Radio and Television for Development and Democracy: Adult Education in India in the 1950s and 1960s

At independence, the task of educating India’s masses was tied to the imagination of the young country as a democracy. It was also key to fostering the changes in agricultural practices necessary to feed a hungry nation. This article surveys adult education more broadly, and then narrows in on two experiments on the use of radio and then television for adult education. With some aid from UNESCO, these new forms of media also promised a novel pedagogy for India’s population. Programmes for the new India delivered what their social scientist designers understood to be “new knowledge” through entertaining programmes. The article charts the amazement of the social scientists – Indian and western – conducting this experiment, as their expectations about India’s passive, stagnant and homogenous population were upended. It includes a discussion of what these experiments reveal about India’s approach to international aid, and to Indian socialism.