The Enduring Echo Of A Kumartuli Radio Shop and Kolkata's Timeless Radio Culture

In the narrow lanes of Kumartuli, where clay gods and goddesses come to life all around the year, sits a different kind of shrine. Amit Ranjan Karmakar's radio repair shop, a nameless shop even after years of much social media craze and fame, opened by his father in 1967, houses approximately 150 radio sets, some dating back to 1944. "Radio amar jonno business na, eta ekta daayitto, ekta legacy" (Radio for me is not business, it's a responsibility, a legacy), says Karmakar, who has been running the shop since 1976.

Inside this time capsule, visitors find themselves transported through decades of broadcast history. Murphy, Bush, Philips, Telefunken, the names on these vintage cabinets read like an industrial who's who of the wireless age. Only a handful come to actually appreciate the craft and get actual work done from Karmakar, the last radio man of Kumartuli, many come to just click pictures. He isn't bothered much by it, he is engaged in his knowledge very well “only people from an era you all don’t know keep me in work."

A young visitor from outside Kolkata, who discovered the shop after much asking around and much to his dismay that it is nameless and doesn’t even have a google map pin, describes it aptly, "This isn't a repair shop, it's pichutan". But don’t let Karmakar’s frugal dressup or frail outer self fool you, Kaku is a celebrity in his own right and he knows it.

When a City Wakes at 4 AM

The true measure of radio's grip on Bengali culture reveals itself each Mahalaya morning. Since 1931, the Mahishasuramardini broadcast on All India Radio has marked the beginning of Durga Puja festivities. The 90-minute programme, narrated by the late Birendra Krishna Bhadra, continues to draw millions of listeners at 4 AM sharp, a ritual spanning 94 years and counting.

"Mahalaya'r agey toh amar ghum thake na. Raat 1-2 ta porjonto boshe boshe set thik kori" (Before Mahalaya, I can’t sleep. I sit until 1-2 AM repairing sets), explains Karmakar. "Shobai chai Birendra Krishna Bhadra'r awaaz radio-tei shunte" (Everyone wants to hear Birendra Krishna Bhadra's voice on the radio itself).

The programme's cultural authority was cemented in 1976 when All India Radio attempted to replace Bhadra with Bengali cinema icon Uttam Kumar. The backlash was immediate and fierce. Information Minister L.K. Advani was forced to issue a public retraction, restoring Bhadra's version in 1977. Proshono Chattopadhyay, a retired schoolteacher reflects who was sitting nearby and listening ardently to our conversation, "Mahalaya has been running since the 1930s and continues even today, tell me, which app has that kind of longevity?".

The Static of Decline and An Adamant Existence

Yet beyond Mahalaya's sacred morning hours, radio's hold on India has weakened considerably. According to a January 2022 survey by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, approximately 71% of Indians never listened to radio, with only 4% tuning in daily. The arrival of cheap smartphone data proved particularly devastating to commercial radio.

Aamar FM, Kolkata's beloved Bengali-language station with the tagline 'Kolkatar Gaan, Kolkatar Pran' (Kolkata's Songs, Kolkata's Life), exemplifies this decline. After broadcasting since 2003, it shut down abruptly on 23 January 2020 without warning. Proshono who is also an avid music lover recalls, "Aamar FM suddenly closed one day in 2020, no warning. That's when I understood radio wasn't just nostalgia, it was part of the city's identity."

Yet the medium refuses to simply fade into obsolescence. The radio has found unlikely reincarnation in devices like the Saregama Carvaan, a portable digital player preloaded with 5,000 retro Hindi songs that taps into the same nostalgia radio once commanded. Meanwhile, policy-makers are attempting to breathe new life into the airwaves: in October 2025, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) released recommendations for a new digital radio policy, enabling private FM broadcasters to adopt a hybrid "simulcast" mode, combining analogue transmission with three digital channels and one data channel on a single frequency. The 9th Edition of The Radio Festival in 2026 strikes a notably optimistic chord, themed "Reimagining Radio with AI," focusing on using artificial intelligence to strengthen community radio and local-language communication. For a technology invented in the 1890s, radio's ability to continually reinvent itself is remarkable, even if its golden age of mass reach may be permanently behind it.

Meanwhile, India's podcasting boom tells a parallel story: with 105 million listeners in 2024 and projected to cross 200 million by 2025, the country has become the world's third-largest podcast market. This audio renaissance, driven by 750 million smartphones and regional-language content, suggests that whilst FM radio's mainstream dominance has waned, the human appetite for voice-based storytelling remains undiminished, simply finding new vessels for an age-old habit.

The Habit That Refuses to Die

Despite statistical decline, radio persists in unexpected corners. Notun Mandal, an elderly taxi driver, captures this resilience, "Traffic jams would drive me mad without radio. Now there's Bluetooth and all, but that live voice from the sky, where will I find that again? Truly speaking, losing radio from the car feels like half my sanity is gone".

At Kumartuli Radio Shop, Karmakar observes something curious, "Today's young people don't bring their own radios, they bring their grandparents' radios. When those sets come alive, the spark I see in their eyes is my real payment.”

Perhaps this is radio's future in Kolkata, not a mass medium but a memory keeper, not a daily necessity but an annual ritual. In a world of infinite streaming choices, radio endures not despite its limitations but because of them: one voice, one broadcast, one shared moment when a city holds its breath at 4 AM, waiting for Bhadra's baritone to announce that the goddess has arrived. As an elderly radio collector, Chandan Banerjee, who also lends some of these radios to art shows and exhibitions where nostalgia is reflected as heritage, culture and sometimes even as a commodity, a relic of the past, "Radio was free entertainment, no subscription needed, no data required. From village to city, signals reached everywhere. Today everyone thinks streaming means radio is finished, but those who truly listen know, radio isn't just a device, it's a habit.”