Partitioning the BBC: from colonial to postcolonial broadcaster

Abstract

This article explores the BBC's transition from colonial to postcolonial broadcaster in South Asia from 1940 to 1955. It argues that the BBC occupied a special place within the subcontinent in its own, and others' imaginations, by virtue of its (disavowed) yet (for it) productive colonial origins. The article focuses in particular on the Indian staff of the BBC pre and post independence and takes the BBC as a hierarchically constituted but creative collegial space. It examines: (1) the collegial relationships within BBC Bush House in London, as well as those that played out between the BBC, All India Radio (AIR) and Radio Pakistan (RP); and (2) the BBC and colonial British India and postcolonial India and Pakistan. Both interpersonal and macro-level relationships were at times read by those within them as a relationship between Britain and its former colonies, with all that entails.

Introduction – South Asian diasporas and the BBC World Service: contacts, conflicts, and contestations

“…The BBC's apparent public confidence about the expansion of services was in private BBC communication undermined by constant anxieties over audience reach (see Thiranagama 2010). Laurence Brander's report on the BBC's Indian programmes in 1943 (famous for throwing George Orwell into a moral dilemma about his working for the BBC) suggested that the audience for the BBC in wartime India was 'exceedingly limited' (Kerr 2004, p. 45).…”

“…'Delicacy', it would seem, was surplus to requirements in such discussions, even about British-styled 'martial tribes', and the frankness was due, perhaps, to the BBC's financial reliance on the Foreign Office's annual grant-in-aid. As Thiranagama (2010), and Ranasinha (2010) examine, BBC-South Asian relations during and after the war were not solely the products of momentary linguistic negotiations; they were also embodied and interpersonal as a community of South Asian intellectuals, writers and professional broadcasters circulated around -and within -the halls and broadcast studios of the BBC. Zulfiqar Ali Bokhari, who had been recruited by Lionel Fielden into All India Radio, was, by 1940, the BBC's India Talk Organiser (see Thiranagama 2010), while the Sri Lanka poet M.J. Tambimuttu and the radical Indian nationalist Mulk Raj Anand were, as Ranasinha (2010) demonstrates, both variously recruited to present broadcasts to South Asian and wider audiences.…”

“…As Thiranagama (2010), and Ranasinha (2010) examine, BBC-South Asian relations during and after the war were not solely the products of momentary linguistic negotiations; they were also embodied and interpersonal as a community of South Asian intellectuals, writers and professional broadcasters circulated around -and within -the halls and broadcast studios of the BBC. Zulfiqar Ali Bokhari, who had been recruited by Lionel Fielden into All India Radio, was, by 1940, the BBC's India Talk Organiser (see Thiranagama 2010), while the Sri Lanka poet M.J. Tambimuttu and the radical Indian nationalist Mulk Raj Anand were, as Ranasinha (2010) demonstrates, both variously recruited to present broadcasts to South Asian and wider audiences. By considering the role of key diasporic individuals within the BBC, both Thiranagama and Ranasinha explain how relations between the BBC and the South Asian diasporas were neither simple nor predictable in times of war.…”

“…Sharika Thiranagama's (2010) article, 'Partitioning the BBC' turns the light onto the period immediately 'post' partition in 1947. Drawing on extensive primary research in the BBC Written Archives Centre, the article critically engages with the individuals and events that marked the development and disintegration of a unified BBC service to British India, and the subsequent emergence of a range of language services notionally delimited by South Asia's new cartographic borders.…”

“…channel signature, but also through the web of professional and personal exchanges, friendships and working relationships that have developed between among the rivalling, but often mutually befriended, broadcasters themselves (see Hill 2010). The cosmopolitan collegiality of these relationships is much in evidence in several of the contributions in this volume (see for example, Ranasinha 2010, Thiranagama 2010, Crawley 2010.…”