What might Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of British India, have to do with the popularity of filmi music? Quite a bit, it turns out. During the Second World War, Mountbatten, then supreme Allied ...

ri Lanka’s Consul General to Mumbai Priyanga Wickramasinghe has paid rich homage to the country's Hindi radio service that has been a cultural bridge built across the Indian Ocean. As the Asia Hindi ...

Radio Ceylon’s use of the hybrid Hindustani was a commercial call but directly defied the British-led decision to bring separate Hindi and Urdu programmes on AIR. Leading this ideological movement was ...

Sri Lanka is celebrating the Centenary year of its radio service this year. It was indeed a momentous event when the Sri Lankan radio service, Radio Ceylon, was launched on December 16, 1925, making ...

Ameen Sayani, who passed away today, was the voice behind Geetmala, or Binaca Geetmala, on Sri Lanka's Radio Ceylon, which played Hindi film music when India had banned AIR from broadcasting the same ...

Last December, Radio Ceylon, as the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation is now known, turned 88. Inaugurated on December 16, 1925, Radio Ceylon was the first broadcasting station of South Asia. In ...

Back in the pre-historic era of the 1960s and ’70s, our favourite entertainment was to twiddle the dials of the family radio to navigate through the crackling, fizzing waves of static and catch Radio ...

In 1952, B V Keskar, Union minister for Broadcasting, decided to ban film songs from All India Radio for their ‘erotic’ nature, and relay only classical music. It meant listeners had access to songs ...

‘Radio Ceylon’ may seem like an aberration today; Ceylon itself, after all, is now Sri Lanka. Yet, as the iconic radio station turns 100 this month, its legacy continues to serve as a reminder of the ...

Sunil Dutt, before becoming a big star in Bollywood, used to be a radio jockey for Radio Ceylon. He hosted a show called 'Lux Ke Sitaray', as Balraj. Those were the days when Radio Ceylon was the only ...

In around 1954, Radio Ceylon, in its Sinhala broadcast, serialised Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I was a nine-year-old at the time. The reading of a translation of Dostoyevsky’s classic, partly ...