Ameen Sayani’s Geetmala: How the British and a ban birthed a key chapter in free India’s sonic history

Ameen Sayani, who passed away today, was the voice behind Geetmala, or Binaca Geetmala, on Sri Lanka's Radio Ceylon, which played Hindi film music when India had banned AIR from broadcasting the same in the early 1950s.

Hindi film songs were not inherently ubiquitous in India, or for that matter in South Asia. If the world, over the years, haven’ t been able to imagine an India, the Indian cinema, and Indian culture without its Hindi film songs, the credit for that goes to one man's efforts and his iconic four-decade-long radio show Geetmala or Binaca Geetmala. Here was a young man, with a deep baritone and a musical ear and demeanour, breaking the notion of what a radio presenter sounds like, instantly connecting with the masses, speaking in their language, and ushering in a new idea of a young India eager to embrace the new, young and the fresh. Ameen Sayani, the grand old man of Indian radio, through his show birthed the symbiotic relationship between radio and Hindi cinema. Sayani passed away on Wednesday, aged 91, following a heart attack.

A Voice to Remember

“Namaskar behno aur bhaiyon, main aapka dost Ameen Sayani bol raha hoon, (Hello sisters and brothers, I your friend Ameen Sayani is speaking),” that singular iconic baritone voice emitting out of wooden boxes, aka radio transistors, followed up with dulcet Hindi film songs captured the imagination of the audience in a then-recently independent India in the mid-’50s . The voiceover artiste-turned-radio host eschewed the gravitas and glum-sounding tone of radio presenters with his jovial style and layman language — Hindustani, making infotainment accessible to the ‘common masses’. He and his shows were an instant hit among his listeners. What led to the making of Ameen Sayani as the voice that filled up the living rooms and lives of a certain generation of not only Indians but those in India's neighbouring countries like Sri Lanka and Pakistan, too, with his iconic show Geetmala, over four decades, is one of the most interesting chapters of India’s sonic history.

Sri Lanka played an immensely important role towards that end. Veteran Sri Lankan filmmaker Prasanna Vithanage said to me last year that he owes his love for India, Hindi films and Hindi film songs for a certain era thanks to Radio Ceylon. “When All India Radio didn’t allow film songs to be aired from India, Sunil Dutt, working (as a radio jockey, years before he became a Bollywood actor) in Radio Ceylon, made Hindi film songs very popular among Sri Lankans,” said Vithanage, 61, who made his first Indian-language (Malayalam) film last year, Paradise, which won the Kim Jiseok Award at the 2023 Busan International Film Festival.

Ameen Sayani’s show, Binaca Geetmala, a 30-minute programme on Radio Ceylon (aired every Wednesday at 8 pm) turned into a rage in the 1950s. It went through several name changes but never lost its essence — Binaca Geetmala, Hit Parade and Cibaca Geetmala — running from 1952 to 1994, it also moved stations and was later broadcasted on All India Radio’s Vividh Bharti.

British, Ban and Binaca 

Binaca is a consumer brand owned by the multinational pharmaceutical company CIBA-Geigy Limited. The story of Geetmala begins with a watershed event in the sonic history of the subcontinent, writes Isabel Huacuja Alonso in her paper titled “Songs by Ballot: Binaca Geetmala and the Making of a Hindi Film-Song Radio Audience, 1952–1994”, published in 2022 in Sage Journals.

“Radio Ceylon was located in the nearby island nation of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). To reach listeners in the former British India, the station relied on a powerful shortwave transmitter that had been originally set up by the British War Office during World War II to bring music and news to British soldiers in the South Asia and Southeast Asia Commands. Louis Mountbatten, who before becoming India’s last viceroy served as the Southeast Asia Command’s Supreme Commander, played an important role in bringing the transmitter to the island and setting up a military radio station,” writes Huacuja Alonso.

“In November of 1952, BV Keskar, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s new appointment to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, spearheaded ambitious reforms to the musical and linguistic programming of the national radio network, All India Radio (AIR)...to ‘transform the auditory experiences of the citizens of the newly independent nation through the medium of radio. Keskar, who was a Hindustani classical music connoisseur, filled airtime hours with Hindustani and Carnatic classical music. In his most divisive move, Keskar ordered that AIR stations stop broadcasting Hindi film songs because he believed that these songs’ growing popularity posed a threat to Indian classical music traditions,” writes Huacuja Alonso.

Cancel culture began early in the subcontinent, where Hindi film music got a bad rap as cheap and lowbrow. It was a golden opportunity for Radio Ceylon administrators in our neighbouring country in the south.

Barely within two months following Keskar’s tirade against film songs, Huacuja Alonso notes, “Radio Ceylon...employed Hindi-speaking broadcasters from India and built up an impressive Hindi film-song gramophone library...In addition to India, Radio Ceylon also garnered a robust following in neighbouring Pakistan, fostering a shared aural culture across the newly formed borders.” “Keskar’s controversial reforms, however, had other consequences, which ultimately set the stage for what Radio Ceylon and, more specifically, Geetmala would accomplish in later years,” Huacuja Alonso writes.

When AIR banned the transmission, along with a platform for broadcasting Bollywood songs, Geetmala also became a medium for the promotion of simple Hindustani, connecting with the masses of the subcontinent.