While radio has never really gone out of style, the sounds and rhythms one may associate with the medium have undergone a sea change over the years. Rather than occupying its humble abode on a lace doily atop a mantelpiece with its antennae pricked up to best intercept errant air-waves, the transistor is now an indispensable travel companion, allowing latter-day excursionists to tide over traffic blues and long-haul journeys with a steady diet of upbeat jingles, peppy film songs, and feverish prattle from exuberant radio jockeys. What used to be a solemn and ponderous medium, tripping over with self-importance, is now a little too frivolous to be taken seriously. It is probably tailor-made to our rewired selves, reeling under the effect of technology overkill, but not being able to dispense with the soundtrack of our lives that the FM channel of choice dutifully provides.
Aural details
The radio play, once a stalwart feature of the national All India Radio, is now jousting with oblivion, even if it still obstinately continues to be a part of radio programming in several regional centres. The early plays, some running into three hours long, catered to a once extended attention span that has now apparently petered down to a mere three minutes — that’s the optimal duration suggested for a YouTube clip by web experts, even for an engaged audience. A radio play, by its very nature, is just acoustics and no visuals. The constant static of poor reception once provided it its most distinctive ambient quality, although music could pipe in and out, and audio effects could complement the vocal performances of the actors or, if you are inclined to be less charitable, the ‘speakers’. They often performed live in recording studios. It was modulated speech that didn’t require to be bellowed out in order to reach the last row of the stalls, as was the case with live theatrical performance. Radio drama was a purely aural experience, yet could be rich with psychological detailing and its dramatic impact could rival that of the best plays that one might see in the playhouse.
India’s legacy of radio drama isn’t one that is sufficiently, or even to a lesser degree, preserved and archived. Dharamvir Bharti’s 1954 radio play, Andha Yug, has survived in the cultural consciousness thanks to Ebrahim Alkazi’s eponymous production, which was performed against the backdrop of the Feroze Shah Kotla in 1963. Its radio origins is often looked at derisively, with Alkazi (and Satyadev Dubey before him) being credited with salvaging an important anti-war text with his monumental (literally, as well as otherwise) visual treatment. In countries like the UK, radio drama continues to thrive, and the BBC produces and broadcasts hundreds of new radio plays each year. The drama section of the BBC’s iPlayer (which is its web interface to access both television and radio content), lists more than 700 entries that can still be listened to by viewers across the world although, most likely, the primary listernership is British.
These include dramatisations of books like E M Forster’s Howards End , and plays written directly for radio. There are much-feted readings like that of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis by a sombre and compelling Benedict Cumberbatch. There has also been, for years now, an entire slew of India-themed material that catered to the burgeoning masses of people of South Asian stock who make up one of Britain’s ideal minorities. These are often produced under the aegis of the British Asian Network, a radio station just like any other regional AIR channel, but with a British accent and edgier politics. A lot of this material would perhaps not appeal to Indian listeners, because of the stilted accents and sensationalised gaze and the manner in which country seems to be perennially viewed through a reductive and exotic lens, however pertinent the politics.
New styles
However, more and more, these radio productions are being made with local Indian production crews, who have brought in their own sensibilities that balance out issues of representation. Since 2001, John Dryden has been directing commissioned radio work for the BBC, and his projects take him all over the world where he employs local theatre groups and records on location to create a kind of pre-recorded radio dramatisation that has the feel of a “a low-budget film shoot without a camera,” according to Nadir Khan, a producer on several of his international projects.
Khan’s Indian collaborations with Dryden includes Ayeesha Menon and Kewel Karim’s adaptation of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance , and Menon’s crime drama Undercover Mumbai, in which Prerna Chawla plays an disgraced police inspector. Dryden’s guerrilla-style recording methods takes the radio drama light years away from the “six actors in a studio sitting around a microphone,” says Khan, “If there is a chase scene, we have the actors running down a street, with the mic following them.” It’s a much more dynamic, and in many ways, richer idiom. The entire process, from conception to being ready to broadcast, takes around six months. Khan doesn’t expect the works to be aired on conventional Indian radio channels. He had experimented with five-min radio theatre spots on Go FM a few years ago, and people just wouldn’t listen in, because they were considered too long. That’s the pet peeve about attention span, all over again.
The writer is a playwright and stage critic.
