Radio Baba

After 70 years on the job, All India Radio still fights for a lost cause: total third-world domination

01 August 2010
For 70 years, AIR has run international broadcasts in dozens of languages. Many of these languages are Indian, since part of its mission is to reach overseas Indians with news from home.
For 70 years, AIR has run international broadcasts in dozens of languages. Many of these languages are Indian, since part of its mission is to reach overseas Indians with news from home.

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.

Achal Prabhala is a researcher and writer based in Bengaluru.

Keywords: Achal Prabhala All India Radio External Services Division Axis of Evil British East Africa international broadcasts Shanghai and Moscow AIRs Swahili service Baluchi Saraiki Mau Mau uprising
COMMENT