Page 22 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

Introduction >> 9

other producers decided to transform Binaca Geet Mala into a one-hour
“hit parade” in December 1954. While continuing to encourage audiences to
write in with song requests, CIBA, after consultations with their sales per-
sonnel, identified forty record stores across India that would send weekly
sales reports to be used as the basis for the countdown show. However, when
it became clear that some film producers and music directors were involved
in rigging record sales, Geet Mala producers decided to set up Radio Clubs
(srota sangh) across the country as a “popular” counterweight. Each week,
representatives from CIBA would collect sales figures and fan letters and
develop a countdown that Ameen Sayani would use to produce a show. Each
week’s show, recorded in Bombay, would be flown to Colombo and broadcast
from 8:00 to 9:00 p.m. on Wednesdays. As Sayani reminisced, “[T]he streets
would be empty on Wednesday nights . . . in fact, Wednesday nights came to
be known as Geet Mala day.”
I wish to draw attention here to the ways in which the film industry
became involved with Geet Mala. The overwhelming popularity of Geet Mala
led to complaints from music directors when their songs did not feature in
the weekly countdown. Sayani suggested appointing “an ombudsman from
the film industry” who would check the countdown list. With established
film producers and directors like G. P. Sippy and B. R. Chopra assuming
this role, producers and music directors seemed satisfied with the process.
And according to Sayani, information regarding record sales and popularity
among audiences in different parts of the country began circulating in the
film industry. By the mid-1950s, directors and stars from the film industry
were participating in other weekly sponsored shows on Radio Ceylon (such
as Lipton Meet Your Stars) and film publicity quickly became a central aspect
of Radio Ceylon’s programs. As Sayani recalled, no film was ever released
without a huge publicity campaign over Radio Ceylon and later, All India
Radio’s Vividh Bharati. Radio, in other words, provided film stars, directors,
music directors, and playback singers with the opportunity to listen, speak
to, and imagine an audience in a fundamentally novel way.
I do not wish to suggest that the picture of the audience conjured by
radio programs carried greater weight than box-office considerations and
the information that producers, directors, and stars in Bombay received
through production and distribution networks. But it is possible to open
up a new framework of inquiry by considering radio’s role in making the
films, songs, and stars of Bombay cinema a part of the daily life of listeners
across India and elsewhere, in creating a shared space for listeners in loca-
tions as diverse as the southern metropolis of Madras and a small mining
town like Jhumri Tilaiya in the northern state of Bihar, binding together the