Entangled Wavelengths:
International Radio Broadcasters & their Afro-Asian Listening Publics
Anandita Bajpai
This sub-project zooms into media entanglements across the Asian and African continents, which were enabled by international radio broadcasting in the Cold War years. Instead of focussing on the broadcasting or host countries of the stations (usually based in Euro-America or the Soviet Union), the key research 'sites' of the project are the places where the stations were heard. Although not intended as such by the stations, international broadcasting programmes enabled several listeners from Asian and African contexts to be informed of, engage, build networks, and initiate epistolary exchanges with each other. Following traces in radio archives, listeners' private collections and their oral testimonies, the project explores the nature of such entanglements and the possibilities listeners imagined them to offer.
Image: Grundig radio set sent by Deutsche Welle to Rajendra Kumar Swarnkar in the 1980s (exact year unknown) upon winning in a competition, Private Collections Rajendra Kumar Swarnakar, Bikaner, Rajasthan, India, photo: Jyothidas KV, © Bajpai, 02.04.2022.
Research
Radio was a prominent tool for staging the ‘Cultural Cold War’, communicating worldviews that prescribed to Cold War-divides, and in forging ideological affinities and animosities alike. Several foreign broadcasting stations based in Europe, USA, and the Soviet Union were especially established between the 1960s and late 1980s to procure global listening publics.​​​ During these decades, the recently decolonized nations in Africa and Asia became attractive sites for international broadcasters.​​ Some of the radio broadcasters which did regular programmes for audiences in Asia and Africa were: Deutsche Welle, Radio Berlin International, Radio Tashkent, BBC World Service, Radio Moscow, Radio Budapest, Radio Praha, NHK Japan, Voice of America, Radio Beijing, Radio Nederland Wereldomroep, Radio Sweden, Radio France Internationale, etc. among others.
This research emerges from a Habilitation project (thesis for qualifying as lecturer in Germany), which traces the affective trajectories of international radio broadcasters and their listening publics in India during the Cold War years.
It explores radio’s material legacies by exclusively focussing on the social lives of radio-objects, which travelled between foreign broadcasting stations and their Indian listeners during the Cold War years.
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The presence of objects such as gifts, souvenirs, letters, photographs, radio journals, and a variety of radio-memorabilia 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. In other words, I follow the trajectories of radio-objects to explore
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.​​
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Field work for this project has been conducted in several towns, villages and medium-sized cities in the Indian states of Bihar (2018-19), Rajasthan (2022), Uttar Pradesh (2022, 2024), Haryana (2024) and Chattisgarh (2024).
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Image: Letter sent by Oluwole Adenaike, Oyo State, Nigeria, 15.05.1987 to Shakuntala Anjaan, Gola Bazaar, Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, Private Collections Vermas, Gola Bazaar, photo: Jyothidas KV, © Bajpai, 2022.
Image: Snapshot of pennants sent by several radio stations (1960s-80s) to Badri Prasad Verma Anjaan, Gola Bazaar, Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, Private Collections Vermas, Gola Bazaar, photo: Jyothidas KV, © Bajpai, 2022.
Documentary Film ​
The Sound of Friendship: Warm Wavelengths in a Cold, Cold War​
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Based on her research on Radio Berlin International and its listeners in India, Anandita Bajpai directed and produced a documentary film titled The Sound of Friendship: Warm Wavelengths in a Cold, Cold War​ (2022).
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It recounts the perspectives of East German/Indian presenters, behind microphones, and listeners behind the radio sets. It takes viewers from locales in Berlin to Madhepura, Bihar where we trace the trajectory of one of RBI’s listeners’ clubs from the 1980s called the ‘Lenin Club’.
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more about the film here:
Image: Page from a photo album with photographs sent by co-listeners to Badri Prasad Verma Anjaan, founder of a listeners' club (Swargiya Minu Radio Shrota club) in Gola Bazaar, Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh (photos sent in 1970s, 80s),Private Collections Vermas, Gola Bazaar, photo: Jyothidas KV, © Bajpai, 2022.
Based on leads from this research, the sub-project within CRAFTE advances in two directions:
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1. Tracing the Afro-Asian listeners' networks which were made possible by international broadcasting stations. This part of the research relies on Indian listeners as its nodal point of South-South networks. In focus is (a) how Indian listeners' expressed solidarity with anti-colonial, nationalist movements in African countries, or opposed the Apartheid regime in South Africa, and US interventions in Vietnam via radio and (b) how radio journals opened new networks of epistolary exchanges between Indian listeners and listeners from Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Mauritius, South Africa, Uganda etc.
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2. Exploring the limits of Afro-Asian solidarities in moments of crisis: This part will focus on the expulsion of Ugandan Asians from the country in 1972. How did different radio stations report on the expulsion? How were listening publics explained the same in different geopolitical contexts?
Image: First Day Cover from Egypt sent by a co-listener to Qazi Hassan Ahmad in Mubarakpur, Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, in 1981, Private Collections Ahmad, Azamgarh, photo: Jyothidas KV, © Bajpai, 2024.
Relevant Publications​
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“Radio Listening and its Epistolary Networks in India during the Cold War”, in: P. Wien, Pelle Olsen et. al (eds.), Ruling the Waves. Transnational Radio Broadcasting in the Middle East and the Mediterranean between Production and Reception, 1920-1970, Leiden: Brill, forthcoming 2025.
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“Material Lives of Cold War Radio Pasts in India”, in: Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: 44, no. 1, 2024, pp. 86-119.
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“Objects of Love: Remembering Radio Berlin International in India”, in: E. Emery, M. Hines and E. Preuß (eds.), The GDR Tomorrow: Rethinking the East German Legacy, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2024, pp. 279–310.
“Friendship through Ether Waves: Radio Berlin International and its Listening Publics in India", Internationale Forschungsstelle DDR, 2023, https://ifddr.org/en/friendship-through-ether-waves/ (in German: https://ifddr.org/aetherwellen-der-freundschaft-radio-berlin-international-und-seine-hoererschaft-in-indien/, 04.10.2023).
“Herzliche Wellelängen: Radio Berlin International in Indien zur Zeit des Kalten Krieges” In: Michael Mann (ed.). MIDA Modernes Indien in deutschen Archiven: In Memoriam Dietmar Rothermund. (accepted and reviewed), 2022, Heidelberg: Draupadi Verlag, pp. 29- 81.
“Warm Wavelengths: Radio Berlin International in India during the Cold War”, in: Bajpai, A (ed.), Cordial Cold War: Cultural Actors in India and the German Democratic Republic, 2021. London, New Delhi, et. al.: Sage Publications, pp. 63-109.
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CRAFTE Working Paper Series
Radio Listening, Private Collections & Afro-Asian Networks
How can private collections contribute to writing hitherto unexplored chapters of radio broadcasting history?
Anandita Bajpai reports from her trip to Azamgarh, India, in March 2024 and her accidental discovery of radio's Afro-Asian networks.
