A Century on Air:
Broadcasters, Listeners and Radio Publics in/from South Asia
On 12.10.2026, CRAFTE and the State and Society Unit at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient organized an international workshop on radio braodcating in South Asia.
Speakers from Columbia University, BRAC University (Dhaka), Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (New Delhi), and Heidelberg University presented papers.
Abstract
This workshop revisits radio history in South Asia beyond the institutional story of colonial and postcolonial state broadcasters. It is almost a century since the Indian Broadcasting Company first began transmitting in 1927. The papers bring together different aspects (temporal focus, themes, actors etc.) of this media history, though a common question runs through all: who was/could be heard and who was left out? One strand of papers is concerned with contested airwaves: the nationalist “hacking” of colonial frequencies in 1932, broadcasting in the princely states, and the Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendra, through which Bangladesh was “heard into being” from outside its territory in 1971. The second turns to broadcasters and listeners, recovering their voices through vernacular memoirs, radio periodicals and listener-authored film-song stories. The workshop closes by shedding light on the reach of wireless itself. Radio promised to overcome distance, but as can be derived from the final paper on the Andaman and Nicobar islands, dealing with colonial wireless stations unto today’s ocean surveillance, the same promise has turned indigenous inhabitants into noise at the edge of the network. Together, the contributions place South Asian radio in a comparative and transnational frame, showing how the airwaves have shaped publics, nations and their margins.
*Photo: Jyothidas KV, April 12, 2022 © Anandita Bajpai
CRAFTE at Africa-Asia: A New Axis of Knowledge
ConFest in Dakar, Senegal 10.06.–14.06.2025
Panel– Crafting Entanglements: Afro-Asian Pasts of the Global Cold War
Papers
Entangled Wavelengths: Entangled Wavelengths
International Radio Broadcasters & their Afro-Asian Listening Publics (Anandita Bajpai)
Postcolonial Spaces and Postsocialist Realities:
The Stasi, African Mobility, and Security Threats in the Divided Cold War City of Berlin (Maria Ketzmerick Calandrino)
Afro-Asian entanglements and East-Berlin's 'World Festivals for Students' through the lens of the
Communist Party of India's youth organizations (Nico Putz)
Afro-Asian Networks and the Cold War:
Mapping Local Practices of Solidarity in India (Tamalika Roy)
