The Sixth String of Vilayat Khan

by Namita Devidayal

All India Radio was launched in 1936, a few years before Vilayat Khan reached Bukhari’s doorstep. Before that, the first radio stations in India were the Radio Club of Bombay and the Calcutta Radio Club and a few more in some princely states such as Mysore, where Dada Imdad Khan had produced his first recording. All India Radio was a revolutionary broadcasting force for a new India, and a series of British and Indian officers were assigned the challenging charge of setting it up. Lionel Fielden, an Englishman who put it all together, wrote in his memoir, A Natural Bent, that ‘none of the staff had ever seen a microphone before and they found great difficulty in using it, or in believing that it was of any use’, while most of the radio artistes ‘ate opium and refused to come to rehearsal in their “opium time”’.