Partitioning the BBC: From Colonial to Postcolonial Broadcaster

This research explores the BBC’s transition from colonial to postcolonial broadcaster in South Asia from 1940 to 1955. It argues that the BBC occupied a special place within the subcontinent in its own, and others’ imaginations, by virtue of its (disavowed) yet (for it) productive colonial origins. The research focuses in particular on the Indian staff of the BBC pre and post independence and takes the BBC as a hierarchically constituted but creative collegial space. It examines: 1) the collegial relationships within BBC Bush House in London, as well as those that played out between the BBC, All India Radio (AIR) and Radio Pakistan (RP); and 2) the BBC and colonial British India and postcolonial India and Pakistan. Both interpersonal and macro-level relationships were at times read by those within them as a relationship between Britain and its former colonies, with all that entails.

Project contact: 

Sharika Thiranagama: New School Social Science Research, NY thiranas@newschool.edu

Project members: 

• Sharika Thiranagama is an assistant professor at the Eugene Language College. Her doctoral and postdoctoral work has focused on various aspects of the Sri Lankan civil war. Primarily, she has conducted research with two different ethnic groups, Sri Lankan Tamils and Sri Lankan Muslims, and the effects of protracted civil war on ideas of home, kinship and self. She has also conducted other research on the history of railways in Sri Lanka, on the political culture of treason amongst Sri Lankan Tamils, the BBC World service in South Asia etc. Her new research will focus more broadly on the South Asian region and the south Indian state of Kerala in particular. She is currently working on a book project entitled In my Mother’s House: the Intimacy of War in Sri Lanka which will be forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press. For more information see Sharika’s website.

Cross theme reference: 

• Regional focus: South Asia