus becoming a ‘telescope to other worlds’.¹⁷ When describing one of his favourite ‘gifts’ from Radio Berlin International, GDR’s foreign broadcasting station and its Hindi Division, Arvind Srivastava, who founded the RBI Lenin Club in the 1980s in Madhepura, Bihar stated

Figure 4 Booklet ‘Sehenswürdigkeiten in Berlin: Hauptstadt der DDR’ (Sights/Attractions in Berlin: Capital of the GDR) sent by Radio Berlin International to Arvind Srivastava (Lenin Club), Private Collections Arvind Srivastava. Photo: March 26, 2019, Jyothidas KV ©Bajpai.

Figure 5 Arvind Srivastava shows the booklet to the author. Each page can be used as a postcard. Photo: March 26, 2019, Jyothidas KV ©Bajpai.

Figure 6 Booklet with landscape images of Sächsische Schweiz (Saxonian Switzerland) in the GDR sent to C.P.S. Chandel and Alka Chandel (Pink City Club, Jaipur) by Radio Berlin International, Private Collections C.P.S. Chandel and Alka Chandel, undated, Photo: April 9, 2022, Jyothidas KV ©Bajpai.

Figure 7 Slides depicting East Berlin’s urban landscape and manual slide viewer (Dia Betractor) sent to Rajendra Swarnkar in Bikaner, Rajasthan by Radio Berlin International, Private Collections Rajendra Kumar Swarnkar, undated, Photo: April 2, 2022, Jyothidas KV ©Bajpai.

RBI was my favourite station. It brought me closest to the power of a medium like viewcards. These gave me the minutest details of GDR’s beautiful landscapes. If one only speaks of the capital East Berlin and its urban landscape, then in each moment of viewing the viewcards from RBI, I felt as if I was personally travelling to the city. You perhaps wouldn’t believe it, but this was a dreamland for me. In these imaginary travels, I would get out of the hotel Stadt Berlin and walk towards the famous TV tower and then the city hall. Then I would move along the Spree and go to the Unter den Linden street. All the famous museums, theatres, and cultural centres would come alive before my eyes. These images teleported me to the city. The viewcards became a means for me to see, understand and even experience Berlin. Such was the magnetism of these images that four of us friends from the Lenin Club even planned to travel to Berlin on our bicycles. Thanks to these images, which I had seen over and over again, I was convinced that I would never lose my way in the city of Berlin.¹⁸

Rather than looking at landscape images as static, bi-dimensional, and representational, Della Dora aptly calls for ‘[A]n approach to graphic landscape representations that emphasizes what these are, rather than what they simply represent or show.’¹⁹ In the context of radio listening, this implies looking at the landscape imagery sent by radio stations to listeners not only for its contents but also in terms of its forms and keepers’ engagement with the same. This opens up explorations into how listeners relate to, affectively experience, archive and display, speak about and use the same as transnational objects, with whom their relationship also transitions in space and time. Just as in Srivastava’s case, for Swarnkar too landscape images, which also came in the form of slides accompanied with a simple manual slide-viewer from the GDR (Figure 7), became a means for him to picturize the landscapes of the country that his favourite presenters came from. This slide-viewer, in his words, enabled him to ‘screen-off’ his own immediate environment and be teleported to the land where RBI was transmitting from. Objects such as these thus informed how radio enabled listeners to ‘see’ and not just ‘listen’ to another world.

Letters as radio-objects

Radio research has relied on letters written by listeners as an important source in documenting the perspective of those behind radio sets.²⁰ Like several listeners across the globe, Indian listeners also wrote regularly to several stations. Through letters they established transnational networks of exchange both with broadcasting stations as well as with co-listeners within and outside India. Such letters offer us the possibility to explore: the flow of information about different parts of the world, how letters were used to stage Afro-Asian solidarities, and how they were invested with listeners’ curiosities. Going beyond the contents of what was written in them, the meaning of words, and how listeners developed epistolary cultures, letters also serve as objects that are carefully copied, collected and archived. As memory objects they enable keepers (as authors and receivers) to showcase their radio-pasts in the present, their connectedness with the world at the time, and also to recount fragments of their lives.

Radio’s epistolary exchange networks: letters and the competition for prizes

Most foreign broadcasting radio stations encouraged listeners to write regularly to them by organizing essay competitions and quizzes. Upon answering correctly or writing an impressive essay, listeners were rewarded with prizes such as radio sets, watches, pens, calculators etc. These lengthy letters with essays and answers to quiz competitions, copies of which can be found even today in the private collections of listeners, and traces of which are not to be found in institutional radio archives, not just open a new field for exploring epistolary cultures, but also offer insights into how radio stations crafted listeners’ political formation in the Cold War years. Rajendra Kumar Swarnkar from Bikaner proudly showed me copies of four such essays and quiz competition letters, which he wrote to the Hindi services of Radio Tashkent (length: 22 pages), Radio Beijing (25 pages), Radio Moscow (19 pages) and Deutsche Welle (11 pages), for all of which he won one of the top three prizes. Resembling miniature hand-written booklets with several hand-drawn illustrations and sheets stapled together, these letters can help us delve into how Swarnkar collected information for answering questions asked on the shows, how he informed himself about the host countries, their political and cultural history, and the form and style of calligraphy and sketching which he developed for writing letters to the stations in the future.

Some of the questions the essays address are: ‘When did you start listening to Radio Moscow? Why do you listen to the station? Which programmes do you like the most and why?’ (essay to Radio Moscow); While two of the essays are on broader themes: ‘The history of Uzbekistan’ (Radio Tashkent) and ‘Our expectations from a reunited Germany’ (DW, 1990), the essay to Radio Beijing addresses ten specific questions (among others: ‘Which sports are most popular in China? What is the history of Radio Beijing and when did its Hindi short-wave service commence? How many presenters does the Hindi programme have? What are the show’s transmission timings?’ etc.). The letters contain several sketches of radio stations’ logos, calligraphy in Mandarin, Devanagri and Russian scripts, and portraits of political personalities like Gorbachev and Lenin drawn by Swarnkar (Figures 8–12). The letters’ contents hint at the author’s eagerness to display all that he knew about the radio stations’ host countries. In his interview, Swarnkar told me:

Figure 8 Rajendra Kumar Swarnkar shows the photocopy of a letter sent to Radio Tashkent, resembling a hand-written booklet, an essay competition for which he received the first prize. Private Collections Rajendra Kumar Swarnkar, Photo: Bikaner, April 2, 2022, Jyothidas KV ©Bajpai.

Figure 9 (top) and 10 (bottom). Portraits of Gorbachev and Lenin sketched by Swarnkar in essay competition letters sent to Radio Tashkent and Moscow. Private Collections Rajendra Kumar Swarnkar, Photo: Bikaner, April 2, 2022, Jyothidas KV ©Bajpai.

Figure 10  

Figure 11 Sketch drawn as part of an essay by Swarnkar (‘40 years of PRC’), Private Collections Rajendra Kumar Swarnkar, Photo: Bikaner, April 2, 2022, Jyothidas KV ©Bajpai.

Figure 12 Sketch drawn as part of an essay by Swarnkar (‘60^th anniversary of Radio Moscow’), Private Collections Rajendra Kumar Swarnkar, Photo: Bikaner, April 2, 2022, Jyothidas KV ©Bajpai.

Radio listening expanded one’s world view. It was not only about entertainment. Real pleasure did not just come from hearing one’s name announced on the show. That wasn’t really an achievement. A real achievement was to hear your name on radio as the winner of a competition. One had to do research in order to apply for such competitions. I often used material sent by several stations to inform myself about different places in the world. I did not listen to radio out of pretentiousness, I did it because I sought knowledge. That was important to me, coming from such a small place as I do. Yes, in the end that knowledge brought me prizes, which I would have never managed to buy from my own pocket.²¹

It is only when I read copies of these lengthy letters in listeners’ homesteads that I came to ask interlocutors how they collected information on topics which they had written about. Information material in the form of books, brochures and magazines, which listeners in remote areas of rural India received from various radio stations, particularly Radio Moscow, RBI, and DW, were almost used like course books for ‘learning about the world’.²² Letters show listeners’ motivations to both learn and to share information. They became a means of showcasing knowledge both to the radio stations as well as to co-listeners.

Swarnkar has not only preserved copies of these letters for over thirty years, he has also meticulously indexed and chronologically ordered them in his collections. For example, in the letter-booklet to Radio Beijing, he has additionally noted on the front page that the letter was posted in 1989, it weighed 70 grams and contained cover stamps which cost him a total of 28.50 Rupees (Figure 13). This archiving technique is also to be seen in the case of all envelopes in which Swarnkar received any letter or an object as a gift/prize from the stations. For example, on the envelope of a parcel sent by DW he notes that he received it on April 15, 1991, that it contained a letter/card from the West German embassy, a Siemens radio set, a Friwo adapter, stereo headphones, a purse to keep the set in, and a radio guide book. Next to its date of arrival, is the personal note: ‘Today it has been 44 entire days that father died’ (Figure 14). Such notes on archived objects often enabled Swarnkar to recount events from his life. A similar example of careful indexing in his collections is the envelope of another parcel with hand-written notes stating that it contained a Sony ICF SW 20 radio set, headphones, a purse to keep these in, two Daimon batteries and a plastic safety plate (Figure 15). In fact, Swarnkar is so proud of his habit of collecting, indexing and ordering that he told me ‘If there was ever a competition on how radio-objects are preserved, I am certain I would win that competition too (laughs).’²³

Figure 13 Copy of a letter-booklet sent by Rajendra Swarnkar to Radio Beijing in 1989. On the right, the author has noted down that it was posted in 1989, weighs 70 grams and contains cover stamps which cost him a total of 28.50 Rupees. The title on the top reads ‘Questionaire on a New China’, Private Collections Rajendra Kumar Swarnkar, Photo: Bikaner, April 2, 2022, Jyothidas KV ©Bajpai.

Figure 14 Envelope of a registered parcel sent by Deutsche Welle to Rajendra Swarnkar. On the top right corner the collector has noted the date of its arrival (15.04.1991) and that it was 44 days after his father’s death. At the bottom the collector lists the contents of the parcel. Private Collections Rajendra Kumar Swarnkar, Photo: Bikaner, April 2, 2022, Jyothidas KV ©Bajpai.

Letters and South-South entanglements

Radio listening did not just produce global listening publics for the host stations, but also initiated channels of epistolary exchange among listeners across continents.²⁴ Besides books, brochures, and magazines with information about the host country, most stations also published their weekly or monthly radio magazines/journals, which were widely distributed by post among listeners all over the world. For the Indian listeners whom I interviewed, it was a matter of pride that their names, the name and address of their listeners’ club and their photographs were published in these transnationally rotating magazines. One such example comes from Mrs. Shakuntala Verma, wife of Badri Prasad Verma (mentioned at the beginning of the article), who was the vice-president of their listeners’ club in Gola Bazar, Gorakhpur, India. The club (Swargiya Meenu Radio Listeners’ Club) was often mentioned in magazines of RBI, DW, NHK Japan and Radio Beijing. This published presence sparked a series of exchanges across South Asia and Africa, with several co-listeners from Nigeria, Ghana, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal often sending letters to Mrs. Verma in order to become pen-friends, establish exchanges over world events and their countries of origin. While some such letters express a curiosity to get to know Mrs. Verma (Figure 16) (some are in pursuit of romantic interest), others (to Badri Prasad) show a will to know more about India. Most striking in several letters is that co-listeners from Nigeria vocally request Mr Verma for a pocket radio (‘I want you to send me a pocket radio’ (Figure 17); ‘The reason why I write you this letter to you [sic.] is that I want you to send me a pocket radio so that I will be hearing all what is going on in the world also by hearing the news and so many different types of things’ (Figure 18), perhaps pointing to similar registers of how radio-objects, ‘things’ from abroad, were locally valued and highly desired in other contexts as well.

Figure 15 Envelope of a registered parcel sent by Deutsche Welle to Rajendra Swarnkar whereby the collector lists the contents of the parcel. Private Collections Rajendra Kumar Swarnkar, Photo: Bikaner, April 2, 2022, Jyothidas KV ©Bajpai.

Figure 16 Letter sent by Radio Japan listener from Ghana to Mrs. Shakuntala Verma in India, 16.06.1987, Private Collections Badri Prasad Verma Anjaan, Photo: Gola Bazaar, April 11, 2022, Jyothidas KV © Bajpai.

As objects carefully archived in listeners’ private collections today, letters illustrate how listeners actively informed themselves about issues in international politics through short waves, how they formed political opinions, positioned themselves vis-à-vis the same and sometimes even expressed solidarity. In that sense, letters become an expression of the will to insert oneself in the wider world, of performing an internationalism from rural and sub-urban locales. Though one could say that the mailbag features of radio programmes, particularly those from socialist countries, selected and announced questions that only suited their agenda, it nevertheless shows that audiences expressed their interests and curiosities and also attempted to shape the content of the medium by asking stations to address their queries. In letters written to Radio Moscow, RBI, Tashkent, one notices an unequivocal support to stations for reporting against the Apartheid regime in South Africa, others that are critical of the Pinochet regime in Chile and US aggression in Vietnam. Terms like ‘anti-fascism’, ‘anti-colonialism’, ‘world peace’ and ‘solidarity’ recurrently appear in such letters. Some letters were also accompanied by photographs which showcase club activities such as protest marches against ‘fascism’ and ‘neo-colonialism’, against the South African Apartheid regime, or marches in solidarity with the people in Vietnam or nuclear non-proliferation. Such letters can only be found in listeners’ private collections today and have remained outside the ambit of institutional radio archives. Archives primarily house sources such as show transcripts, which usually consist of excerpts from listeners’ letters which were incorporated into radio shows. As objects archived in private collections, letters not only point to listeners’ engagement with individual stations, but also tell us volumes about larger politicized sites of expression and the networks of Afro-Asian entanglements that they sought to configure.

Photographs as archived radio-objects

As mentioned earlier, sending photographs was commonplace for both the stations as well as listeners. While the former occasionally sent photos of their staff so that listeners could ‘see’ the voices behind the microphone, the latter regularly sent their photographs for radio stations to see them and their club activities. However, the exchange of photos did not stop there. Like letters, several listeners frequently also sent their photographs to co-listeners. Badri Prasad Verma’s private collections consist of several albums, with each photograph sent by a co-listener being meticulously pasted and chronologically placed on the albums’ pages. Today, these photo albums are a means for Verma to show how he was connected to a wider world from the ‘remote’ town of Gola Bazaar, in times when postal services were the only means of long-distance communication for most Indians.

Quite often, I found Verma’s own portrait photographs (Figure 20) inserted in the albums amidst those sent by co-listeners. Verma used these photos as tools to recount his own life events to me. Almost all photographs were dated and chronologically arranged in the albums. Looking at his own photos as he flipped through the pages of the albums helped him to remember and precisely re-narrate specific moments from his youth. At the same time, these photographs were a means for him to indexically insert his presence in the world of radio listeners.

Back-sides of photographs sent by co-listeners often provided details like names, addresses, the year in which the photo was taken, and listeners’ professions and hobbies. For example, one photograph shows us a young man who had written to Verma in 1967, posing with a pen and a camera, quite literally proving that he was a journalist (Figure 19). In a similar vein, it was important for several listeners to show that they listened to radio. Such photographs, often taken in studios or by invited photographers in one’s homestead, served a dual purpose for listeners: (a) to be seen with modern technology such as a radio set, and (b) to also prove their access to the camera, another equally enchanting and modern device, which had captured key moments in their life. That several photographs were developed in multiples and sent to different destinations is proven by the fact that I found duplicates of some of them, which I had from an RBI presenter’s private collections in Germany (Sabine Imhof) and which I was using for tracing listeners during field work, also in Verma’s collections (Figures 21, 22).

Figure 17 and 18 Two sample letters from Nigeria, requesting Badri Prasad Verma for a pocket radio, 1987, Private Collections Badri Prasad Verma Anjaan, Photo: Gola Bazaar, April 11, 2022, Jyothidas KV © Bajpai.

Figure 18  

Figure 19 Photograph sent by a co-listener to Verma, pose with camera, pen and notebook, Private Collections Badri Prasad Verma Anjaan, Photo: Gola Bazaar, April 11, 2022, Jyothidas KV © Bajpai.

Figure 20 A page from one of the albums in Anjaan’s collections. The photograph on the top right corner is Anjaan’s own portrait photo with a radio set, taken in a studio in Gorakhpur in 1968. Private Collections Badri Prasad Verma Anjaan, Photo of photo: Gola Bazaar, April 12, 2022, Jyothidas KV © Bajpai.

Like any other object in this context, photographs also have highly mobile lives. They open chapters of recount. However, they do not just engage onlookers with their content, that which can be seen in the photograph, their materiality also hints at other sensory dimensions of the past. Photographs bear stamps of studios where they were clicked and developed. They also follow aesthetic styles which correspond to the times in which they were taken (black and white or coloured, with or without studio props, with white frames, rounded or square edges etc.). Photographs are ‘relational or distributed objects enmeshed in various networks of telling, seeing and being, which extends beyond what a photograph’s surface visually displays and incorporates what is embodied in their materiality.’²⁵

Elizabeth Edwards points to two elemental characteristics of photographs as objects: their placing and their material conditions. Placing refers to ‘the work of a photographic object in social space through which questions of materiality, adjacency, assemblage and embodied relations frame the meaning of the image.’²⁶ Following each photographic object thus reveals details of its materiality (how, where, when, and by whom they were developed) and assemblage (the complex networks involved in the trajectory of the photograph). By material conditions, Edwards also refers to the ‘remediation and repurposing of the photographic images: the material translation of a photograph from one kind of object to another.’²⁷ This process of translation can be seen in some of the letters which Rajendra Swarnkar sent to several radio stations for competitions. In copies of three such letters (discussed in the previous section), Swarnkar skilfully pasted the photocopy of his own passport-sized ID photograph and aesthetically reworked it with additive painting/outlining and by drawing motifs around its frame. Next to the photo in the letter, Swarnkar usually wrote a biographical note, introducing himself to the station (Figure 23). Thus, a simple passport-sized ID photo, which was otherwise utilized for everyday bureaucratic purposes (ration-card, a voter ID, a driver’s license etc.) was sometimes re-worked and translated into a different kind of photograph/object (as part of a letter) by listeners and made exclusive for both the receiving radio station and co-listeners. Such photos cannot be seen in isolation but belong to a letter-photo composite. At the same time, such a reworked photocopy of a photograph, which becomes part of a letter, points to a particular practice of ‘interventions with the surface of the image’, as suggested by Christopher Pinney.²⁸ Portrait photographs in the Indian context are often re-constructed through overpainting and collage. Pinney states that ‘they extend its [the photograph’s] indexicality, which is seen as a baseline for a photograph, not as the complete rendering of an identity; instead the identity recorded in the photograph is extended and enhanced, revealing a form of inner self through material surface additions to the photograph itself.’²⁹

Figure 21 (left): A page from one of the albums in Anjaan’s collections, Private Collections Badri Prasad Verma Anjaan, Photo of photo: Gola Bazaar, April 12, 2022, Jyothidas KV © Bajpai.

In Entangled Objects Nicholas Thomas suggestively states ‘Objects are not what they were made to be but what they have become. This is to contradict a pervasive identification in museum research and material culture studies which stabilizes the identity of a thing in its fixed and founded material form.’³⁰ Photographs as objects are often at the heart of creative recontextualization and re-authorship. They also serve as autobiographical objects, narrational tools, that enable listeners to recount fragments of their life stories. They are not just testimony to what was, their social lives as objects belonging to changing times, but just like other objects, they are often utilized by keepers in re-weaving and re-narrating their own pasts.³¹ For Badri Prasad Verma and Shakuntala Verma, one such family photograph (Figure 24), which he sent to several radio stations, and a copy of which he has in his collections, is the only living memory of his eldest daughter who died at a very young age. In the photo, one sees Verma and his children posing with a radio set. Verma would later on name his listeners’ club after his deceased daughter (Meenu), an advice he took from Sun Ing, a host at Radio Beijing’s Hindi programme, whom the Vermas wrote regularly to and were in touch with until recently.³² Holding the photograph evoked an affective response in both Badri and Shakuntala, who were both in tears when recounting the short life of their daughter. The photograph, an autobiographical object held in their hands when speaking to me, enabled both to recount their biography and this part of their past, which would not have happened had we not encountered the photograph in Verma’s archive.

Figure 22 (right): A multiple of the photograph on top left corner in Figure 20, which KK Jaiswal, from Basti sent to RBI on 27.07.1985. The photo showcases a portrait of India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1984, and Jaiswal’s radio set. Private Collections Sabine Imhof, currently Private Collections @author (the collection will eventually become a part of the RBI holding of Deutsches Rundfunk Archiv, Potsdam, Germany).

Figure 23 Swarnkar’s portrait, photocopy of an ID photograph pasted into his essay-letter to Radio Beijing. The photo has been re-worked with additive outlining, overpainting with a pencil and motifs drawn around its frame, Private Collections Rajendra Kumar Swarnkar, Photo: Bikaner, April 2, 2022, Jyothidas KV ©Bajpai.

Figure 24 Badri Prasad Verma with his four children and a radio set. Meenu (his eldest daughter) is seen in the back row in a blue dress. Exact date unknown, Private Collections Badri Prasad Verma Anjaan and Shakuntala Verma, Photo: Gola Bazaar, April 12, 2022, Jyothidas KV © Bajpai.

Conclusion

In tracing the histories of individual radio stations through archival sources, most research on radio has primarily focused on the content and semantics of radio shows (what was presented, language, diction, style, voice of the presenters, mailbag programmes, and letters), the technicalities and technologies of transmission and reception, and the overarching aims of radio stations, such as their role in nation- and community building and their utilization for state objectives or as an ideological instrument of the cultural Cold War.³³

Contributions to radio histories within media reception studies have primarily focussed on the medium’s transforming technologies and how these have impacted who listens, when and where they listen, and how they do so.³⁴ The practice of writing reception-reports, particularly when it comes to short-wave radio, is one noteworthy transformation in this direction, which has informed the crafting of participatory cultures.³⁵ With the introduction of reception-report writing, ‘hams’, ‘DXers’, amateur listeners learnt standardized codes for reporting back to stations about the quality of their transmission.³⁶ However, barring such technological innovations and how they have enabled the making of listening audiences, reception studies largely remains devoid of reflections on the materiality of the medium. Important clues and parallels to the same may be situated in Fan studies, which has indeed drawn our attention to how fans relate to fan-objects and collectibles, and how these objects are tied into transforming relationships with their keepers, particularly when it comes to cinema, television and sports.³⁷ Particularly relevant is scholarship on keepers’ emotional ties with objects (especially toys and childhood favourites like Lego), and how things enable them to physically connect to their pasts in present times or to form communities of fan activities.³⁸ For radio, the genre of literary fan studies has engaged with radio dramas and radio poetry and how these have impacted radio-show fan mail writing.³⁹ Memorabilia, which I have termed as ‘radio-objects’ are largely outside the purview of this scholarship. Taking this clue from Fan Studies, this article has explored how research on radio’s listening publics may profiteer from studies of material culture. Contributions within anthropology in general, and studies of material culture specifically, have drawn attention to the materiality of radio as a communication technology, the materiality of sound, and ‘[…] the culturally specific ways that people attune themselves to (or attenuate themselves from) the radio machine, its technology, its portability, its commodity status […]’.⁴⁰ This contribution has called for studying radio pasts through a close reading of how listeners relate to radio-objects i.e. souvenirs, photographs, letters, landscape-objects and other radio-memorabilia exchanged between listeners and stations as well as among co-listeners. Abstaining from labelling collectors as ‘fans’, a term which neither does justice to emic self-ascriptions of listeners nor to their ongoing transformative relationships to the collected things, the article closely engages with radio-objects and keepers’ relationships to them as a means to trace radio’s material legacies. It has illustrated how ephemeral and evanescent short waves were materially rendered present through things in Indian households by foreign broadcasting stations. These mobile radio-objects, which travelled across continents, point to how radio was not only ‘heard’ but also how it materially permeated listeners’ everyday lives. Things enabled receiving listeners to perform difference and distinction locally, to stage an internationalism from locales in rural India; to ‘see’, imagine and experience the host countries of the radio stations in the form of landscape objects; to establish transnational epistolary South-South networks and perform Afro-Asian solidarity; and to exchange photographs with both radio stations as well as co-listeners.

Following the social lives of these radio-objects, the article has illustrated how they become inalienable and acquire a personalized value in the Indian context. At the same time, it becomes clear that things are regularly re-contextualized and that their relationship with their keepers is not stable or fixed, but subject to creative re-authorship and transformation over time. Whereas in the moment of being received, most radio-objects were prized possessions, objects of envy for those without them, and valuables which one could not purchase in the local contexts, decades later the same objects become instruments of recall and memory. Another intervention this article has made is to point to the potential of private collections and home archives as a hitherto underexplored source-base in writing histories of radio reception in the global South. Such collections are heterogenous in their composition, consisting not just of written and audio sources, but also memorabilia. The relative recentness of the end of the Cold War offers researchers the rare possibility to explore the potential of living archives and keepers’ affective ties to them.

As an approach, focussing on objects also constitutes another intervention in scholarship on radio in the Cold War. Rather than tracing the trajectory of individual radio stations, embedded as they were in nation-statist projects, the article has explored the world of radio listening as eclectic and diverse.⁴¹ Though exploring individual radio stations’ histories is crucial, a historical ethnography of radio-pasts from the perspective of those behind radio sets reveals that listeners in urban and rural India did not restrain themselves to one or two stations. As an active hobby, radio sets were often turned on in the mornings and short-wave programmes by several foreign broadcasters continued to flow into households and workspaces until late evenings in urban and rural contexts alike. It is thus no surprise that the same listener heard several stations regularly and founded multiple listeners’ clubs at the same time. Prioritizing the side of reception thus entails not restricting the ambit of research to a singular radio station and its intimate ties with Indian listeners, even if each listener club had its personal favourites. Radio-objects offer us the possibility to uncover listening pasts as a wider field of sonic competition, whereby listeners were not passive receivers, but active choosers of what they heard, which and how many stations they wrote to, and why they listened to these stations in the first place. Finally, following mobile things that listeners received, sent, and collected through their radio networks enables delving into radio listening as an activity that triggers and encourages a range of other related practices in everyday life– photography, letter writing, pen-friendships, memorabilia collection and exhibition, reading information brochures/radio guides in order to acquaint oneself with other parts of the world, consuming international news, collective listening, and attunement to sound in the domestic sphere and beyond.

Primary sources

1. Private Collections Sabine Imhof, Berlin, Germany.

2. Private Collections Arvind Srivastava, Madhepura, Bihar, India

3. Private Collections Rajendra Kumar Swarnkar, Bikaner, Rajasthan, India

4. Private Collections Badri Prasad Verma Anjaan and Shakuntala Anjaan, Gola Bazaar, Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, India

5. Private Collections C.P.S. Chandel and Alka Chandel, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India

4. Cited Interviews

1. Arvind Srivastava, Patna, September 2, 2018 and Madhepura, March 25–29, 2019

2. Arvind Srivastava, telephonic interview, July 3, 2022

3. Sabine Imhof, Berlin, July 31, 2018; March 3, 2020 and March 6, 2020

4. Rajendra Kumar Swarnkar, Bikaner April 1–3, 2022

5. Kushal Chand Lakhotia, Bikaner, April 3, 2022

6. Alka Chandel and C.P.S. Chandel, Jaipur, April 9, 2022

7. Badri Prasad Verma Anjaan, Gola Bazaar, Gorakhpur, April 11–12, 2022

8. Shakuntala Verma, Gola Bazaar, Gorakhpur, April 11-12, 2022

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anandita Bajpai

Anandita Bajpai is a Research Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin, Germany. She is currently the Principal Investigator of the Leibniz Collaborative Excellence Research Project ‘Crafting Entanglements: Afro-Asian Pasts of the Global Cold War’ (K437/2022) funded by the Leibniz Association, Germany. Between 2017-20, she was lecturer at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin. She has been a postdoctoral research fellow in the Modern India in German Archives, 1706–1989 (MIDA) Project, funded by the German Research Council (2014-17). Her previous research has focused on political communication and prime-ministerial rhetoric in India. She is the author of Speaking the Nation: The Oratorical Making of Secular, Neo-liberal India (Oxford University Press, 2018). She is the editor (with Heike Liebau) of the Archival Reflexicon, an open-access bilingual journal for theoretical and conceptual reflections on archival architectures/organizing logics as well as thematic contributions on India-related holdings of German archives (https://www.projekt-mida.de/rechercheportal/reflexicon/).

Notes

1 Holding of Radio Berlin International (Hindi), Deutsches Rundfunk Archiv (DRA), Potsdam, https://www.dra.de/de/bestaende/ddr-rundfunk/hoerfunk/.

2 Among others, see: Christoph Classen, ‘Captive Audience? GDR Radio in the Mirror of Listeners’ Mail’, Cold War History 13, no. 2 (2013): 239–54; Christoph Classen, ‘Medialization in Opposing Systems: Approaching a Media History of Divided Germany’, German Historical Institute London Bulletin 41, no. 1 (2019): 19–49; Nicholas John Cull, ‘Reading, Viewing, and Tuning into the Cold War’, in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, ed. M. P. Leffler & O. A. Westad (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), II, 438–59; A. Ross Johnson & R. Eugene Parta, Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe : A Collection of Studies and Documents. Budapest (New York: Central European University Press, 2010); Friederike Kind-Kovács, ‘Voices, Letters, and Literature through the Iron Curtain: Exiles and the (Trans)Mission of Radio in the Cold War’, Cold War History 13, no.2 (2013):193–219; Alasdair Pinkerton & Klaus Dodds, ‘Radio Geopolitics: Broadcasting, Listening and the Struggle for Acoustic Spaces’, Progress in Human Geography 33, no. 1 (2009): 10–27; Alasdair Pinkerton, ‘Radio’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Media Geography, ed. P. C. Adams, J. Craine & J. Dittmer (Farnham [et al.]: Ashgate, 2016), 53-68; Arch Puddington. Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000); Linda Risso, ‘Radio Wars: Broadcasting in the Cold War’, Cold War History 13, no. 2 (2013):145–52; Heiner Stahl, ‘Mediascape and Soundscape: Two Landscapes of Modernity in Cold War Berlin’, in Berlin–Divided City, 1945-1989, ed. P. Broadbent and S. Hake (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 56-66.

3 See for example: Richard. H. Cummings, Cold War Radio: The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950–1989 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009); Richard. H Cummings, Radio Free Europe’s ‘Crusade for Freedom’: Rallying Americans Behind Cold War Broadcasting, 1950–1960 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland 2010); A.R. Johnson, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: The CIA Years and Beyond (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Ruxandra Petrinca, ‘Radio Waves, Memories, and the Politics of Everyday Life in Socialist Romania: The Case of Radio Free Europe’, CNT Centaurus 61, no. 3 (2019):178–99. For research specifically on western foreign broadcasters in the German Democratic Republic, see Airy Curtains in the European Ether: Broadcasting and the Cold War, ed. A. Badenoch, A. Fickers and C. Henrich-Franke (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2013), 321-46; Patrick Major, ‘Listening behind the Curtain: BBC Broadcasting to East Germany and Its Cold War Echo’, Cold War History 13, no. 2 (2013):255–75; Emily Oliver, ‘A Voice for East Germany: Developing the BBC German Service’s East Zone Programme’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 39, no.3 (2019): 568–583.

4 One recent and thought-provoking intervention in the African context is: Marissa J. Moorman’s Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola 1931-2002 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press: 2019).

5 David Lelyveld, ‘Upon the Subdominant: Administering Music on All-India Radio’, Social Text 39 (1994): 111-27 (p.113). For BBC in India, see: Alisdair Pinkerton, ‘A New Kind of Imperialism? The BBC, Cold War Broadcasting and the Contested Geopolitics of South Asia’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 28, no. 4 (2008): 537–55.

6 See for example, Diya Gupta, ‘The Raj in radio wars: BBC Monitoring Reports on Broadcasts for Indian Audiences during the Second World War’, Media History 25, no. 4 (2019): 414-29.

7 Isabell Huacuja Alonso, ‘Radio, Citizenship and the ‘Sound Standards’ of a Newly Independent India’ Public Culture 31, no. 1 (2019): 117-44; Isabell Huacuja Alonso, Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting across Borders (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2023).

8 For All India Radio’s early years up to independence see Indira Baptista Gupta ‘From the BBC’s Shadows? Fledgling

AIR Finding Its Feet’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 42, no. 4 (2022):749-72.

9 For radio broadcasting in colonial India, see David Lelyveld, ‘Upon the Subdominant’; Pinkerton ‘A New Kind of Imperialism?; on community radio, see Y. T. Jayaprakash, , ‘Remote Audiences beyond 2000: Radio, Everyday Life and Development in South India’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 3, no. 2 (2015): 227–39; Y. Nirmala, ‘The Role of Community Radio in Empowering Women in India’, Media Asia 42, no. 1-2(2015): 41–46; on radio and nation building projects in postcolonial India, see Vebhuti Duggal, ‘Imagining Sound through the Pharmaish: Radios and Request-Postcards in North India, c. 1955–1975’, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 9, no. 1 (2018): 1–23; Steven Hughes, ‘The ‘Music Boom’ in Tamil South India: Gramophone, Radio and the Making of Mass Culture’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22, no. 4 (2002): 445–73; David Lelyveld, ‘Upon the Subdominant’; on radio and the production of ‘national’ culture or the nationalization of Indian classical music through radio, see Isabell Huacuja Alonso Radio for the Millions and ‘Radio, Citizenship and the ‘Sound Standards’ of a Newly Independent India’ ; on All India Radio and Bombay Cinema, see the intersecting trajectories of All India Radio and Bombay Cinema, see A. Punathambekar, ‘Ameen Sayani and Radio Ceylon: Notes towards a History of Broadcasting and Bombay Cinema’, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 1, no. 2 (2010): 189–97.

10 Alisdair Pinkerton, ‘A New Kind of Imperialism?’; Pinkerton and Dodds ‘Radio Geopolitics’.

11 On global publics, see Valeska Huber and J. Osterhammel. (eds.) Global Publics: Their Power and their Limits, 1870-1990. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

12 Vebhuti Duggal, ‘Imagining Sound through the Pharmaish’; Isabell Huacuja Alonso, ‘Songs by Ballot: Binaca Geetmala and the Making of a Hindi Film-Song Radio Audience, 1952–1994’, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 13, no. 1 (2022): 38-73.

13 Interview Jaipur, 9 April 2022.

14 Interview Bikaner 3 April 2022.

15 Interview Bikaner 2 April 2022.

16 Interview Bikaner 3 April 2022.

17 Veronica della Dora, ‘Travelling Landscape-objects’, Progress in Human Geography 33, no. 3 (2009): 334-54, 344.

18 Interview (telephonic) Srivastava, 3 July 2022.

19 Veronica della Dora, ‘Travelling Landscape-objects’, 334.

20 Among others, see Christoph Classen, ‘Captive Audience? GDR Radio in the Mirror of Listeners’ Mail’, Cold War History 13, no. 2 (2013):239–54; Friederike Kind-Kovács, ‘Voices, Letters, and Literature through the Iron Curtain: Exiles and the (Trans)Mission of Radio in the Cold War’, Cold War History 13:2 (2013), 193–219; Emily Oliver, ‘A Voice for East Germany: Developing the BBC German Service’s East Zone Programme’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 39, no. 3 (2019): 568–83; Susanne Schädlich, Briefe Ohne Unterschrift: Wie eine BBC Sendung die DDR herausfordete (München: Albert Knaus Verlag, 2017).

21 Interview, Bikaner 2 April 2022.

22 Interview, Madhepura 26 March 2019.

23 Interview, Bikaner 2 April 2022.

24 On listening publics, see Kate Lacey, Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013) and Jason Loviglio, Radio’s Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass-Mediated Democracy (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

25 Joshua A. Bell, ‘Promiscuous Things: Perspectives on Cultural Property through Photographs in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea’, International Journal of Cultural Property 15, no. 2 (2008):123–39 (pp. 124–25). I have dealt with the theme of photographs of listeners as biographical objects in greater depth in Anandita Bajpai, ‘Objects of Love: Remembering Radio Berlin International in India’, in The GDR Tomorrow, eds. Elizabeth Emery, Matthew Hines and Evilyn Preuß, (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, forthcoming 2023), 240-266.

26 Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Objects of Affect: Photography beyond the Image’, Annual Review of Anthropology 41(2012): 226

27 Ibid.

28 Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 137, cited in Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images , eds. E. Edrwards and J. Hart (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 14.

29 Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica, 137 cited in Photographs Objects Histories, eds. E. Edrwards and J. Hart, 14.

30 Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 4.

31 Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

32 Interview, Gorakhpur, 11 April 2022.

33 For India specifically see: Alasdair Pinkerton, ‘Radio and the Raj: Broadcasting in British India (1920–1940)’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 18:2 (2008), 167-91; Alasdair Pinkerton, ‘A New Kind of Imperialism? The BBC, Cold War Broadcasting and the Contested Geopolitics of South Asia’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 28:4 (2008), 537–55.

34 Among others, see Janet Staiger, Media Reception Studies (New York and London: New York University Press, 2005), Susan J. Doughlas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

35 See Jenkins’ seminal work on fans and fandoms, where he develops the framework of ‘participatory culture’. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992).

36 For short-wave listening (SWL), S.I.N.P.O. was a commonly used technique to report to stations about how well one received their signals. Shorthand for Signal strength, Interference (from other stations), Noise (from atmospheric sources), Propagation (disturbance, degree of fading) and Overall Merit (based on reception quality), the code relied on numerical ratings on a scale of one to five, with five being the optimum conditions and one the minimum. In order to ascertain that one had actually heard the programme, most reception report forms asked listeners to describe the overall contents of the programme on a specific date which they were reporting about.

37 Steve Berry, TV Cream Toys: Presents You Pestered Your Parents For (London: Friday Books, 2007); Bob Rehak, ‘Materiality and Object‐Oriented Fandom’ [Editorial], Transformative Works and Cultures, 16 (2014) (see especially the contributions in this issue by Matt Hines, ‘From Dalek half balls to Daft Punk helmets: Mimetic fandom and the crafting of replicas’; Ian M. Peters, ‘Peril-sensitive sunglasses, superheroes in miniature, and pink polka-dot boxers: Artifact and collectible video game feelies, play, and the paratextual gaming experience’; and Forrest Phillips, ‘The butcher, the baker, the lightsaber maker’); Lincoln Geraghty, Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture, (London: Routledge, 2014); Josh Stenger, ‘The Clothes Make the Fan: Fashion and Online Fandom When Buffy the Vampire Slayer Goes to eBay’, Cinema Journal, 45:4 (2006), 26–44; Scott K. Radford and Peter H. Bloch, ‘Grief, Commiseration, and Consumption Following the Death of a Celebrity’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 12:2 (2012), 137–155.

38 See Lincoln Geraghty, ‘Nostalgia, Fandom and the Remediation of Children’s Culture’, in A Companion to Media and Fandom Studies, ed. Paul Booth (New Jersey and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2018), 161-174 and Sherry Turkle ‘Introduction: The Things that Matter’ in Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, ed. Sherry Turkle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 3-10.

39 Mike Chasar, Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

40 On the materiality of radio as a communication technology in Nigeria, see Brian Larkin, ‘Islamic Renewal, Radio, and the Surface of Things’ in Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion and the Sense, ed. Birgit Meyer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 117-136. On the materiality of radio’s sound, see Joe Tacchi, ‘Radio texture: between self and others’, in Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter, ed. David. Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 25-45. Deborah Spitulnik has explored the material aspects of radio technology, its relation to the domestic sphere and beyond, the economic factors (costs of sets and batteries) which determine who has access, and its mobility as a portable machine in Zambia. She calls for broadening the realm of reception studies by stating that ‘The notions of “audience” and “reception”—if limited to the sender/receiver dyad and the individual interpretive moment of decoding messages—neither exhaust nor encompass the range of relations that people have with radio. This does not mean that these notions should be discarded, but rather that they should be expanded or supplemented by the study of other activities and domains of experience that structure media meanings and use’. Deborah Spitulnik, ‘Mobile Machines and Fluid Audiences: Rethinking Reception through Zambian Radio Culture’ in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, eds. Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, Brian Larkin, (Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2002), 337-354.

41 A similar argument for overcoming a nation-statist focus and engaging with transnational connections enabled by international broadcasting has been proposed recently by Potter et al. in The Wireless World: Global Histories of International Radio Broadcasting, eds. Simon J. Potter, David Clayton, Friederike Kind-Kovacs, Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, Nelson Ribeiro, Rebecca Scales, and Andrea Stanton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).