In Memoriam - Sarojini Sivalingam

A pioneer Radio Jockey - Ceylon Radio, Malayalam transmission

During the 70s and the early 80s, youngsters of our generation were glued to transistors - small portable radios, a marvel that arrived after the bulky old valve radios of yore. They were a heaven-send for not only music enthusiasts, but also cricket lovers, and we could transport ourselves to distant corners of the world with those radios and listen to broadcasts from exotic locales. Though the Panasonic versions sported a plug-in earphone, it was sportier to hold it close to one’s ear, a common sight in those days. As these sets worked on torch batteries, many more people started listening to the radio, so much more affordable compared to the ornate valve sets showcased in the living room. Moreover, tussles with the elders on whether to listen to a farmer's broadcast or a morose Carnatic rendition were conveniently avoided. And that was how, I got to hear the Malayalam (and of course Tamil and Hindi) music broadcasts jockeyed by a pioneer in the field, Sarojini Sivalingam, who hailed from Kakkayur in Palghat, just a few miles distant from our Pallavur ancestral home. She passed away on 9th Dec, aged 88, leaving behind many a musical memory in the minds of the Malayalees from my generation. With heartfelt condolences, I wish that her soul rests in eternal peace.

Many a Malayali of the baby boomer generation will remember that chirpy announcer with a slight Tamil accent, launch into the afternoon Malayalam transmission at 330 PM, and bring to us the greatest songs sung by the proficient singers of the time. But before we get to her life story, let us trace out the events leading up to the creation of the South Asian commercial broadcasts. It was not really meant for the listening pleasure of the many Malayalees living in Ceylon, but it was directly aimed towards listeners in India.

In the 70s and 80s, like many other Malayalees living away from home, I would switch on my little Keltron transistor radio and dial in the 41-meter band SW Radio Ceylon frequency. Of course, the tuner was not digital, and the reception would wax and wane sometimes, but for the most part, held steady as the transmitter in Ceylon was quite powerful. The Hindi and Malayalam music programs were very good indeed and if one did not have a turntable to play LPs or EPs the transmission from Ceylon was the main source, though there was the well-set but relatively staid AIR Vivid Bharati program, on the MW channels.

I spent many hours studying the commencement of radio experimentation and transmission in Ceylon and must tell you that a more detailed article on Radio Ceylon and its connections to Binaca Geetmala will follow in due course, this one is focused on Sarojini Sivalingam, following a quick run through the station’s development.

The first wireless telegraphy station was erected in 1912, and wireless messages in Morse Code were sent under the callsign CLO, which was later changed to VPB. Though there are ubiquitous mentions of a German sub’s transmitter being salvaged by American Ed Harper to create the first transmitter in 1924, it was mostly the work of his deputy Lt. M J Golighitly, with double tube sets which started it all. The first transmitter was on the air in 1925 briefly with music (gramophone records played into the primitive microphone) transmitted on a small ½ kW transmitter, from ‘Colombo Radio’, with the equipment locally custom built by Harper and team. Irregular broadcasts, two or three times a week, contained music, news, weather reports, and time signals. So much for a very brief mention of the early history.

While India boasted of a few MW sets and stations, they were not quite powerful, but with the arrival of the Second World War, many Indians acquired a radio (we detailed these in the Congress and Revolutionary radio articles). Indians had by now gotten used to tuning in to news broadcasts from distant stations, mainly due to mistrust of the British content.  

SW transmissions

In Ceylon, SW transmission experiments started in 1934. In 1939, the VPB MW callsign was shut down. The shortwave transmitter continued to be in use at Welikada for three more years while a larger shortwave station was under construction at Ekala during 1944, and the callsign changed from VPB to ZOH. The design for the new shortwave station in Ekala was like the one located in Malaysia. Much of the electronic equipment was shipped from Marconi in England but was lost in a German torpedo attack. A new consignment comprising a powerful 100KW set was shipped out from England, and installed at Ekala. This SEAC wartime transmitter was later gifted by Mountbatten, to Colombo, after the war. In 1948, Ceylon became independent, and on Jan 1st, 1950, Colombo Radio became Radio Ceylon.

The station at Ekala, a dozen miles north of Colombo eventually housed a total of seven shortwave (Philips) transmitters, including the powerful 100KW international set. Ekala’s broadcasts were since then, heard worldwide, and many millions listened to it in India.

The Commercial Service for Southern Asia was beamed to India, and other nearby countries on shortwave, as the All-Asia Service (ilanagai oliparappu stapanam, asia sevai). In 1967, Radio Ceylon was renamed the Ceylon Broadcasting Corporation; and in 1972, the station was redesignated again, as the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, after Ceylon became the Republic of Sri Lanka. The Commercial service was built up with support from the Australian radio staff, and Clifford Dodd was the driving force behind the rapid development of the service. It was under his tutelage that many local personnel became legendary radio personalities, and among them were Jimmy Bharucha, Shirley Perera, Nihal Bharati, Ameen Sayani, SP Mayilvahanam, and Vernon Corea, among others.

AIR and BV Keskar

The 60s were to feature an Indian-oriented transmission, for two reasons. While the primary reason for the launch of the Commercial service was driven by Indian listeners desiring to hear Bollywood tunes, the impetus was provided by manufacturers who wanted to advertise their wares to the thousands of listeners tuned to the channel. On a lighter note, one can read many an old-timer’s anecdote of how they fell for the catchy jingles and used a product advertised over those airwaves, with less than satisfactory results.

Strangely the driver of this wave was an authority who decided that films and film music are necessarily vulgar and would taint the young Indian mind. He banned film music from All India Radio - AIR broadcasts, in 1952, and tried to force listeners to listen to classical music and ‘raise their standards’, which turned out to be a classic Tughlaq-ian decision. Much has been written about Binaca Geet Mala and Amin Sayani, but the involvement of BV Keskar and the AIR ban on film music is an interesting topic to mull over. Some months ago, I had written about the Harmonium, the ban of the instrument on the AIR waves, and the involvement of many a music stalwart on the same. The film music ban by the I&B minister Keskar, has two aspects - firstly, his personal views on classical versus film music, and secondly his views on Urdu versus Hindi. The aftereffects of the ban had profound results, the Hindi film industry took to the Radio Ceylon airwaves for commercial broadcasting of film songs, and it proved to be very successful, especially the Amin Sayani compered Geetmala, sponsored by the toothpaste manufacturer Binaca. I should not forget to mention that Radio Goa was another station (until 1962, a Portuguese colony) which broadcast advertisements, but never added regional languages like Tamil and Malayalam. Religious and news broadcasts in Tamil & gospel in Malayalam had been aired on other Ceylon channels much earlier.

Secondly, AIR would not permit commercial advertisements, it was state-funded and state-run. Listeners and sponsors fled to the commercial service at Radio Ceylon which took care of the matter, with the incorporation of pithy advertisements interspersed into the musical programs. American Daniel Molina established Radio Ceylon’s Advertisement services in Bombay to build up the advertisement revenues. Programming was done in Bombay and at Ceylon where RJ’s and DJ’s (then called announcers) compered each show. With the AIR continuing to be a dull station, feeble in power and covering a smaller area, listeners hastened to find radios that were guaranteed to pick up radio Ceylon. Thanks to these kinds of shows, the radio announcer’s job became highly sought after, and if you recall, Sunil Dutt was on the air as an announcer for Radio Ceylon, and Amitabh Bachan later failed an audition at the AIR. In the late 60’s the advertisement revenue by Radio Ceylon from Indian companies was well over Rs 5 lakhs, Bombay and Madras became the production centers, as they were home to recording studios and well as the film fraternity.

AIR claws back

When AIR (Aakashwani - AIR means the voice from the sky) and the bureaucrats in India realized that Radio Ceylon was minting money and that most of the listeners were Indians, they conceded it was time to change. The film music ban was lifted and the Vivid Bharati channel was introduced in 1957, to air film songs, but then again the rigid team at Delhi fixed their working hours and banned advertisements, and their tepid programming coupled with a few weak MW stations was no match for the professional and catchy service from Colombo, which by now was employing more and more Indians to man the mics at Colombo.

AIR announcers continued to be dull and just played records after making terse and brief announcements of the track, with a long list of listeners, compared to Ceylon announcers who interacted with the public, reading snippets from listener’s letters, providing details of the songs, their creation, makers and what not. It is said that 9 out of 10 sets were tuned during certain hours to Ceylon’s 41-meter band, even after the launch of Vivid Bharati. Another reason for Radio Ceylon’s success was that the studios had amassed a great collection of music records, carefully maintained and archived by the team. Their selection of music for a program was impeccable and went with the times. The collection boasts over one lakh Sinhalese, Tamil, Malayalam, English, and Hindi songs!

The listeners were from all corners of India and Pakistan, and there was a smattering of immigrants in Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, and other SE Asian states who listened to the Ceylon broadcasts. Later in the 70’s and 80’s it was also popular with the many Malayalees who took the boats to work in the Middle East. Surely many of the Malayalees remaining in Sri Lanka also listened to these channels. Some Indian politicians wondered if they could campaign over the Radio Ceylon waves, which was refused.

However, trouble was starting to brew in Lanka. Nationalist demands that the Lankan soil cease to be home for foreign broadcasts became louder, many Malayalees had been evicted from the island (see my article on Malayalees in Ceylon) and Buddhist leaders complained that the commercial service had in a few years damaged the ethnic island culture far more than four hundreds of years of colonialism. The adoption of Sinhala as the sole national language after the election success of Bandaranayake resulted in riots between the Tamils and the Sinhalese. Nevertheless, by 1967, Radio Ceylon became a public corporation, the CBC, and the government tried hard to exercise their control on matters aired.

The 70s in Lanka was a period of strife, especially after 1972 when it became a republic. The JVP and the LTTE reared their heads, the Ceylon government was concerned that the LTTE was getting coded information from Madras over the Tamil programs. Fearing DMK manipulation, the Sinhalese wanted a cessation of Tamil film music broadcasts and Bharatiyar’s poems. It was only in 1977 -78 that the constitution was rewritten, Lanka moved away from leftism and opened itself to market-oriented reforms. What all this did was to prove what Ammen Sayani once mentioned - that a good radio station is the one you can see, and not just hear.

Anyway, the reduction of film music transmission in SLBC and the nationalistic pressures resulted in a reduction of advertisers and revenue for the channel and an increase in listenership for the AIR which had by 1970 started commercial services and hit revenues of over 20 crores by the early 80s.

Tamil & Malayalam channel

To summarize, the success of the Hindi channel and the higher quality of SW transmission compared to the weak MW transmitters in India, plus a proliferation of different types of radios resulted in many listeners tuning into Radio Ceylon by the 70’s. Tamil programming had a massive share of listeners, and announcers namely KS Raj, Saravana Muthu, Abdul Hameed, and SP Mayil Vaganam ( who spoke with a Jaffna sing-song accent), ruled the roost.  T. Urutharapathy of SLBC says - "Mayilvaganam used to leave by flight for Chennai at 8 a.m. collect new songs, have lunch in Chennai, return to Colombo by 4 p.m. and air the new numbers on the 6 p.m. radio show". That shows how Radio Ceylon kept its listeners up-to-date and hooked.

Interestingly while the SLBC broadcast in Sinhala, Tamil, and English for some 250 hours a week, the Commercial broadcast in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam was beamed towards India, and separately to Europe and SE Asia for just seven hours.

In the late sixties, Trivandrum and Calicut were the only two stations, and their MW signal strength was lackluster. It was a strange period for us in India those days, we had to buy a license to own a radio, costing some Rs 15/- per year, can you imagine!! Transistors with real leather cases thrived and by the ’70s were replaced by the latest radio cassette receivers or ‘2 in 1’s’ as they were called, which arrived from the gulf, gracing almost all Malayali and Tamil homes. Even with the arrival of home taping with these cassette recorders and the proliferation of cassette tapes, Radio Ceylon stayed strong for a few more years, but the death knell was about to sound. During its heydays, it is mentioned that over 1.3 million listeners were tuned to the Malayalam broadcasts which were added over the years, and here is where Sarojini Sivalingam and team come in.

Sarojini Sivalingam

We can piece together her RJ days from a 2011 in-person interview and a lovely article on her by the music writer Ravi Menon from Wynad. Now, Sarojini had retired, after leaving Sri Lanka due to the turbulence and was closeted in her home in Coimbatore. Unlike the film star persona and fame achieved by her contemporary in the Binaca Geetmala program – Ameen Sayani, Sarojini had been forgotten. Television had arrived in India and took over viewership from Ceylon as well as a multitude of local and national radio stations. But Ravi and many others including me, were fortunate to have lived through the 60-80’s the Golden age of Malayalam music. It was a period lorded by Baburaj, Raghavan, Dakshina Murthy, Arjunan, MB Srinivasan, MG Radhakrishnan, and so on, ruled the roost and singers like Yesudas, Jayachandran, Brahmanandan, S Janaki, P Sushila, Madhuri, Vani Jayram etc. just to name a few stalwarts, enthralled listeners. For the many listeners in India and abroad, the Ceylon SW station provided respite, and of course, enjoyment, by broadcasting these songs, compered by Sarojini Sivalingam.

Sarojini hailed from a little village nestling under the brooding Western Ghats, in the rice bowl of Kerala, namely Palghat. Kakkayur is a little distance away from Pallavur and in the late 60’s and early 70’s just two buses plied the forest route from Pallavur to Koduvayur, one an Ex-Servicemen blue bus., which I remember distinctly. There was just one stop between them and that was at Sarojini’s village of Kakkayur.  Today a new residential locality called Little Dubai, borders Kakkayur, boasting of many ‘gulf’ returnee’s houses, with garishly painted exteriors. As her father worked in the military, Sarojini spent her younger days at Calcutta and Poona but interestingly passed her school finals from Koduvayur. College education continued at Coimbatore and Madras. Music was always with her and right from her younger days, music held her in a firm grip, though Carnatic, Hindi, and Tamil were her favorites.

She fell in love with RR Sivalingam from Ceylon, who was her batch mate at the Madras Christian College, and after studies and a difficult courtship period, decided to get married. Though her parents were not too happy with the match, they got married and the couple went back to Ceylon - to Hatton, near Nuwara Eliya in Ceylon ( If you have not been to those tea estates, plan your next trip to the legendary Ashoka Vana where Sita was imprisoned, according to the locals – it is well worth it – See my article about the Lanka sojourn for details). While Sivalingam worked initially as a principal in a private school, Sarojini took a while to adjust to the new terrain, society, and language, and fortunately for her, her in-laws loved her like a daughter. Later he became a successful advocate in Colombo and the family moved there. At this opportune juncture, SLBC were looking around for Malayalam announcers. Sarojini’s demeanor and character impressed the Director Sushil Munasinghe, and she started her career with them in 1971.

It is not clear if N Karunakaran and Lathika Vivekanandan, two other announcers, joined the new Malayalam commercial channel in the 70s with Sarojini, but they were around with her till the 80s. Karunakaran was certainly a resident in Lanka since many years. Together they compered many programs and Malayalees would recall Marivillu (rainbow), Sabda Lahari, Raaga Sangamam, Vanita Rangam, and so on. The start of the 3:30 p.m. show was always by Sarojini. Readers must note that Radio Ceylon did not really have a code of conduct or style, and announcers had to establish limits and keep it decent and casual. Other than music slots, Sarojini would also interview musicians, singers, and music directors, but told Ravi Menon that one of her biggest regrets was that she could never do one with Yesudas who had shifted to Bombay by then, to progress his Hindi career. Sarojini mentions that Karunakaran was a great help in getting herself grounded in the radio station. 4 sets of records arrived every time a film was released.

For close to ten years Sarojini anchored the Malayalam channel, but by the 80’s the living circumstances in Sr Lanka had become untenable. The sectarian violence was taking its toll on one hand and the revenues had dipped on the other hand. It was time for the immigrant staff to return, violence had skyrocketed, and the safety of immigrant workers was no longer guaranteed.

Sarojini returned to Palghat in 1983 and settled down in Coimbatore. She led a retired life after Sivalingam passed away, and her sons Damodaran and Sreedharan chose to remain in Lanka initially and migrated to NZ and USA, later. Spending her last years with her daughter Rohini, Sarojini watched the passage of time over the new medium of television, which went from B&W to color, and radio had finally been consigned to the back seats. While Sri Lanka may have forgotten her, many Malayalees remembered her and her 3:30 p.m. slot, for she would bring Kerala and films to them, as well as the magical voices and the best songs of their favorite singers.

In May 2013, the Ekala site housing the rusty old Marconi transmitters was finally shut down. There is much more to the famous SEAC 100KW transmitter, and I will recount all that some other day.

Why was Radio Ceylon revered by Indian listeners and music creators? For the Indian creators, Ceylon’s programming provided them the opportunity to get feedback from listeners, and even interact with them. The announcer would be the listener's voice, and they had to honestly and emotionally connect with the song and the musicians, thereby becoming the bridge, and that was why the announcer became what they were, cult heroes – people like Amin Sayani, Mayil Vaganam and Sarojini Sivalingam. They never failed to ignite the listener's imagination.

Sarojini Sivalingam, like Amin Sayani, certainly did that to me…

May her soul rest in eternal peace, and I am sure a thousand grateful listeners will join me in this last wish…

References

Community Radio Policies in South Asia: A Deliberative Policy Ecology Approach - Preeti Raghunath

Brought to Life by the Voice: Playback Singing and Cultural Politics in South India - Amanda Weidman

A look at the Radio Ceylon Commercial channel studios – An Instagram post

Ravi Menon’s article – Mathrubhumi Nov 2011

Related blogs – Maddy’s Ramblings

Harmonium

Malayalees in Ceylon

Revolutionary Radio -Congress radio, Propaganda wars

Trip to Sri Lanka

I had a short chat with Rohini, Sarojini’s charming daughter. The pictures posted are thanks to her and not to be copied without her permission. thanks also to Arun at Intach Palghat and the gentle prod…

Ekala site picture – courtesy Vernon Correa

Note – I too got confused with the spelling - Memorium' is a common misspelling of 'Memoriam,' and it has no function in the English language. 'Memoriam' is a Latin word that means memory. 'Memoriam' is added to the preposition, in, to create the prepositional phrase In Memoriam, which means, in memory of. Learnt a little bit of English/Latin along the way…

I still listen to a radio