Forging a Nation on Air: Radio and the Early National Soundscape in East Pakistan (1947–1952)

Abstract

As All India Radio Lahore station signed off its programme on the eve of 14 August 1947, a new voice of a new nation was heard. Thus was born Pakistan’s national soundscape. Radio brought new promises to bind together a people separated by culture, geography, and language. In the first decade after its birth, Radio Pakistan heralded itself as a transformatory tool with which the build the new nation, beginning with immediate plans to turn Urdu into a lingua franca, to employ Islamic motifs into the nation’s conscience and sound out nationalist sounds and requiems to invoke rituals of national cohesivenes. Yet these efforts soon revealed deep fissures. In Dacca[1], Tagore’s ballads continued to haunt West Pakistan despite prohibitions. In Karachi, Zulfikar Ali Bukhari trained broadcasters in an ornate Urdu that was alien even to many in the West. The national anthem, composed in stylized, Persianized diction, was received as distant and foreign. By following these debates over anthem, language, and song, this article argues that the project of forging a unified national soundscape was, from its very beginning, a project laden with tensions — one that already anticipated the fractures that would later unmake the nation.