Opinion Express View on Ameen Sayani: Voice of a nation

In a 1945 letter to Kulsum Sayani, an educationist who published the fortnightly newsletter Rahber, her mentor Mahatma Gandhi wrote, “Beti Kulsum, I like the mission of Rahber to unite Hindi and Urdu. May it succeed.” Rahber, since its inception in 1940, was published in Hindustani — an amalgamation of Hindi and Urdu — at a time when the conflict over the superiority of one language over the other was fomenting. Hindustani was Gandhi’s solution. Kulsum Sayani’s young son Ameen imbibed his first lesson on the power of language then — it could transcend the constraints of identity.

Soon after, since 1951, Ameen Sayani’s warm and charming voice entered Indian homes like a close friend with Binaca Geetmala, over boxy Murphy radio sets and Philips transistors. Sayani spoke in Hindustani while taking listeners on a journey through film music. What was interesting was the way he used Hindustani or what he called “bol-chaal ki bhasha” in a newly-independent country recovering from the scars of Partition. “I promised to myself: I was naye Bharat ka naya naujawan. I will speak in Hindustani,” he said in a 2016 interview to this newspaper.

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In 1952, B V Keskar, then I&B minister banned film music on radio, calling it “erotic and vulgar”. Sayani began broadcasting his shows from Radio Ceylon in Sri Lanka. It was a radical idea — to not be stymied into silence — and the popularity of the show continued unabated. It was Aruna Asaf Ali, who after her conversation with Jawaharlal Nehru, brought the show back to India in the late ’50s. The show went on for 42 years and was revived in 2014 for an FM channel. With Sayani’s demise on Tuesday, India has lost not just a man who revolutionised radio presentation, but a voice that bound the nation together.