The Accidental Archive: How Radio Listeners Became the First Custodians of Early Indian Cinema
12 Feb, 2026 | Short Features by Asha Batra
From the Cinemaazi collection of vintage radios
For a large part of India in the early and mid-twentieth century, cinema did not arrive as an image. It arrived as an aural experience. Back then, theatres were concentrated in cities and tickets were expensive. Cinema was not easily accessible for the majority of Indians. Film prints rarely reached small towns. But with single crackling speakers, radio seeped into villages, small towns, and homes where cinema was a distant luxury. Radio sets became the primary connector between films and their listeners. This way, for many, cinema did not come through the eye but through the ear, and radio made films travel where the projector could not.
This created an interesting trio: radio, cinema, and its listeners. For them, film did not flow from reels but from radio sets. Programmes travelled invisibly through the air, crossing distances without tickets, transport, or literacy, turning living rooms into makeshift cinemas.
Radio entered homes with an ease that few other technologies of the time could claim. A single set, once purchased, asked only for batteries and a patient ear. It did not demand additional equipment, delicate handling, or repeated expense. In contrast, the world of long-playing records and gramophones remained largely the preserve of the resourceful. Records had to be bought individually, and players were costly and fragile. Needles wore out, shellac discs cracked, and ownership required both money and upkeep.
Here’s what changed because of that difference. Film music, which might otherwise have remained confined to cinema halls or to the homes of those who could afford records, slipped beyond those limits. Songs moved out of elite drawing rooms and into bazaars, courtyards, tea stalls, and village squares. One broadcast could gather an entire neighbourhood around a single receiver. A melody heard once in a theatre now entered daily life.
Listening became a collective habit, and gradually radio turned it into a shared space. Street corners and paan shops turned into informal listening hubs. A single radio often served dozens of people. It functioned as a community gathering point and a shared cultural calendar. Film programmes structured the day, with families planning their evenings around broadcasts. The radio was not background noise but an active listening habit.
A majority of prints of films made before 1950 no longer exist. Out of the vast output, only fragments remain. Some of the most historically significant works are gone forever, surviving only in stills, reviews, songs, publicity materials, and recollections. And yet, the cinema of that period did not disappear.
As listeners copied lyrics into notebooks, they also began noting music credits with care. Between songs, when cast lists were announced, those names were memorised just as attentively. Radio schedules, too, were preserved like precious documents. People compared notes, corrected one another’s recollections, and debated credits. Thus, radio created continuity through repetition and habit through recall. Out of this, an informal yet rigorous peer-review system was created, not by institutions but by listeners themselves, making film music the most stable document.
Listeners, through shared experience, also became India’s first true nationwide cinema network, who were not just consuming film music but making it part of their lived experience. And in that act of listening, discussing, and remembering, they accidentally did the work of archivists long before formal documentation and preservation happened.
This mattered because film archiving in India was virtually non-existent at the time. By the time the NFAI came into being in 1964, most early cinema had already been lost. Cinema in its early decades was treated as disposable entertainment, and studios saw little value in preservation. A majority of prints of films made before 1950 no longer exist. Out of the vast output, only fragments remain. Some of the most historically significant works are gone forever, surviving only in stills, reviews, songs, publicity materials, and recollections. And yet, the cinema of that period did not disappear.
This happened because a radio listener in Kanpur who wrote down songs from a popular film created a record no studio ledger preserved; a teenager in Kolkata who memorised the voice of a singer became a living repository; a woman in Pune who saved a magazine mention of a radio broadcast date provided a timestamp that no archive captured; and in towns like Jhumri Telaiya, archiving did not require vaults or catalogues but love for cinema.
It’s interesting to note that listeners remember cinema differently. They recalled a singer’s inflection, a composer’s signature tune, and a lyricist’s turn of language. These were details visual records alone could not capture. Today, when a researcher tries to identify uncredited artists or undocumented films, it is often oral memory, reinforced by listening habits, that provides clues.
Today we inhabit an era of limitless digital storage, where preservation often appears automatic. Yet technological storage alone does not guarantee cultural memory. The history of radio listeners teaches us that archives endure because people invest them with meaning.
In this sense, cinema survived because it was listened to, noted, and discussed. The memory was not stored privately but rehearsed aloud, corrected collectively, and passed on through conversation. These listeners were archivists who never used the word. When film prints deteriorated in humid studio warehouses, when negatives were lost to fire or simply discarded as worthless, these notebooks survived. These memories endured.
Rethinking the Archive
Archiving is not only an institutional practice; it is a habit of attention. It is shaped by everyday decisions about what is worth remembering and how memory is shared. Indian cinema’s earliest archive, instead of being a government institution, was a dispersed network of these active radio listeners who preserved films in language, rhythm, memory and routine. They were not trained archivists, yet their devotion functioned as a powerful method of preservation. When film images deteriorated or vanished, sound — carried in memory and repetition — ensured continuity.
One of the least acknowledged archival acts in Indian cultural history lies in these personal collections. Listeners wrote down film songs, corrected lyrics, memorised credits, and treated broadcasts as events to be documented. Many of these handwritten notebooks still survive as private repositories of film history. Over time, some have been digitised or shared among enthusiasts, while others remain intimate archives held within families and communities. Together, they reveal that preservation can emerge from collective care rather than formal authority. Long before metadata and databases, there existed patience, attention, and an insistence on remembering.
A Call to Listen Again
Today we inhabit an era of limitless digital storage, where preservation often appears automatic. Yet technological storage alone does not guarantee cultural memory. The history of radio listeners teaches us that archives endure because people invest them with meaning. Preservation is sustained not only by infrastructure but by active engagement — by listening, sharing, and valuing what might otherwise fade.
On World Radio Day, it is worth recognising the listeners who unknowingly built one of Indian cinema’s earliest archives. Their practices remind us that cultural memory depends on participation as much as protection. Before vaults, there were drawing rooms. Before archivists, there were fans. Before preservation policies, there was listening. Indian cinema survived not because it was formally secured, but because it was cherished — and love, unlike nitrate, does not decompose.
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About the Author
Asha Batra is a film historian, archivist and exhibitor. The Founder Trustee of Indian Cinema Heritage Foundation, Asha also heads Cinemaazi Research Centre, the Foundation’s flagship project which is creating a research based digital encyclopaedic resource of Indian films and its people.
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