Relive the timeless stories of All India Radio in this book

Remember when we’d all be glued to our radio sets during cricket matches? Or wait impatiently for songs on Vividh Bharati? Relive those good old days with excerpts from a new book on All India Radio by Vikrant Pande & Neelesh Kulkarni

Radio made cricket a religion in India,” says [veteran football commentator] Novy Kapadia, and everyone seems to agree. The game introduced to us by the English was once played by royals like Ranji Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, Vizzy-Maharajkumar of Vizianagaram, the two Nawabs of Pataudi and Maharaja of Dungarpur, amongst others. It became a household name only due to AIR. 

Everyone we spoke to for this book, whether commentators or fans, mentioned the golden era in the ’70s when transistors shrunk in size, people could carry them around and people walking on the road with hands holding transistors glued to their ears became a common sight. Many fondly recalled how they smuggled tiny transistor sets into classrooms and offices. 

There was a time when one could walk through markets and hear commentary playing in every shop. Pulokesh Mukhopadhyay, a veteran sports journalist and sports editor of The Statesman, remembers the streets of Kolkata he walked as a young man where the commentary blared forth from every handcart on the road, with cheers going up in unison in the entire market when a run or a goal was scored. “When AIR covered the IFA shield [football] matches, the entire city of Kolkata would come to a standstill, as fans sat glued to their transistor sets listening to the commentary,” he says. 

A taxi driver in Mumbai listens to the radio broadcast of the long-awaited revival cricket match between India and Pakistan on March 13, 2004. Pic/Getty Images

Veteran Hindi commentator Sushil Doshi, recollects a tea stall owner in Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi telling him that sales always went up three times when matches were on, as people stopped to listen while sipping hot tea. “Kya score hua? (What is the score?)” was the most common question one heard on the streets.
 
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But the commentary in English was understood and followed only by a handful. It had not yet reached villages and the streets and lanes of each town, nor acquired cult status. 

Hindi would be needed to make this happen. 

In 1960, the Government of India decided that all important sports events would also be covered by Hindi commentary. Due to a plethora of greats dominating the live commentary in English, many wanting to enter the field were ignored. 

One such was 23-year-old Ravi Chaturvedi, a zoology lecturer at Delhi University, who couldn’t get a chance as an English commentator. So he grabbed the opportunity and did the first Hindi commentary for a Ranji trophy semi-final between Delhi and Mumbai. 

“I still remember the date—February 24, 1961; Mumbai won by an inning and 203 runs,” he tells us. “This was, however, broadcast only locally. It was the first Test match with Hindi commentary when India, led by the Nawab of Pataudi Jr, drew against the English team led by Ted Dexter, which brought a change in Indian sports across the country.”

The match played on December 1, 1961, in Kanpur, however, brought about a revolution. With a single masterstroke, the Hindi commentary, cricket entered millions of Indian homes in villages and cities. The sport was never the same again. India had discovered a new religion. 

Chaturvedi went on to play the lion’s share in popularising Hindi commentary and cricket in India and has, to date, written 27 books on cricket and cricket commentary. He is the only commentator to have completed a doctoral thesis on cricket and was also awarded a Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award by the Indian government in 2012. He is also a freelance journalist and writes regularly on environmental and developmental issues. The residents of his ancestral village, Dalipnagar, near Kanpur, recollect his stellar contribution to getting electricity to the village, a road connected to the highway and the de-silting of canals to provide irrigation water to the farmers. 

Chaturvedi recalls how Shiv Sagar Mishra, the son-in-law of Hindi poet Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, asked him to speak pure Hindi. 

“You have to find words for all field positions,” Mishra, then a station director in AIR, had insisted. Joga Rao, who later became a sportscaster, challenged Mishra to tell him the Hindi equivalent of the field position “slip”. It soon dawned on them that the word “parchi” or a slip of paper would sound ridiculous and they didn’t know how to proceed. Finally, Chaturvedi stepped in and gave his views as a zoology lecturer. “In science conferences worldwide, it is common to stick to the original Latin, German or English words, as the case may be. We cannot translate square leg and short leg positions to ‘chaukon taang’ and ‘choti taang’, can we?” 

The argument settled the matter, and a truce was declared, accepting the original names of field positions. 

Extracted with permission from Akashvani: A Century of Stories from All India Radio by Vikrant Pande and Neelesh Kulkarni, published by HarperCollins Publishers India

Some more tales from Akashvani

Funeral for harmoniums
“Ram naam satya hai. Prabhu ka naam satya hai,” chanted the veteran broadcaster, actor and poet Harindranath Chattopadhyay. The group of musicians he led reverentially laid down the boxes they carried onto eleven biers arranged systematically on the grounds of the Lahore station of AIR.

He carried an earthen vessel, hung from hemp rope and containing burning coals, and led the radio station musicians’ procession to the nearest graveyard. The words chanted by mourners at all Hindu funeral processions echoed across the roads of Shahpura as the group of mourners lamented the passing on of a dear friend.

They laid the boxes neatly in the graves, shovelled earth on to them and returned teary-eyed to their homes. In the boxes were 11 harmoniums, which were the property of the radio station. They were so integral to musical programmes that when their use was banned on March 1, 1940 [AIR labelled it an “inferior Western instrument”], it was as if a relative had exited their lives—hence the mourning.

Urdu fans in Pak
Obaid Niazi, [a retired AIR producer] who also handled the Urdu service for some time, recalls what Ghulam Ali, the noted Pakistani ghazal singer, had once told him. He said he would make his disciples listen to the AIR Urdu service to understand how to speak Urdu correctly—such was its credibility and popularity. 

At its peak, in the ’80s, it received almost four lakh letters of appreciation every year, of which nearly 50,000 were from Pakistan. 

This is Ruskin Bond calling
How does one record a story in a total lockdown? How does one promote such an event? The innate creativity of the broadcasters and the capacity for jugaad (the ability to find innovative, frugal solutions) came to the fore to solve this problem. [Author Ruskin] Bond would call on the landline every day and read a story while [veteran broadcaster Basudha] Banerji recorded it. 

“You will be surprised to hear about my recording studio’s location,” she chuckles. 

“I recorded wherever I could, sometimes in the kitchen or in the bedroom with sheets hung on walls to muffle out echoes. I also enforced a strict curfew in the house to keep outside sounds away. We recorded promos in the oddest of places. Manoj [Atri, veteran AIR producer] recorded some in a studio created inside a mosquito net!” 

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