Radio for the Millions - by Isabel Huacuja Alonso (Paperback)

About the Book

Radio for the Millions examines Hindi-Urdu radio during the height of its popularity from the 1930s to the 1980s, showing how it created transnational communities of listeners. Isabel Huacuja Alonso argues that despite British, Indian, and Pakistani politicians' efforts to usurp the medium for state purposes, radio largely escaped their grasp.

Book Synopsis

Winner, 2024 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award

Winner, 2024 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies, Modern Language Association

Co-winner, 2023 AIPS Book Prize, American Institute of Pakistan Studies

Finalist, 2023 Richard Wall Memorial Award, Theatre Library Association

From news about World War II to the broadcasting of music from popular movies, radio played a crucial role in an increasingly divided South Asia for more than half a century. Radio for the Millions examines the history of Hindi-Urdu radio during the height of its popularity from the 1930s to the 1980s, showing how it created transnational communities of listeners.

Isabel Huacuja Alonso argues that despite British, Indian, and Pakistani politicians' efforts to usurp the medium for state purposes, radio largely escaped their grasp. She demonstrates that the medium enabled listeners and broadcasters to resist the cultural, linguistic, and political agendas of the British colonial administration and the subsequent independent Indian and Pakistani governments. Rather than being merely a tool of nation building in South Asia, radio created affective links that defied state agendas, policies, and borders. It forged an enduring transnational soundscape, even after the 1947 Partition had made a united India a political impossibility.

Huacuja Alonso traces how people engaged with radio across news, music, and drama broadcasts, arguing for a more expansive definition of what it means to listen. She develops the concept of "radio resonance" to understand how radio relied on circuits of oral communication such as rumor and gossip and to account for the affective bonds this "talk" created. By analyzing Hindi film-song radio programs, she demonstrates how radio spurred new ways of listening to cinema. Drawing on a rich collection of sources, including newly recovered recordings, listeners' letters to radio stations, original interviews with broadcasters, and archival documents from across three continents, Radio for the Millions rethinks assumptions about how the medium connects with audiences.

Review Quotes

An intellectually astute and meticulously researched book.... a rich and insightful exploration of how an ostensibly ordinary technology became an extraordinary instrument for social and political change.-- "Journal of Cinema and Media Studies"

This volume provides a cogent introduction to early iterations of broadcasting on the subcontinent and tells the story of its shaping by wars, nationalism, and commerce.-- "Technology and Culture"

This unique and engaging book offers a pleasurable reading experience while providing an urgently needed comprehensive and interdisciplinary history of South Asia.--Manjari Mukherjee "Theatre Survey"

The book makes an important contribution, especially in unearthing and resurrecting liminal voices, which make up what I would call a kind of archaeology of Southasian media.-- "Himal Southasian"

A fascinating story of the history of radio in South Asia.--Mehru Jaffer "The Citizen"

An original and truly fascinating work.-- "H-Soz-Kult"

Skillfully and imaginatively highlights the place of [radio] in the broader historiographies of nation-building, language, and the public sphere.--Faiz Ullah "The Book Review (India)"

Radio for the Millions is a fantastic work of radio history and South Asian historiography. It is meticulously researched, making use of an extensive range of archival collections across India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, as well as oral-historical interviews with radio broadcasters. Focusing on radio as a medium and following radio waves across the national borders of South Asia, this book is an excellent contribution to the project of decolonizing sound studies and the project of denationalizing South Asian history.--Amanda Weidman, author of Brought to Life by the Voice: Playback Singing and Cultural Politics in South India

Radio for the Millions challenges neat historiographies often developed from and/or by state archives. Huacuja Alonso reminds us that the "oral" and "aural" are indeed messy and complicated yet necessary registers for understanding national, political turmoils. Hindi-Urdu broadcast radio has long been a site of both (state) nation-building and (community) place-making by listeners. Radio for the Millions is an exemplary study of why listening is such an integral component of history.

--Dolores Inés Casillas, author of Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-Language Radio and Public Advocacy

Isabel Alonso provides a captivating history of radio that sits at the intersection of sound studies, cultural history, and the politics of nationalism in modern South Asia. In this virtuosic tale, we read about the policymakers, artists, singers, political figures, and poets who inhabited a broader transnational space in South Asia. . . This book will benefit an expansive community of readers, including academic communities in the disciplines of history and ethnomusicology and specifically readers interested in the cultural history of sound and music--Pouya Nekouei "Not Even Past"

This ambitious and wide-ranging book takes seriously radio as a medium and music as a central form of sensorial engagement that defied borders and communal affiliations. Spanning India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka from the colonial to the postcolonial periods, it explains how a subcontinental popular culture endured in spite of multiple partitions.--Durba Ghosh, Cornell University

This pathbreaking study shows how an attentiveness to the political and cultural potency of radio sounds reframes our understandings of histories in South Asia. Huacuja Alonso illuminates the relationship between aurality and orality, inviting us to lend an ear to voices and sounds on the radio waves that transcend and complicate borders, states, identities, and cultures in South Asia.--Kama Maclean, University of Heidelberg

About the Author

Isabel Huacuja Alonso is an assistant professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University.