"From news about World War II to the broadcasting of film music to readings of pre-partition memories, radio played a crucial role in South Asia for more than half a century. In Radio for the Millions, Isabel Huacuja Alono tells the history of Hindi-Urdu radio during the height of its popularity from the 1940s to the 1980s. She recounts and analyzes how radio enabled listeners and broadcasters to resist the cultural, linguistic, and political agendas of the British colonial administration and the subsequent independent Indian and Pakistani governments. Rather than being a tool of nation-building in South Asia, radio forged an enduring transnational soundscape across state borders, even after the 1947 Partition had made a united India a political impossibility. Throughout the book, Alonso describes how people listened to radio, arguing for a more expansive definition of what it means to listen. She proposes a new concept of "radio resonance" to understand how radio capitalized and expanded upon older circuits of communication such as rumor and gossip. Alonso examines the widescale introduction of radio during World War II, including Subhas Chandra Bose's pro-Axis and anti-colonial broadcasts. Turning to post-independence, she looks at the history of independent Radio Ceylon, which went against the All India Radio's prohibition on film music to create a transnational radio audience; and, finally, she considers how a radio broadcast during the Indo-Pakistan War of 1965 forged bonds among Indian and Pakistani citizens pre-partition nostalgia"--