Broadcasting the ‘(anti)colonial sublime’: Radio SEAC, Congress Radio, and the Second World War in South Asia

Abstract

Abstract This article considers the Second World War’s effects on radio infrastructures and listening cultures in India through a detailed analysis of two radio stations: Radio SEAC and Congress Radio. Radio SEAC was a military radio station based in Ceylon targeting British soldiers stationed in Asia. It housed what was then one of the most wide-reaching transmitters. Congress Radio was a makeshift station in Bombay run by young and largely unknown anticolonial activists. While operating on vastly different scales and with rival goals, these stations’ political ambitions were surprisingly similar. Radio SEAC sought to restore confidence in the empire by invoking an old device of imperialism: what Brian Larkin calls the ‘colonial sublime’, the use of ‘technology to represent an overwhelming sense of grandeur’. Radio SEAC’s colonial sublime, however, was not aimed at colonized populations, but at disillusioned British soldiers, whose faith in the empire the station wished to revive. Congress Radio, in contrast, sought to summon what I call the ‘anticolonial sublime’ by deploying the aura of imperial technology against British rulers. Yet, whereas the colonial sublime required technologies to work smoothly, the anticolonial sublime did not. Congress radio broadcasters celebrated their station’s faulty reception, nurturing an aesthetic of rebelliousness. Analysing these two radio projects together, the article traces how the war shaped technological infrastructures while challenging conventional understandings about how radio connects with audiences. British administrators, like anticolonial activists, sought to bring about change less through programming content than through the aura of technological prowess they hoped their stations would generate.