Babel: Participatory media for children and its early travails in India, 1940–1950s

The 1940s saw an upsurge in media initiatives for children in India, which invited the young to participate and co-produce content. Soon, some of these projects garnered an immense following, staying popular for the next two and a half decades. The article explores the early trajectory of two kinds of media enterprises based out of Calcutta: weekly children’s pages introduced by newspapers, and children’s programmes of All India Radio. Both were started within years of each other and had the common vision of incorporating children’s voices. At the core of the article is the remarkable babel that characterises archives of such media initiatives. Exploring media archives and interviewing respondents who were involved in these initiatives as children, it studies how children responded to these initiatives and the reactions this drew from media producers in the 1940s and 1950s. The article demonstrates how foregrounding children’s voices enables conversation with the historiography of media participation, revealing a significant moment in Indian media history when the press and radio whetted the participatory appetite of hundreds of children and briefly gave their desires an outlet for a few years.