Radio and Broadcasting

Detailed chapter description

Radio changed the scale and temporality of public culture in Mithila, Vajji and Anga. Print required a physical copy and a reader; broadcasting could carry a voice, song, agricultural advisory, drama, news bulletin or political speech across many households at once. Yet the existence of a transmitter did not create a single regional public. Reception depended on signal strength, electricity or batteries, receiver ownership, listening time, language choice, gendered control of household space and the station’s editorial decisions. Radio therefore belongs to social and economic history as much as to media history: it reorganised cultural labour, created new professions, altered the circulation of music and speech, and made the state audibly present in everyday life. The regional story is also transborder and technologically layered. Akashvani stations at Patna, Bhagalpur and Darbhanga formed different nodes in the Indian public-service system, while Radio Nepal and the later explosion of FM stations created another broadcasting ecology across Madhesh and Kathmandu. Maithili, Angika, Bajjika, Hindi, Nepali, Urdu, Sanskrit, Santhali and other languages shared frequencies and institutional space rather than occupying sealed territories. Medium wave, FM, cassette recording, satellite distribution, mobile streaming and on-demand audio did not simply replace one another. They accumulated. This chapter therefore reconstructs broadcasting as an institutional chain linking language politics, public service, cultural performance, labour, technology, listening practices and preservation. A printed page can travel slowly and be reread; radio’s distinctive power is that many separated listeners can hear the same scheduled event at approximately the same time. This simultaneity mattered for morning news, weather, agricultural advice, devotional music, festival coverage and emergency communication. It also created ritualised listening habits around programme schedules. In a region where mobility, flood disruption and uneven literacy shaped access to information, the spoken broadcast could cross some barriers that print could not. But simultaneity should not be confused with equality. Reception varied by distance from the transmitter, quality of the set, atmospheric conditions and whether a household could control the time and place of listening.