Radio Ceylon in the Indian Ocean Arena: Towards a More Expansive Cultural Geography of Media

• In Event: The Region in Global Media Studies

Abstract

During the 1950s and 1960s, Radio Ceylon, a Colombo (Sri Lanka)-based commercial broadcaster produced a series of programs based on Indian film music. Broadcast via powerful short-wave transmitters, these programs reached an estimated 90-120 million listeners not only in the Indian sub-continent but those as far afield as South Africa and parts of East Africa. Drawing on preliminary archival research and interviews with broadcasters, this paper will sketch the role played by Radio Ceylon in forging a trans-national audience community in a historical conjuncture in which national identity was being defined in narrow, territorial terms by the newly independent Indian state. Building on studies of processes of cultural transnationalism in the Indian Ocean arena, I will trace the implications of thinking beyond the ‘regional’ and foregrounding the ‘oceanic’ as a way to develop a more expansive cultural geography of media.

Bio: Aswin Punathambekar is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. He is the author of From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry (2013) and co-editor of Television at Large in South Asia (2013) and Global Bollywood (2008).

Author

• Aswin Punathambekar, U of Michigan