In the summer of 1944, largely in response to newspaper reports, the British government ordered an investigation into the low morale and poor working conditions of British soldiers stationed in South and Southeast Asia. The official report, prepared in November 1944, concluded that soldiers were, indeed, suffering from low morale and made several recommendations. These included improving medical facilities and providing larger beer and cigarette rations and better radio programmes. In response to the specific recommendations regarding radio broadcasting, the War Office, which handled military-related logistics, came up with an ambitious plan: setting up a transmitter in Delhi that would be powerful enough to reach British soldiers anywhere the war in Asia would take them. The War Office surmised that access to radio, in particular, listening to “authentic news from home” and enjoying the latest musical hits, would offer disillusioned British soldiers a much-needed “link home”, and would boost their morale. That summer, the War Office asked the Marconi Company to construct a state-of-the-art one-hundred-kilowatt shortwave transmitter— about as powerful as possible then—and initiated the complicated arrangements to ship the transmitter, which took up an entire room, to the Indian capital.

Louis Mountbatten, a media-savvy individual, famous for his skill at public relations and tendency for showmanship, immediately took an interest in the ambitious radio project and its Marconi-built transmitter. Mountbatten is best known in the Indian subcontinent for his role as the last British viceroy of India. His decision to hasten the British retreat from the subcontinent in 1947, many historians believe, contributed to the turmoil that followed independence. Yet for the history of radio and music, it was Mountbatten’s prior, lesser-known military post as the supreme commander of the South East Asia Command (SEAC) that proved most influential. To sidestep the bureaucracy of the colonial government of India and the growing anticolonial movement, Mountbatten decided to shift his command offices to the nearby island of Ceylon. He then lobbied hard and succeeded in bringing the Marconi transmitter to the island instead of India as originally planned and set up a brand new station in Ceylon exclusively for British soldiers. He called the station Radio SEAC, after his command’s initials.

Ultimately, Radio SEAC did not turn out to be the prominent military radio station Mountbatten had envisioned. A dock strike and other war-related hindrances set back the transmitter’s arrival. It was not until May 1946 that the famed and powerful Marconi transmitter finally aired its first broadcast from Ceylon. By then, the war had been over for more than a year, and Mountbatten was making plans to leave the island. It was in the 1950s and afterward that the military transmitter, now in the hands of the independent Ceylonese movement, finally reached its full potential. Shortly after the country’s independence in 1948, Ceylon launched a Hindi-language commercial service targeting listeners in newly independent India and Pakistan. The station, however, rose to fame towards the end of 1952 when All India Radio (AIR) inaugurated an ambitious set of reforms. In the wake of these reforms, Radio Ceylon began broadcasting Hindi film-song programmes and quickly began to garner a loyal audience in newly independent India and Pakistan. In the decades to come, Radio Ceylon and the film industry in Bombay developed an important reciprocal commercial relationship. Film producers provided the music that helped Radio Ceylon attract listeners and sponsors to its Hindi-language programmes. Radio Ceylon broadcasters, in turn, not only made these songs widely available on the airwaves but also developed programmes that consciously fostered listeners’ active participation. 

What Mountbatten could not have possibly known in the summer of 1944 was that shifting his command from India to Ceylon and bringing the transmitter to the island would have such important consequences for the history of sound and radio in the Indian subcontinent. In the post-independence period, Radio Ceylon—its broadcasters and listeners—was able to effectively contest the independent Indian government’s ambitious reforms to create loyal citizen-listeners because Radio Ceylon, located in the neighbouring nation-state island of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), lay outside the Indian government’s jurisdiction, both physically and administratively. Moreover, by cultivating audiences in Pakistan in addition to India, Radio Ceylon broadcasters also indirectly challenged the Pakistani state’s efforts to mould a new national culture disconnected from India...

Independent Ceylon’s Commercial Radio 

When Ceylon gained independence in 1948, the British closed down Mountbatten’s Radio SEAC but left behind the powerful military transmitter on the island. As soon as British officials learned of the Ceylonese government’s desire to use the transmitter for commercial broadcasting, they began to regret letting the broadcasting equipment “out [of their] hands.” One alarmed officer noted: “I did not realise what a wide area Radio SEAC can cover.” The transmitter’s broadcast can “reach into Iraq and to the east to almost the whole of China. It can, of course, reach all the parts of India with great clarity.” British officials were particularly worried that US businesses could take advantage and advertise their products on the airwaves “with serious consequences to United Kingdom markets.” Moreover, commercial broadcasting “across frontiers” they noted, could have unexpected political consequences. “The danger here is that the government may not stop at ordinary commercial broadcasting—toothpaste, magazines, etc.—but might sell time to political bodies, e.g. Hindus and Moslems.” The fear that native politicians would exploit radio facilities had long worried colonial officials. Now, in a changed political world following the end of colonial rule in South Asia, British officials had few options. The size of the equipment made it impossible to disassemble and ship back to England, and they could do little to stop the independent Ceylonese government from venturing into commercial broadcasting. In March 1949, the former military transmitter, despite British discomfort, aired its first broadcast as Radio Ceylon.

From the beginning, Radio Ceylon involved a complex system of transnational collaboration. Immediately after independence, Ceylonese politicians reached out to the Australian government for assistance with launching a commercial station on Radio SEAC’s premises. Australia had developed a unique hybrid system of broadcasting that combined commercial and public service radio. As part of a foreign aid programme called Plan Colombo, the Australian government sent out one of their best radio experts to Ceylon. Clifford Dodd, an Australian broadcaster and administrator with more than two decades of experience in commercial radio, became Radio Ceylon’s first director of commercial broadcasting in 1948.

Under Dodd’s influence, Ceylon adopted an Australianstyle mixed broadcasting system. The Ceylonese government managed two separate radio networks: the National Network and the Commercial Service. The National Network relied on government funds, targeted Ceylonese audiences and aired educational programmes. The Commercial Service put out entertainment programmes and relied almost exclusively on commercial sponsors for financial support. The Ceylonese government owned and managed both networks, and income from commercial broadcasting—at least in principle, if not always in practice—offset expenses from the public service network. The present study concerns only Radio Ceylon’s commercial branch and, more specifically, the commercial service aimed at populations in India and Pakistan, called “India Beam” and later “India-Pakistan Beam”. Broadcasters and listeners in India and Pakistan, however, used the generic term “Radio Ceylon” to refer to this service exclusively, and I have done the same in this book.

Much like the Australian commercial radio stations where Dodd had worked, Radio Ceylon’s India-Pakistan Beam originally featured music from the US. For example, a programme called Fran Warren Sings showcased the young American female singer’s most popular numbers. A programme titled Negro Spirituals likely replicated the same racist dynamics of US radio shows that featured African American music. Other more generic sounding musical programmes, such as It’s Dance Time, My Songs for You and Singing Americans, played the latest musical numbers from the US. All of Radio Ceylon’s early programmes were in English, a language that only a privileged fraction of the populations of India and Pakistan could understand.

In late 1951, Radio Ceylon began to experiment with Hindilanguage transmissions. It is unclear what triggered this important change. What appears to have happened is that Dodd and others at Radio Ceylon sensed that broadcasting in Indian languages and particularly in Hindi, the unofficial national language of India, would attract larger audiences in the subcontinent than Englishlanguage programmes. The station’s first attempts at broadcasting in Indian languages, however, were rather unambitious. Radio Ceylon hired two women originally from India residing in Colombo to host two weekly Hindi-language programmes, Vimla and Kamini Ganjwar, later known as the Ganjwar sisters, who aired a number of Hindi film-song programmes. Their choice of music, however, does not appear to have been particularly strategic. They likely played Hindi film songs because this was one genre of Indian music readily available on gramophone records at the time.

Radio Ceylon’s timing, however, could not have been better. A year after Radio Ceylon started its modest Hindilanguage transmissions, AIR stations ceased the broadcast of film songs. Moreover, one reason why Radio Ceylon was able to quickly garner an audience is that listeners in colonial India had already been conditioned to tune in to the foreign shortwave station during World War II. Listeners throughout the subcontinent had turned their receiver knobs in search of alternative radio stations on the shortwave. Many in colonial India had tuned in to Axis radio broadcasts and specifically to Subhas Chandra Bose’s broadcasts (and to gossip about and discuss them) to question British accounts of the socalled good war. During the post-independence era, listeners drew on this important radio-listening practice, and once more fiddled with their dials in search of alternative music programmes that better suited their musical tastes.

Some tuned in to Radio Goa’s transmissions. Goa was a Portuguese colony and its radio station, which was not part of the AIR network, continued to play Hindi film songs. Listeners in Punjab and along the western coast were able to tune in to Radio Pakistan’s Karachi and Lahore stations. Radio Pakistan would soon also censor songs from films produced in India as part of a nationalist agenda, not unlike AIR’s campaign. In this early period, however, Radio Pakistan aired film songs, although not without some restrictions. According to broadcasters, Radio Pakistan during this period avoided playing songs that referenced Hindu mythology or Hinduism in any way. Goan and Pakistani stations were certainly a good option for listeners dissatisfied with AIR’s programming, but these stations used low-power transmitters and could be heard only in nearby areas. In contrast, the broadcasts from the Marconi transmitter Mountbatten had brought to Ceylon reached throughout most of India and Pakistan. As mentioned in the book’s opening anecdote, one enthusiastic listener in Bombay spoke for many when he wrote to Movie Times in February 1953 to express his satisfaction with Radio Ceylon’s new Hindi filmsong programmes. “The change” in programming, he remarked, “is most welcomed.”

In addition to radio listeners, Indian film producers too “welcomed” Radio Ceylon’s new film-song programmes and began regularly mailing gramophone records of new (and sometimes also old) productions to Radio Ceylon’s Colombo studios. It was this practice that enabled Radio Ceylon to build a substantial Hindi film-song gramophone library, which broadcasters used in their many Hindi film-song programmes. To this day, Radio Ceylon houses what is perhaps the most extensive and complete collection of gramophone records of Indian and Pakistani film songs in the world. This library enabled Radio Ceylon to foster a shared aural culture on the airwaves in the decades following the physical partition as well as enabled Radio Ceylon’s trans-media productions.

Notably, royalties do not seem to have been an issue of discussion in this early period, as producers were likely eager to have their music broadcast on the radio. In the late 1960s, however, filmmakers did demand royalties for their songs and, at one point, even threatened to take legal action against Radio Ceylon if the institution did not properly remunerate them.

Radio Ceylon’s Sponsored and Sustenance Programmes 

Back in Colombo, Dodd and his team quickly noticed that AIR’s gargantuan reforms, particularly the controversial ban on Hindi film songs, presented a rare opportunity for their station and toiled to make use of it. The Radio Ceylon team, however, faced one major difficulty: how could Dodd and his mostly Sinhala-speaking staff recruit sponsors with an interest in advertising their products to Indian audiences? Radio advertising was a fairly new concept in India, and after the carnage of Partition, which devastated the region’s social and economic infrastructure, few businesses wanted to experiment with new forms of advertising. Moreover, Nehru’s socialist-leaning government placed strict restrictions on foreign exchange. This meant that Indian businesses had to apply for special permission from the reserve bank to pay for Radio Ceylon’s sponsored programmes.

Dodd connected with Daniel Molina, a US-born entrepreneur based in Bombay with advertising experience. Molina recruited foreign companies with Indian offices that could bypass the Indian government’s restrictions on foreign exchange. Molina managed to convince CIBA, a Swiss chemical company with an Indian branch, to experiment in radio advertising. CIBA sponsored many of Radio Ceylon’s pioneering Hindi programmes, including the super-hit programme Binaca Geetmala. Soon other businesses followed CIBA’s lead. Britannia Biscuit Corporation, Jay Engineers Works and Boots Pure Drug Company were among the first companies to advertise their products on Radio Ceylon. Although more research would be required to better assess the profitability of advertising on the radio in this early period, CIBA’s and other companies’ continued sponsorship of programmes suggests that it was a worthwhile investment.

Molina and his associates also began to venture into programming and established a programming branch, which they called Radio Enterprise Services (RES). Hamid Sayani, who already was an established AIR broadcaster and a fairly known voice in India, became RES’s first director of programming. Incidentally, Hamid Sayani was also the legendary Hindi broadcaster Ameen Sayani’s elder brother and introduced the then still teenaged Ameen to the art and craft of radio broadcasting. 

Magnetic tape copies of RES’s programmes travelled every week—over the newly operating airlines—from Bombay to Radio Ceylon’s Colombo-based studios and were broadcast to India and Pakistan with its powerful former military transmitter. At first, Radio Advertising Services staff recorded programmes in a small studio at St. Xavier’s College in Bombay. In later years, the company shifted to the heart of the commercial district of Colaba in Bombay, in front of the renowned Regal Cinema. During the peak of Radio Ceylon’s popularity, RES occupied the entire floor of the building and commanded a strong presence in the Bombay film world.

Back in Colombo, Dodd put as much enthusiasm into developing a solid Hindi branch in Colombo as he did into building links to India and the Bombay film industry. He recruited broadcasters from India with experience in either Hindi broadcasting or the film industry. These broadcasters became the hosts of what later came to be known as “sustenance programmes”. These were Hindi film-music programmes that went out live from the Colombo studios and that relied on the stations’ extensive Hindi film-song gramophone library. RES’s sponsored programmes provided the income on which Radio Ceylon subsisted, whereas sustenance programmes filled the majority of Radio Ceylon’s broadcast hours. This meant that what listeners in India and Pakistan understood as Radio Ceylon’s Hindi Service in reality was the combined work of two independent organisations: a commercial radio station owned by the Sri Lankan government and Daniel Molina’s private advertising company based in Bombay. Staff from these two organisations worked closely together, but Radio Advertising Services never maintained official ties to Ceylon’s government.

It was Radio Ceylon’s transnational networks that enabled music and voices to move beyond national borders. The station was owned by the Ceylon government but was managed by an Australian director. A US-born business owner based in Bombay recruited sponsors for the station’s varied programmes, while Indian broadcasters, some based in Bombay and others in Colombo, anchored Radio Ceylon’s various programmes. Most importantly, its audiences also crossed borders. In addition to India, the station developed a strong and loyal following in Pakistan.

Pakistani film magazines’ references to Radio Ceylon offer important evidence of Radio Ceylon’s listenership in Pakistan. In December 1957, for example, one listener discovered that the Pakistani-made film Bedari (Awakening, 1956) was a copy of the earlier released Indian film Jagriti (Awakening, 1954) after listening to Jagriti’s songs on Radio Ceylon’s programmes. Although the availability of Indian films and film songs in Pakistan changed depending on the status of its relationship to India, Radio Ceylon consistently made old and new Indian-made film songs available on the airwaves for Pakistani listeners. In the years following the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War, when the Pakistani government officially banned the screening of all Indian films as well as the broadcasting of their songs on Radio Pakistan, listeners simply continued to tune in to Radio Ceylon. One listener writing to the Pakistan-based film magazine Eastern Film warned the government that their attempts to stop Pakistani listeners from enjoying Indian film songs was futile because “more and more listeners have started tuning to Radio Ceylon.

It is not clear whether or not other sponsoring companies like CIBA actively advertised in Pakistan in addition to India. Yet regardless of sponsors’ interest in the Pakistani market, there is little doubt that Radio Ceylon broadcasters were quite interested in and committed to nurturing audiences in Pakistan. In interviews, Radio Ceylon broadcasters all have noted that they received mail from Pakistani listeners. Manohar Mahajan, for example, in his account of Radio Ceylon, Yaadein Radio Ceylon Ki, includes fan letters from Pakistani listeners, alongside mail from listeners in India. Moreover, programming schedules reveal that in the 1960s, Radio Ceylon began to air programmes that exclusively featured film songs from Pakistani-made films. These were likely meant to please Pakistani listeners as well as to introduce listeners in India to film songs from the neighbouring nation.

Most telling is that when Ameen Sayani visited Pakistan for the first time in May 2007, Radio Ceylon fans gathered in the Arts Council auditorium in Karachi to finally “see” the man whose voice they knew so well. That night when he replayed clips from his old radio programmes, some members of the audience cheered enthusiastically and others quietly shed tears, overwhelmed by nostalgia. Newspaper reports of the event, like the audience in the Arts Council auditorium, celebrated Sayani both as an eminent voice that had long been part of the Pakistani soundscape, as well as a shared legacy with neighbouring India and a symbol of a surviving shared culture nearly a half-century after Partition. Express, for example, wrote that Ameen Sayani “ties India and Pakistan together,” and QVS Audio Video noted that “radio was still waiting for a voice artiste like Sayani.”

Radio Ceylon and the Ideology of Hindustani 

Language was a key aspect of Radio Ceylon and Ameen Sayani’s appeal. Radio Ceylon broadcasters hailed from India and, for the most part, called the language they spoke on the airwaves Hindi. Radio Ceylon employees, however, adhered to what I described earlier as “the ideology of Hindustani”. They strove to speak a language free of religious affiliations that could connect speakers of other regional languages, without threatening regional identities. In so doing, they defied both the Indian and Pakistani governments’ linguistic policies, which promoted Hindi and Urdu, respectively, as national languages.

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Pull Quote: In addition to radio listeners, Indian film producers too welcomed Radio Ceylon’s new film-song programmes and began regularly mailing gramophone records of new (and sometimes also old) productions to its Colombo studios. To this day, Radio Ceylon houses what is perhaps the most extensive and complete collection of gramophone records of Indian and Pakistani film songs in the world.

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Excerpted from Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders by Isabel Huacuja Alonso. Copyright (c) 2023 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

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