Radio Listening, Private Collections & Afro-Asian Networks

Listeners’ Private Collections

Qazi Hassan Ahmad is from the older generation of listeners (now in their seventies and eighties), who began radio listening in the 1960s and continued even until 2000s. Upon meeting him, I had hoped for a reminiscing session of memory recount. A session where I would be told stories of radio and its young listeners, what one liked to hear and why, how radio helped shape one’s everyday social life and political formation and perhaps reflections on how as a technology it has impacted the lives of those who do not reside in the urban, metropoles of India. However, I was completely unprepared for being shown one of the most intricately organized and meticulously preserved private collections abound with material traces of radio-pasts.  The collections, in Ahmad’s homestead, consist of radio memorabilia, grey literature, letters, photographs, magazines, souvenirs, and radio log books, among others. This moment of disbelief has happened before on fieldwork as by now I have come across several such similarly meticulously preserved private collections of listeners, also in other parts of India. And yet, each time I have wondered with the same level of disbelief as to why listeners have so ardently preserved all of this over the decades, often even compromising living space for family members which is physically taken up by such collections. The question of why secure and preserve is an important one and perhaps demands another article. In this piece I wish to reflect on what it is that such private collections tell us that we would otherwise not know?

Before anything else, private collections such as Qazi Hassan Ahmad's open up a crucial window into listeners’ perspective(s). They are also a starting point for initiating conversations with keepers on what was collected, preserved, why and how? In more ways than one, this is acknowledging the natural advantage that the area of research comes with in this case. Even among historians of media, it is rare to have access to any oral testimonies of especially those who have been the 'audiences', 'the receiving public' of the medium. The possibility to get first-hand accounts of actors, improvised and changing as their narratives may be in the present, is a unique advantage waiting to be further tapped into by historians.  ​

 Private collections in this case underline the importance of objects, radio-memorabilia, things received from stations over the years, or radio-objects, as I call them, for listeners and how these fundamentally tied in with the overall experience of radio listening. For long scholars of radio history have attempted to overcome the problem of writing one-sided radio histories, which solely rely on the broadcasters’ perspective, by drawing our attention to listeners’ letters and their queries addressed on broadcasts. Private collections such as Qazi Hassan Ahmad’s offer the possibility for exploring the haptic, tactile and multi-sensorial dimension(s) of listeners’ radio pasts.

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Most international broadcasters (1960s-90s) regularly sent memorabilia ranging from pennants, souvenirs, calendars, torches, wrist watches, landscape objects, postcards with urban and rural scenery of host countries, pin badges, journals and magazines, posters, stickers, to plastic/paper bags and peak caps to eagerly awaiting listeners. Yet little has been written about such paraphernalia, which listeners in different parts of the world collected and preserved. As I have argued elsewhere, these things not only serve as memory-objects that help listeners recount their radio-pasts, they also point to the material legacy of radio. [1] 

What remains when the sound of radio fades away and the tuning knob has been turned off? Things such as the numerous radio-objects painstakingly kept without damage for over 30-40 years, sometimes in the private space of listeners’ bedrooms, are material remnants of the practice of radio listening. Listening did not just imply listening to shows– it amalgamated a plethora of other activities in its web which included speaking back through communal listening and discussion (listeners’ clubs), collecting radio-objects and exhibiting them at local exhibitions, writing letters and establishing long-lasting epistolary exchanges with both broadcasters and co-listeners, seeing and being seen in the form of exchanged photographs, honing other hobbies such as philately and numismatics through radio networks, to name some. 

            What institutional radio archives do not tell us but private collections inevitably show is that Indian listeners’ auditory world was pluralistic and as wide ranged as the available shortwave bandwidths on which transmissions were caught. The same listener heard several programmes each day and the stringent Cold War ideological divides, which tried to manifest themselves also as territorial ones, could not deter Indian listeners from having a genuinely diversified radio experience in the Cold War years. Given that most radio archives belong to the family of state-organized archives, and embedded as they are in the logic of nation-states, they do not reflect this pluralistic experience of the listeners–one usually gets to research who heard a particular station, hosted by a particular state, and from where but no hints are dropped that the same listener may also have listened to something else. Private Collections challenge this myth.