‘Invisible Empire Tie’: Broadcasting and the British Raj in the Interwar Years

Abstract

When the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, spoke at the inauguration of the first broadcasting station in Bombay in July 1927, he optimistically claimed that wireless in India would provide an ‘invisible empire tie’ that would be ‘stronger than the strongest cable of woven wire’. Such views were echoed a decade later by Rabindranath Tagore in a poem entitled Akashvani (Heavenly Proclamation),² composed specially to mark the opening of the first short-wave station in Calcutta. Tagore had always been ‘very keen to help’ and had recorded several broadcasts from Shantiniketan, ‘his name a great draw anywhere in India’.³ However, such predictions of a spatial world transformed by the medium of radio communication proved rather exaggerated. For the study of the fate of broadcasting under the Raj in the interwar years discloses a reality altogether more prosaic and hesitant, characterised overall by an abysmal lack of creative policy-making. Was this deliberate official instruction, or simply a failure to grasp and exploit the potentialities of broadcasting? Was All India Radio (AIR) ever about all India? What were the roles of key organisations such as the ICS and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), as well as prominent individuals within these organisations? Jean Seaton has argued that individuals in broadcasting ‘explain the real story’, adding a colour and vibrancy to institutional accounts.⁴

From Earth to Heaven, distance conquered, In Waves of Light … To East and West speech careers, Swift as the Sun, The Mind of Man reaches Heaven’s confines, Its Freedom won.

Akashvani by Rabindranath Tagore¹