Radio and Broadcasting

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. 109.1 Radio made simultaneity a new social resource 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. 109.2 Broadcasting entered a landscape already structured by oral performance and print Radio did not invent the song, story, debate, sermon or drama. It selected existing forms and reworked them for a timed, microphone-centred medium. A wedding song performed for women in a courtyard became different when compressed into a studio slot; a stage play became a sound drama when scenery had to be translated into dialogue, narration and effects. Print and radio also fed each other. Authors wrote scripts, periodicals announced programmes, songs heard on air were later printed or recorded, and radio performers acquired reputations that affected live performance markets. Broadcasting therefore expanded an older cultural ecology instead of forming a separate world. 109.3 Akashvani Patna supplied an early post-independence regional platform All India Radio’s Patna station, commissioned in 1948 according to AIR technical records, became an important post-independence broadcasting centre for Bihar. Before dedicated stations existed at Bhagalpur and Darbhanga, Patna necessarily carried much of the burden of representing Bihar’s linguistic and cultural diversity. The resulting hierarchy was both technical and editorial: regional languages competed for finite 10991099 GAJENDRA THAKUR airtime within a state-centred schedule. Later demands for more Maithili broadcasting and for a Darbhanga station reveal that listeners did not regard “regional service” as culturally neutral. The location of the studio, the language of continuity announcements and the proportion of locally originated programmes all affected whether audiences experienced radio as their own. 109.4 Akashvani Bhagalpur created a durable broadcast node for Anga The AIR Compendium records the Bhagalpur medium-wave station as commissioned on 5 March 1967. Its importance was greater than the date or transmitter power alone suggests. A station in Bhagalpur provided a recurring institutional address for artists, writers, musicians, announcers and producers from the Anga region. It created auditions, fees, scripts, recording sessions and programme schedules through which local cultural forms entered an official archive. A 2026 parliamentary reply described Akashvani Bhagalpur as operating a 20 kW MW transmitter and a 100 W FM transmitter, with more than twelve hours of original programming within a daily schedule of over seventeen hours and broadcasts including Angika. 109.5 The Darbhanga station emerged from both technical planning and language politics A parliamentary record states that the Darbhanga 10 kW MW transmitter was commissioned on 2 February 1976. The station’s history should also be read against earlier agitation for greater Maithili representation on radio. Demands during the 1950s and 1960s linked broadcasting to recognition: a local station promised not only clearer reception but more control over language, repertoire and cultural personnel. A dedicated Mithila-region station therefore represented an institutional gain even though it remained part of a centralised public-service structure. Later campaigns for more Maithili airtime demonstrate that gaining a transmitter did not settle the question of linguistic proportion or editorial autonomy. 109.6 Signal coverage made geography measurable but never culturally exact Medium-wave service areas are defined by transmitter power, frequency, terrain, interference and time of day, not by cultural boundaries. Darbhanga’s signal could reach beyond a district; Bhagalpur’s could cross administrative borders; listeners in the Nepal Tarai could hear Indian stations, while Radio Nepal and local Nepali FM signals crossed southward. This technical permeability matters historically. Mithila, Anga and Madhesh were never sealed broadcasting zones. At the same time, a coverage map is only potential audibility. It cannot show who actually listened, which language they preferred, whether women or children controlled the receiver, or whether a programme was trusted. Broadcasting geography must therefore combine engineering records with reception evidence. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II Figure 432 — Selected institutional milestones in regional radio and broadcasting. 109.7 Language scheduling turned airtime into an allocative institution Every multilingual station has to divide a finite day. The resulting schedule is a form of cultural allocation. Minutes assigned to Maithili, Angika, Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, Santhali or other languages reveal institutional priorities, but raw duration does not tell the whole story. Prime listening hours differ from marginal hours; original production differs from relayed content; news has a different public authority from music; and a weekly literary programme cannot be equated with a daily bulletin. Historians should therefore reconstruct not simply whether a language “was broadcast” but when, how often, in what genres, with what production resources and under what label. 109.8 The microphone helped standardise speech while preserving audible variation Print standardisation works through spelling and grammar; radio standardisation works through pronunciation, vocabulary, pace and announcer selection. Studio norms can privilege educated or metropolitan varieties, especially in news and formal talks. Yet radio is also unusually good at preserving variation because the voice carries accent, intonation and code-switching that writing may suppress. Maithili and Angika broadcasts could therefore pull in opposite directions at once: formal announcer speech could strengthen a prestige norm, while interviews, songs and field recordings could make local varieties audible. The archive of sound is consequently essential for linguistic history, not merely an illustration of written sources. 109.9 Radio drama created a distinctive literary labour market Broadcast drama converted writers into scriptwriters and stage actors into microphone performers. The medium rewarded concise scenes, recognisable voices, acoustic cues and dialogue that could carry setting without visual scenery. Stations commissioned or accepted scripts, auditioned artists, paid fees and repeated successful forms. In both Maithili and Angika, this created a cultural economy adjacent to print but not reducible to it. Biographical records of Angika writers, for example, preserve evidence of numerous radio plays produced from Bhagalpur. Such claims are strongest when they can be matched with station logs, scripts, payment records or recordings; memory alone should not be used to manufacture precise broadcast counts. 11011101 GAJENDRA THAKUR 109.10 Music broadcasting altered the relation between household repertoire and public canon Songs previously embedded in ritual, work, season or locality could become “folk music” once selected for broadcast. Studio duration, accompaniment and audition standards changed performance. Radio also created repeat exposure: a singer or tune could become recognisable across districts, and the station could transform particular voices into regional celebrities. This process was not simply preservation. Selection inevitably canonised some repertoires and neglected others. Women’s ritual songs, caste- or occupation- specific performance and minority-language forms could be simultaneously documented and decontextualised. A social history of radio music must therefore ask who performed, who selected, how the item was labelled and what happened when a lived repertoire became programme content. 109.11 Farm and rural programmes made broadcasting part of the development state Post-independence public radio treated rural listeners as a special audience. Agricultural extension, weather information, crop practices, animal care, health and cooperative advice placed the microphone within the developmental apparatus. Such programmes are valuable evidence of state priorities, but they should not be read as proof of adoption. The distance between advice and practice depended on landholding, irrigation, credit, literacy, gender and local ecological conditions. In flood-prone north Bihar, for example, the utility of a general crop message could vary sharply by river regime and season. Listener letters, farm surveys and local extension records are therefore necessary to evaluate how developmental broadcasting entered everyday decision-making. 109.12 Women’s programmes reveal both inclusion and paternalism Dedicated women’s slots created opportunities for female announcers, singers, writers and experts, and could circulate information about health, education, law and household economics. Yet the very category “women’s programme” often assumed that women’s primary social location was domestic. Broadcasting could therefore expand voice while reproducing a narrow model of appropriate subject matter. The historical question is not whether women were present on air but what forms of authority they were allowed to exercise. Comparing programme scripts, performer rosters and listener correspondence can show when women appeared as artists, citizens, workers, farmers and political subjects rather than only as mothers or homemakers. 109.13 Children and youth broadcasting created new pedagogic publics Radio could reach children beyond the classroom through stories, quizzes, songs, educational talks and school broadcasts. In regions with uneven school infrastructure, such programmes carried an egalitarian promise. Their effect nevertheless depended on access to receivers and on scheduling around school and labour. Youth programmes also created an entry route into broadcasting for new voices and modern music. As cassette, FM and later mobile audio expanded, young listeners gained more control over what and when they heard. This shift from a fixed schedule to selectable audio is one of the most important transformations in the social history of listening. 109.14 News bulletins gave language recognition a special political weight A literary song in a language and a news bulletin in that language do not have the same institutional meaning. News places a language inside the routine vocabulary of government, elections, economy, disaster HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II and international affairs. That is why demands for Maithili news acquired symbolic importance. In Nepal, Radio Nepal gradually expanded multilingual news beyond Nepali and English. Current Radio Nepal materials list Maithili among its bulletin languages. Secondary accounts disagree on the exact start year of Maithili news, with dates around the early 1990s; this discrepancy should be resolved from Radio Nepal’s own archival logs rather than repeated as settled fact. Figure 433 — Broadcasting as an institutional chain from speech community to archive. 109.15 Radio Nepal created a second public-service axis for the Maithili region Radio Nepal, established in 1951, developed from a small short-wave service into a national broadcaster using medium wave, FM and later satellite and online distribution. For Maithili-speaking populations in Nepal, this mattered because public broadcasting located Maithili within the national multilingual order rather than treating it only as a cross-border cultural language. Provincial and regional transmission further altered the relationship between Kathmandu and Madhesh. The same listener could potentially hear Radio Nepal, Indian Akashvani stations and later local FM. This competitive and overlapping environment is crucial: language publics were shaped by multiple states and markets at once. 109.16 Nepal’s FM opening broke the monopoly of a single broadcasting institution Nepal’s 1990s communication reforms opened FM broadcasting to actors beyond the state. Radio Sagarmatha, on air in 1997 after a long licensing struggle, became South Asia’s best-known early independent community-radio example. Its importance for this regional history is indirect but structural: once independent and community FM became viable, local-language broadcasting could be produced closer to listeners. Madhesh towns subsequently developed dense FM ecologies in which Maithili appeared in news, phone-ins, music, education and civic programming. The centre of gravity moved from a few national transmitters toward many local studios, even though ownership, finance and political influence remained uneven. 109.17 Janakpur and neighbouring FM stations localised Maithili public speech Local FM in Dhanusha, Mahottari, Siraha and adjoining districts changed the scale at which Maithili broadcasting could operate. A station did not need to represent an entire nation or state; it could discuss municipal services, schools, roads, health posts, local elections, markets and cultural events in the language of 11031103 GAJENDRA THAKUR nearby listeners. Development organisations also used multi-station networks for Maithili educational programmes. The “Appan Shikshya” project, for example, was distributed through six FM stations in the region beginning in 2017. Such networks demonstrate that local radio became both a civic forum and a delivery infrastructure for NGOs and public-interest campaigns. 109.18 Call-ins changed listeners from an imagined audience into audible participants The telephone transformed radio’s social structure. Listeners could request songs, answer quizzes, report local problems, debate presenters or speak in mixed and informal registers. This interaction challenged the one-way model of broadcasting and exposed differences between formal studio language and everyday speech. A 2010 study of Maithili FM programmes in Nepal, for example, examined English code-mixing in telephone-based broadcasts and listener attitudes. Call-in radio is therefore a rich source for the study of linguistic change, aspiration and youth culture, although ethical and archival problems arise because participant consent and long-term preservation were rarely designed for later historical research. 109.19 Commercial FM reorganised attention around advertising and measurable audiences Private FM depends more directly on advertising, sponsorship and market segmentation than classic public-service radio. This changes programming incentives. Shorter speech, popular music, branded contests, traffic-style updates and advertiser-friendly dayparts can displace slower literary forms. At the same time, commercial competition may create airtime for local language because advertisers want access to local consumers. Language visibility therefore need not arise from cultural policy alone; it can also be produced by market logic. The resulting public is different from the subscriber public of print and the citizen public imagined by state broadcasting: it is simultaneously a listener community and an audience commodity. 109.20 Community radio linked broadcasting to participation and local accountability The community-radio ideal treats listeners not merely as consumers but as participants who can shape content, report problems and produce programmes. Nepal became a major South Asian laboratory for this model after the late 1990s. In practice, the category “community” covers diverse ownership and funding arrangements, and local stations can be vulnerable to party influence, donor priorities or financial crisis. Yet the model is historically significant because it shifted the normative question from “what should the broadcaster tell the public?” to “who gets to speak through the station?” This distinction is especially important in multilingual Madhesh, where language choice is inseparable from representation. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II Figure 434 — Public-service, local FM/community and digital-audio ecologies overlap rather than replace one another. 109.21 Disaster and flood broadcasting reveal radio’s infrastructural value Mithila and north Bihar are repeatedly affected by flood, while Nepal’s Tarai faces related river and monsoon risks. During disruption, radio can remain useful when roads fail and print distribution stops, particularly if receivers are battery powered. Emergency value, however, depends on local specificity. River level, embankment breach, evacuation route and relief-centre information must reach the correct population quickly and in understandable language. Public and community broadcasters therefore function as part of disaster infrastructure, not merely cultural institutions. Historical study should compare emergency schedules and warnings with actual disaster chronologies to determine when radio reduced uncertainty and when communication systems failed. 109.22 Migration expanded radio audiences beyond the territorial reach of transmitters Migrants carried listening habits with them. In Kolkata, Delhi, Punjab, the Gulf or Kathmandu, a Maithili- or Angika-speaking migrant might seek regional songs and news as a form of continuity with home. Before internet streaming, this depended on shortwave, cassettes, recorded programmes or occasional signal reach. Online radio radically changed the equation because a station located in Darbhanga, Bhagalpur or Nepal could be heard globally. The diaspora audience is therefore not an accidental extension of local broadcasting; it alters the imagined public of the station. Programme producers can now address listeners who are culturally local but geographically distant. 109.23 Streaming converts a scheduled broadcast into a platform service Akashvani stations that once depended on terrestrial reach are now also available through internet streaming and official apps. A 2021 parliamentary reply explicitly noted online availability for Akashvani Darbhanga, while the current Akashvani live-radio directory lists Bihar stations for internet listening. Radio Nepal likewise distributes content online. Streaming does more than expand range. It changes measurement, discoverability and device use; a listener may use headphones on a phone rather than a family radio set. Yet a live stream still preserves the old schedule. The deeper transformation comes when programmes are archived as selectable audio, allowing listening to detach from broadcast time. 11051105 GAJENDRA THAKUR 109.24 Podcasts and social platforms blur the boundary between radio and recorded audio Once a programme can be uploaded, clipped, shared and replayed, “radio” becomes partly a production tradition rather than a transmission technology. Interviews, literary readings and discussions may circulate through YouTube, podcast feeds or social media without an FM or MW transmitter. This lowers entry barriers and helps small language communities create audio publics without a broadcast licence. It also fragments preservation: files may sit on private accounts, platforms may remove content, and metadata may be inconsistent. Future historians will therefore need to archive digital audio systematically rather than assuming that online abundance guarantees survival. 109.25 Broadcasting created paid and semi-professional cultural labour Stations required announcers, producers, engineers, translators, scriptwriters, musicians, actors, news readers and casual artists. For regional languages, these jobs and fees mattered because literary and performance work often had weak commercial markets. An audition grade or recurring programme could provide income, reputation and institutional validation. But radio labour was hierarchical. Permanent technical and administrative staff, contract workers and occasional artists had different security and bargaining power. Gender, caste, class, language and urban access could shape who reached the studio. Broadcasting history should therefore include payrolls, contracts, audition files and artist rosters alongside famous programmes. 109.26 The archive is both unusually rich and dangerously fragile Radio can preserve the actual voice of a writer or singer, making it one of the most powerful media for cultural history. Yet broadcast archives are vulnerable to tape reuse, format obsolescence, poor cataloguing, institutional moves and rights restrictions. A surviving recording may lack date, performer or programme metadata; a script may survive when the audio does not. Conversely, private cassette collections may preserve broadcasts absent from station archives. A serious regional project should digitise recordings with checksums and retain programme logs, scripts, contracts and descriptive metadata. Audio without provenance is evocative but historically weaker than a well-documented recording. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II Figure 435 — Evidence layers required for a social history of broadcasting. 109.27 Listener memory is evidence, but it must be anchored to schedules and recordings People often remember a familiar announcer, a signature tune, a weekly drama or the communal act of gathering around a radio. Such memory is indispensable for reconstructing the social use of broadcasting. It reveals where the set stood, who controlled tuning, which programmes interrupted work and how voices were emotionally received. Memory is less reliable for exact dates, frequencies or programme titles decades later. Oral-history interviews should therefore be cross-checked against printed schedules, station logs and surviving audio. The goal is not to discredit memory but to use it for the questions it answers best: experience, meaning and routine. 109.28 Comparative history must separate public service, community service and language advocacy A Maithili programme on Akashvani, a Maithili bulletin on Radio Nepal, a Janakpur commercial FM phone-in and a volunteer digital podcast may all use the same language while operating under different institutional logics. Public-service broadcasting balances statutory or governmental mandates; commercial FM competes for advertising and attention; community radio claims participatory legitimacy; activist media may prioritise language recognition. Treating them as one undifferentiated “Maithili media” hides the economics and governance that shape content. The same distinction applies to Angika, whose broadcast presence is tied especially to Bhagalpur’s station and regional cultural networks. 109.29 A regional broadcasting archive should be organised around programmes, not celebrities alone Celebrity histories are easy to write because prominent singers, announcers and writers leave biographies. Institutional history requires a different archive. Each programme should ideally have station, date, time, language, genre, producer, participants, script identifier, recording identifier, rights status and technical format. Repeated programme series should be catalogued as runs, not isolated objects. Such a database would make it possible to measure gender representation, language allocation, genre change and the movement of artists between print, stage, radio and later television. It would also allow competing claims about “first broadcasts” or programme longevity to be verified rather than inherited. 109.30 Broadcasting modernity is a history of changing access to voice Across Mithila, Vajji, Anga and Madhesh, the deepest historical significance of radio lies in who could become audible beyond face-to-face space. Public broadcasting enlarged the scale of language and performance; dedicated regional stations created institutional addresses; FM multiplied local producers; call- ins made listeners audible; streaming detached reception from territory; and digital archives made some broadcasts replayable across generations. None of these shifts eliminated hierarchy. Editorial selection, transmitter geography, licensing, finance, language prestige and platform control continually redistributed voice. Broadcasting modernity is therefore best understood not as a march from old technology to new, but as a changing political economy of audibility. Table 109.1 — Evidence domains for reconstructing radio and broadcasting history Evidence domain What it can Principal historical Main limitation establish use 11071107 GAJENDRA THAKUR Evidence domain What it can Principal historical Main limitation establish use Transmitter and Frequency, power, Reconstruct Potential coverage is engineering records commissioning, technical reach and not actual listening coverage institutional expansion Programme schedules Language, time, Measure editorial Surviving runs may and logs genre, duration, allocation and change be incomplete relay/origination over time Scripts and Words, voice, music, Analyse content, Audio may lack recordings performance, pronunciation and metadata or rights production style genre clearance Artist and personnel Auditions, fees, roles, Study cultural labour Access is often files contracts, and gatekeeping restricted; casual employment artists underdocumented Listener letters, calls Reception, requests, Recover social use Self-selected evidence and surveys complaints, audience and perceived can overrepresent profile relevance active listeners Oral histories Domestic listening, Reconstruct lived Exact dates and titles memory, emotion, experience of radio require corroboration routine Digital streams and Online availability, Trace post-territorial Platforms change or platform metadata timestamps, and on-demand delete files; metrics circulation routes audio publics are proprietary