Radio Baba

ON THE FIRST DAY OF OCTOBER 1939, All India Radio—AIR in the colloquial—formally inaugurated its ‘External Services Division.’ It was a time of great opportunity and grave danger; a time of uncertainty and upheaval. Germany was on the rise, World War II had just begun, and the Allied Forces needed a counterbalance to Axis-power propaganda in some of the geographies we now know, funnily enough, as the Axis of Evil. The first ‘service’ this division performed was a broadcast in Pushtu, to whip the errant Pashtuns into line.

Independent India quickly picked up the thread. The 1950s and 60s were good times for breaking free in Africa and Asia, and Nehru was no south-south slouch. The very first mission entrusted to the External Services Division by its new management was to bolster the Mau Mau uprising in

what is now Kenya. Spearheaded by Apa Pant, independent India’s first envoy to then British East Africa, AIR launched a Swahili service in 1953 that would flagrantly side with the rebels.

The English went apoplectic, but Apa Pant held his ground—and kept his radio—all the way up to an independent Kenya.

Today, AIR runs international broadcasts in 27 languages. Granted, many of these languages are Indian, since part of its mission is to reach overseas Indians with news from home, which is itself a quaint and wonderful holdover. However, consider the list of languages that aren’t: Mandarin, Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Swahili, French, Arabic, Persian, Russian, Baluchi, Saraiki, Dari, Pushtu, Tibetan, Nepali, Burmese and Sinhala. (I confess: I had to look up Saraiki too.) Now, seriously, have you ever seen these words used together in the same sentence before?

And consider the sheer chutzpah of the exercise. Once upon a time, it is likely that AIR saw itself as an alternative to Voice of America and the BBC; briefly, in remote outposts, perhaps it even was; but today? The idea that people in Nairobi and Shanghai and Moscow will tune in to a translated version of the Indian state’s turgid take on the day’s events is doomed; so doomed, in fact, that it’s kind of beautiful.

Radio, someone still loves you.

Some years ago, in a quiet, book-lined flat in Delhi, I met Radhika, a recent retiree from the External Services Division. Radhika started her career as a Swahili translator in Kenya. Her husband was an Indian diplomat stationed there. Bored with the insularity of diplomatic social life, she began to explore the country on her own. She joined AIR on her return to Delhi, and remained there until retirement, reading the news, conducting interviews and selecting letters for an on-air response—in Swahili.

Swahili was AIR’s first ‘Africa service.’ French would come next, and it was meant for West Africa, not Europe. Radhika, like others I talked to, fondly remembered the letters. They came by the hundreds then, in the 1960s and 70s. Sometimes they were critical and other times complimentary. Mostly, however, they were neither. AIR’s Swahili service—and radio in general, at a certain point in time—was also a social network; like Facebook, except communicated on short-wave frequency and facilitated by airmail instead of an internet service provider. Radhika remembered reading out several such correspondences—from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and beyond—between people who were more interested in speaking to each other about the burning issues of the day than listening to what the Indian government had to say. It was her favourite part of the job.

It was also her favourite time on the job. By the 1990s, letter-writing to AIR had ceased. The letter-writers had probably ceased too, or moved on to more gratifying methods of communication. Telephones were becoming less exotic, satellite television was making inroads everywhere, and it was the beginning of the end of the old kind of radio. External Services became a punishment posting within AIR. Career-wise, it was a definite dead-end. There was often no work to do at all. Radhika remembers a colleague fondly reminiscing that he hadn’t lifted a pen all week.

By the late 1990s, the Ministry of External Affairs could see no feasible diplomatic purpose in continuing the service. But the Ministry of External Affairs was not the boss of the AIR (that would be the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting), and it says something for our stonewalling skills that AIR’s record of externally servicing all those 27 languages remains uninterrupted to this very day.

Even as it became a shadow of its former shadowy self, the stories remained sparkling. Radhika recounted the tale of one Samina, whose considerable physical charms—and recent tourism in Afghanistan—propelled an excited male director into initiating a Dari service. And her face lit up as she told me the story of the Chinese spy. “It was never a service as such,” she said, talking of the Mandarin broadcast, “merely a pre-recorded bulletin. You see, there weren’t many Chinese citizens willing to work at AIR, so we had to make do with just the one.” That one, it turned out, was using his daily sessions to broadcast Indian naval secrets back to Beijing—with impunity, since he was the only one in the building who understood the language. Right before the plot was uncovered, he showed up unannounced at Radhika’s flat late one night and handed her two paintings for safekeeping. He told her that he would be going away for a while. She never saw him again.

One year later, AIR instituted a new rule in its External Services Division: all broadcast languages had to be understood by at least two people, one of whom had to be an Indian citizen.

I visited the AIR head office in Delhi last year. I wasn’t sure why I was going there, since the story I was looking for seemed to lie in another time and in another country. The moment I stepped inside, however, I knew I had made the right decision—I was in another time and another country. The lobby was a vast, circular room of governmental proportions, punctuated by a sweeping art-deco staircase. Vintage radios gathered dust in glass showcases; a desultory, uniformed sweeper squatted in my way. The head of the External Services Division was everything I expected him to be—slightly forlorn, highly cultured, and entirely puzzled by my interest in his work.

An Afghani delegation was visiting. “They want to learn how to run a radio station,” the director said. I spoke to several people in the division. Recruiting foreign-language speakers was hard, they said; sometimes they literally had to pluck students off the street. “And anyway,” one particularly maudlin officer confided to me over tea in the canteen, “we are orphans.” He meant his division and its mission, long forsaken by India and the rest of the world. “We don’t get letters anymore, and if we do, they are from Pakistan,” he said, throwing his hands up.

I asked him if I could look around and see the recording studio. He was doubtful. The division’s staff had dwindled over the years, and as a result no one quite knew what the rules were—but perhaps he could give me permission to enter. We went back upstairs. There were some foreign students in the studio, he said, taping a broadcast in French.

“Of course,” he added, mildly, “We do not know exactly what they are saying.”

Names have been changed to protect the identity of the people involved. A version of ‘Radio Baba’ appeared in Chimurenga 14, ‘Everyone has their Indian.’