Imagine the era of the 1960s, when television was a distant dream and the internet did not exist. At that time, a small box called a radio was the lifeblood of the Indian middle-class drawing room.

Regular radio broadcasting began in India in the late 1930s, almost alongside the arrival of India’s first talkie, Alam Ara (1931). As cinema found its voice, radio became its amplifier. Films created ...