The other day while listening to a noisy programme on the fm
of Radio Mirchi my mind travelled back long years to 1948 when we got the first
radio in our house. My late second brother got a first division in his
intermediate examination. The examinations were held then by the Ajmer Board of
Secondary education to which a number colleges in Rajputana, United Provinces,
Central India, etc were affiliated. With thousands of candidates competing,
getting a first division in those days in any board or university examination
was no ordinary matter. Elated by the
distinction achieved by him, my father went and bought a radio as a gift for
him – a small one, of five valves made by Phillips of Holland. Its price was
Rs. 350/-, an amount that was more than my father’s monthly salary.
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| A radio of early 1940s |
Radios were a, sort of, rarity those days, more so in a small
town like Gwalior where we grew up. Not many people owned one. I remember our
entire family walked quite a distance to a Bengali family’s house to listen to
the broadcast of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose from Singapore. This must have
been around 1942 when I was a small kid. Amid a lot of disturbing noises like
those of lightning and thunder I just heard somebody speaking out. But I
remember the radio which was a boxy type, something like the one that Tom tunes
in to in Walt Disney’s “Tom & Jerry” cartoons.
One could easily make
out who all had radios in the town. The tell-tale sign was a pair of bamboo
poles sticking up into the skies from the terrace, joined by a wire that came
down to a lower floor and entered the house through an available inlet. These
were the antennas that one had to have to receive broadcasts and were also
indicative of the family’s financial wellbeing. Radios being uncommon, one
would find them, maybe, on top of one or two houses in a locality. Consumerism
was far, far away. While salaries were low, the prices were constantly rising.
Even in those early post-independence days Nehru would frequently harangue
people about tackling the “monster of rising prices”. Were he to re-appear today
and check out the prices, he wouldn’t know where to hide.
Although there were only very few broadcasting stations in
the country – mostly in metro and other bigger towns – one could roam all over
the world with the receiving set. The air waves were free and, unlike the TV or
fm transmissions, one could tap them to tune in to the fare offered by any
station in the world that one fancied. It all depended on the power and
capability of the set one possessed.
Our five-valve, three-band radio, one medium and two
short-wave bands (many of the current generation may not have heard of these
bands, fed on fm as they are), had limited capabilities. Yet we could tune in
to, apart from Indian stations, distant broadcasts from, say, Radio Australia,
on 16 or 19 metre bands to listen to the running commentaries on cricket test
matches played there. Likewise, when cricket was on in England we would tune in
to BBC, again, on the 19 metre band. I clearly remember the disastrous second
Indian innings at Headingley, Leeds in the summer of 1952. India lost four
wickets for no runs on the board, the new young speedster Freddie Truman
knocking off three of his four wickets in the innings in the first two or three
overs. The din that the Indian debacle raised at distant Headingley was carried
over the air-waves to us through the radio.
Even the news bulletins broadcast at night were worth
listening to. Among the English newscasters was the legendary Melville De Mello
with his impeccable English delivered in his deep baritone. He was the one who
gave non-stop running commentary from a moving van for around hours while
accompanying the funeral cortege of Mahatma Gandhi. He was also handpicked by
the British Government for broadcasting running commentary on Queen Elizabeth’s
coronation procession in 1952. It’s such
a pity that his 95-year old widow has had to fight for her measly pension.
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| Radiogram |
The medium wave-band broadcasting those days was of low power
hence the weak signals of distant stations like Cuttack or Patna would only be
faintly audible. The short wave broadcasts, capable as they are of reaching any
part of the earth, were clearer and largely devoid of atmospheric disturbances.
Good for receiving musical programmes, we would tune in on short-wave to the Delhi
station for various musical programmes. Most of the ustaads (maestros) of Indian classical vocal or instrumental music
were given breaks by the government-owned All India Radio (AIR).
For us the most
attractive programmes used to be of Hindi (non-film) songs of Pankaj Mullick,
Talat Mahmood, Jagmohan, Hemant Kumar as also the weekly programme of film
songs “Aapki farmaish”. We would even tune in to Radio Pakistan, Dhaka to
listen to Firoza Begum sing Tagore songs, a favourite of my father those days.
Around the early 1950s Radio Ceylon literally gate-crashed into the Hindi
film-music listening audience. The broadcasts available right through the day,
they remained a great favourite for a very large section of the people who were
light music enthusiasts until AIR’s Vividh Bharati, a film-songs based
programme commercialised on the pattern of Radio Ceylon, gave it a run for its
money. By then, of course, Radio Ceylon’s disc jockeys (DJs) Amin Sayani and,
later, Sheila Tiwari had become household names in India.
Western music has
virtually disappeared from the Indian airwaves. In our times we could tune in
to Delhi to listen to chamber and dance music, a programme of Western
orchestras, and “A date with you” anchored by Ms Preminda Premchand every
Friday night. She played on demand popular Western light vocal and instrumental
music. Bing Crosby, Jo Stafford, Patty Page, Nat King Cole, Perry Como etc.,
the trumpet of Eddie Calvert and the numbers of Billy Vaughn and his orchestra
were favourites of most of us. Radio Ceylon, too, used to broadcast Western
light music and its DJ, Greg, was very popular in India.
Because of the growing clutter of broadcasting stations on
short waves at 16, 25, 31 and 41 metre bands radios with band-spreads for
accurate tuning of
closely spaced frequencies became available. We acquired in mid-fifties an
8-band radio with a more powerful speaker. The music flowing out of it was
sheer pleasure. Much later, the tuner-amplifiers with fm band made their
appearance with a bank of 10 press-button tuning knobs, detached speakers and
stereophonic sound system. I was sold one by Philips in Chandigarh in 1975 in
beautiful rosewood-finish with the assurance that stereo broadcasts were to
commence soon. AIR, with the monopoly that it had, however, took around 10
years to bring fm broadcasts on stream and, that too, for very limited hours.
Nonetheless, even in mono state the big powerful speakers produced delectable
sound of music.
In the meantime,
advances in technology radically changed the scene and democratised the radio,
taking them even to the villages. Invention of transistors made it cheap and
portable – shorn of the heavy and fragile valves and powered by dry battery
cells. In the early sixties the Mall of Mussourie lost its quietude, with
tourists walking around with battery-powered transistor radios slung from their
shoulders, film music blaring out of them. These also became powerful means of
dissemination of information to the remotest corners of the country where
electricity had not reached.
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| Samsung Smartphone |
Though millions are still in use, their popularity waned with
miniaturisation and advent of portable cassette players. Nonetheless, in the
later avatar of bulky radiograms that combined a valve radio and a gramophone,
radios used to feature in much smaller early two-in-ones or three-in-ones which
even had a cassette deck. Then, in the ‘80s radio lost out to the TV that
combined audio and video broadcasts. Admittedly, a mere audio receiver could
have had no chance of survival in front of a medium that could also receive
live and vibrant pictures.
Fm broadcasts came along in the early nineties and soon the
government broke its monopoly over the radio waves. Privatisation of fm
broadcasts enabled controlled increase in the number of broadcasters. Arrival
of cheap radio-enabled cell phones has kept fm broadcasters busy but today what
one gets is mostly a mix of loud music and gibberish. Doing even better, smart
phones have gone ahead and put in the pockets of people not only a radio but
also a television and a computer with internet connectivity.
No wonder radios of yore in beautiful shiny wooden cabinets
with their illuminated dials capable of tuning on to any station in the world
have had to make a quiet, unobtrusive exit from Indian homes. Young India
hasn’t seen them; those who are curious can find them only in museums.
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