Counterculture | All India Radio Nears 90: A Glorious Legacy Fading Under Commercial Clutter?

In a month from now, All India Radio, launched in its present avatar on June 8, 1936, will enter its ninetieth year. India’s first radio broadcast actually came thirteen years earlier, in 1923, from the Radio Club in Bombay, situated off the Gateway of India. All India Radio’s acronym, AIR, is a term used by radio broadcasts all over the world, as in the expression “You’re on Air.” So, we’re lucky it’s the acronym of our own national radio.

But All India Radio also has another name—Akashvani. It was Rabindranath Tagore who gave the name Akashvani to All India Radio. The word, as everyone knows, literally means ‘Voice from the Sky’. But it has a deeper mythological significance that has to do with the birth of Lord Krishna. A voice from the sky, an Akashvani, is supposed to have predicted that Devaki’s eighth child would be the killer of the tyrannical king Kamsa. Kamsa was actually Devaki’s brother. The prediction enraged him so much that he imprisoned Devaki and her husband, Vasudeva and killed all their children. However, the eighth child, Krishna, escaped. Kamsa sent his asuras (demons) to kill Krishna, but he killed all of them, and finally killed Kamsa as well. The Akashvani thus came true.

In October 1957, Akashvani launched its Vividh Bharati commercial broadcasting service. Till then, lovers of Hindi film songs could only listen to them on Radio Ceylon with its erratic reception. Radio sets in those days were not powerful enough to transmit shortwave broadcasts with clarity. The technology was rudimentary. Radios required antennas that had to be tied to bamboo poles on the roofs of buildings. Later, transistor radios with built-in aerials made their appearance.

Vividh Bharati ran advertisements between songs, some of them in English, others in Hindi. Ads in regional languages were still the exception, not the rule. The birth of Vividh Bharati coincided with the Golden Era of Hindi film music. Throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s, Vividh Bharati was the only radio station where one could immerse oneself in melodies sung by Mohammed Rafi, Talat Mahmood, Lata Mangeshkar, Mukesh, Asha Bhosle, Kishore Kumar, Manna Dey, and others. There were several iconic female playback singers before Lata Mangeshkar arrived on the scene and elbowed them all out, and Vividh Bharati was the only place where one could hear them. Some of these singers were Noor Jehan, Geeta Bali, Sudha Malhotra, Kanan Devi, Uma Devi, Zohrabai Ambalawali, Suraiya and Shamshad Begum.

Today, so many decades after it was born, Vividh Bharati has survived the onslaught of TV channels, FM radio, OTT platforms, social media and YouTube channels. It still holds sway, especially amongst older people, and youngsters who relish old songs as compared to the noise that goes on in the name of music today. It has also adapted to technology. While some like myself continue to listen to Vividh Bharati on antique radios bought half a century ago, others download apps and listen to Vividh Bharati on their smartphones.

Vividh Bharati’s archives are like wine that has fermented with age. The singers mentioned above can still be heard on Vividh Bharati’s music programmes morning, afternoon, evening and night. The format may have changed, but the songs are the same. One unfortunate change in format, however, is the scrapping of the highly popular ‘pharmaishi geet’ programmes, where a song was preceded by a long list of names of those who had asked for it. Not just names, but the towns the listeners belonged to were also dutifully stated, some like Jhumritalaiyya acquiring legendary status.

But Vividh Bharati has also deteriorated with time. It has gone commercial with a vengeance and made it obvious that money is much more important to it than the continuation of a legacy. This smacks of desperation. Why otherwise would they resort to the humiliating practice of interrupting songs sung by legendary singers to impose advertisements on us about mutual funds, gold loans, package tours, cloth shops, and quack doctors advertising their services ad nauseam on the radio, even sponsoring entire programmes, instead of attending to their so-called patients?

True, FM radio stations that have proliferated like roadside tea shops do this, OTT platforms do this, and TV channels do this. But Vividh Bharati is a class apart. One would expect greater discretion from their station directors and programme executives. Don’t they realise that to cut Lata or Rafi or Mukesh or Kishore Kumar short as they’re singing, just to promote a soap or toothpaste, is a grave insult to their memories? The least they can do is insert an advertisement at the end of a song, as they used to do in the past. But unfortunately, they don’t follow this practice any more.

The advertisements themselves are anything but tasteful. They comprise loud commentary and crude jingles about this or that product or service. Their pronunciations are faulty. One doctor solicits patients for his treatment of ligament tears, but pronounces the word ‘tears’ to rhyme with ‘fears’ instead of with the word ‘hares’.

As it begins its journey towards its century, one can only hope that Vividh Bharati will retain some of the grandeur and fanfare with which it was started all those years ago.

(The writer is a well-known author and former head of the English Department at Savitribai Phule Pune University)