Society

The Wave Silenced

The BBC Hindi radio, a constant for the last seven decades, is set to go off air

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The Wave Silenced
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Milestones

  • BBC Hindi service began on May 11, 1940
  • Significant events covered include: Indo-Pak war of 1971, Emergency, Operation Bluestar, Indira Gandhi assassination, Kandahar hijack, Gujarat riots, Parliament attack, 26/11
  • BBC Hindi currently airs four 30-minute programmes on short wave—at 6.30 am, 8 am, 7.30 pm and 10.30 pm
  • BBC Hindi short wave transmission to cease from April 1, 2011, as a result of cuts imposed by its funder, the British foreign office

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Vijay Kumar Pandey of Kunda town in Uttar Pradesh’s Pratapgarh district was in Class VIII when prime minister Indira Gandhi fell to her assassins’ bullets in 1984. The memory of that electrifying day, which he spent sitting next to his father listening to the tragedy unfold on one BBC Hindi bulletin after another, is still sharply etched in his mind. While DD and AIR dithered, it was BBC that told millions of Indians they had lost their prime minister. Since then, Pandey has been hooked to what he calls “my father’s legacy”, so much so that he today heads a 200-strong Shrota Sangathan (Listeners’ Collective) that gathers every evening to listen to, and pick apart, BBC Hindi broadcasts.

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On March 31, this happy routine will end. BBC Hindi radio will broadcast for the last time on short wave before shutting shop on April 1, thanks to budget cuts imposed by Britain’s foreign office. “We will listen to it together one last time. Then our organisation will also cease to exist,” says Pandey with a palpable sense of sadness in his voice. But they won’t go quietly. Members are planning to write to the British foreign office, and some even plan to burn the effigy of  PM David Cameron in protest!

There are many such diehard fans among the 9.5 million committed BBC Hindi listeners in obscure towns and villages scattered across the Hindi belt. For 87-year-old Sukhdeo Narayan of Basantpur village in Supaul district of Bihar, the mornings have always begun with him fiddling with his radio or transistor to tune them to the BBC frequency. “Short wave ke bahut nakhre hain (it has its tantrums). It’s difficult to receive the transmission,” he says, sounding a trifle irritated. But even more disorienting, now, is the thought of not receiving it at all. “Khana kaise pachega?” (how will I digest my meals), asks the retired block extension education officer and author.

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Such deeply felt reactions towards something as mundane as a radio service may sound alien to the TV and internet-savvy kids of today, but not their middle-class parents, who grew up on BBC Hindi. For some, it is the very stuff of nostalgia. TV producer Sonal Joshi remembers the way the late Hindi poet Bhawani Prasad Mishra, a family friend, listened to the BBC Hindi service. “We were seven or eight years old and had to remain absolutely quiet while he heard the news,” she says. It was like the Bible for grown-ups in his family, remarks software programmer Anurag Narayan. “I remember my late grandfather in Sasaram telling me that if BBC had said something it had to be correct. He even set his watch by the BBC news,” he says.

But personal memories are actually only a part of BBC Hindi lore. For seven decades, the service, which began in 1940, has been a window to the world, India included, for its listeners. “Election to inflation, I heard it all on BBC,” says 71-year-old retired veterinarian, Dr Rajendra Prasad Das, of Bela Rahi village in Jhanjharpur, who has been listening to the service since 1952. Even now, among a cacophony of news channels, it was the BBC that 40-year-old Irfan Hashmi, a resident of Ballia in UP, turned to, and trusted, for the Parliament attack, 26/11 and the Iraq war. (It also helps that radio stays alive on batteries when TV sets fall silent during power cuts.) Filmmaker Vinod Pande, who read the news for BBC Hindi between 1967 and 1979, remembers how the service rose to the occasion with extended bulletins during the Indo-Pak war of 1971; and its crisp, exciting coverage of the freeing of Pakistani PoWs and the Simla Agreement.

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Sixty-two-year-old Sumant Pandya remembers the volume being turned up for the whole community to listen to BBC broadcasts of the Indo-Pak war of 1971. The professor, now retired, was then teaching in Rajasthan’s famous Banasthali Vidyapeeth where, in his words, “radio was the only means of communication”. It was the only source of information for him—and indeed, and the rest of the country—during the Emergency, when censors ruled. “BBC ka naam prachaar ke bajaye khabar ki vishwasneeyata se juda tha (BBC was associated with reliability of news than propaganda),” he says. Later, in 1991-92, when riots broke out in Jaipur on account of the Babri Masjid dispute, it was BBC to the rescue. “We were living in the Walled City, the whole town was under curfew, and had been handed over to the army. BBC was our only link with the world outside,” says Pandya. 

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These regular listeners sound almost identical in their choice of adjectives to define the service—informative, knowledgeable, dependable, impartial, independent.... “Tathast aur santulit (steady and balanced)” is how Sukhdeo Narayan puts it. The pre-liberalisation era was BBC Hindi’s heyday; it was the king of real time, with all other broadcast media being government-controlled. When private news channels took off in the ’90s, the BBC became a reference point. “We consulted their style book when we were doing one for NDTV India,” says the channel’s former managing editor Dibang.

News apart, the language and the voices which brought it all alive have also lingered in many listeners’ minds. “The enunciation and pronunciation were always perfect,” says Sukhdeo Narayan. Hashmi remembers Rihaan Fazal’s coverage of the Gujarat riots and Kandahar hijack, while Pandya’s favourite was Ratnakar Bharati, who would sometimes visit the Banasthali campus to see his daughter who studied there. “Every visit became an event, we had extended sessions with him,” says Pandya. BBC bureau chief Mark Tully and deputy chief Satish Jacob were of course household names, especially after their coverage of Operation Bluestar.

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It’s their bond with listeners that BBC staffers, too, cherish, acknowledging, at the same time, that with the growth of FM and private TV channels that long-cultivated relationship has been under threat. Listenership, pegged at about 35 million in the early ’80s, began its downward spiral in the early ’90s. But the strength of the bond remains. “I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who turned up during the Golden Jubilee celebrations in 1990 and at the roadshows we did in 40 small cities in 2004. The direct interaction with them, the special relationship shared with them, is my most cherished  memory,” says Achala Sharma, former head of BBC Hindi. And it will be these memories that hold sway after April 1, as voices fade out.

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