When:
Thursday, April 15, 2021 4:00 PM
-
6:00 PM
Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs
South Asia Center presents
“Where are you? Call out to me”: The All India Radio Urdu
Service’s Letters of Longing
Shortly after the end of the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war and largely
in response to Radio Pakistan’s campaign to incite anti-Indian sentiment,
Indira Gandhi, then Indian Minister of Information and
Broadcasting, inaugurated a new radio service directed at West Pakistan.
While the service targeted “foreign” Urdu-knowing audiences, it quickly gained
popularity in North India as well, where Urdu was widely understood. In
addition to news programs, the Urdu Service aired entertainment programs,
including music and radio drama, but at the heart of the service were letters
from fans on both sides of the border sharing pre-Partition memories. This talk
focuses on the late 1960s and 1970s and considers how the
practice of writing letters to radio stations sought to mitigate the distance
between listener and broadcaster. This practice effectively turned listeners
into broadcasters and enabled cross-border connections between
India and Pakistan at precisely the time when the western
Indo-Pakistan border became physically impassible. Moreover, the talk
grapples with the limitations of the Urdu Service. The nostalgia and
sentimentalism that programs fostered helped forge Urdu into what Huacuja Alonso calls a
“language of nostalgia,” ensuring that Urdu in post-independence India became
associated with bygone pre-Partition days.
Isabel Huacuja Alonso
Assistant Professor
California State University
Isabel Huacuja Alonso is an Assistant Professor at California
State University (CSUSB) and an historian of Modern South Asia
with interests in media and the politics of state borders. She will be
joining Columbia University's Department of Middle East, South Asia, and Africa
Studies (MESAAS) in the Fall 2021. Her current book project, Radio for
the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting and the Politics of Sound, follows radio
stations in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Germany and parts of
Southeast Asia as it argues for a new geography of radio based on
language groups rather national or regional borders. The book
expands on her dissertation, which won the 2015 Sardar
Patel Award for “the best dissertation in any aspect of modern India defended
at a US institution.”
In addition to
her work on sound and borders, Dr. Huacuja Alonso has researched the
anti-colonial leader M. N. Roy’s unconventional sojourn in Mexico and
translated an excerpt of an Urdu-language radio travelogue on the Grand Trunk
Road, which crisscrosses the Indian subcontinent. The American Institutes of
Indian and Pakistan Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the
Institute for Historical Studies at University of Texas at Austin, where she
completed her doctorate, have funded her research. Her publications
have appeared in Public Culture, South Asia, SAGAR, The
Caravan, Scroll, and the Spanish-language magazine, Algarabia.
Co-sponsored by the Departments of History, Literatures and Linguistics,
Television, Radio and Film.
Click here to register
For more information, please contact Emera Bridger Wilson, elbridge@syr.edu or to request accommodation arrangements, please contact Morgan Bicknell, mebickne@syr.edu.