When Jhumri Tilaiya was on song

Nehchal Sandhu

Much like Timbuktu, Jhumri Tilaiya was considered a make-believe place in the 1960s when I was growing up, seemingly a fictitious town that featured prominently on the popular filmi firmaish song programmes broadcast daily by Radio Ceylon and its rival, Vividh Bharti.

But the actuality of Jhumri Tilaiya’s existence ensued when I was posted there as Sub-Divisional Police Officer in 1975. With a population then of around 40,000, this nondescript Bihar town — now in Jharkhand — was located on the northern edge of the Chhotanagpur Plateau and had emerged as a mica mining centre.

Apart from its mining barons, Jhumri Tilaiya had another distinctive icon: Rameshwar Prasad Barnwal, a small-time mica trader, who had gained notoriety for dispatching every day some 30 postcard requests for Hindi songs, most of which were aired. Both broadcasters were largely the main source of musical entertainment for the masses.

With radios being scarce, music aficionados would flock to Barnwal’s shop and listen to songs, gossip and drink tea. Their biggest kick, however, came from hearing Barnwal’s name and that of Jhumri Tilaiya several times a day on both networks.

Barnwal, for his part, basked in the glory. Expectedly, his popularity spawned local jealousies amongst his social and business rivals.

It led to nearby electronics shopowner Nand Lal Sinha and adjoining paan-wala Ganga Prasad Magadhiya emulating Barnwal, by similarly sending daily postcard song requests. But unlike Barnwal, these two only targeted Vividh Bharti in Bombay to keep postage costs down.

The close-by Sita Press emerged as the unintended beneficiary, as Sinha and Magadhiya ordered substantial quantities of postcards.

In the mid-1980s, years after my Jhumri Tilaiya posting ended, I paid it a visit only to discover that a formal Radio Listeners Club had been instituted, with Barnwal unanimously appointed its chief patron. Town youngsters competed with each other to send out the most requests for songs and allegedly even some local postmen were coerced or bribed not to clear competing song request letters to Radio Ceylon and Vividh Bharti.

Consequently, Jhumri Tilaiya’s popularity soared. It was even immortalised in Bollywood hits like Hasina Maan Jayegi (1968), when the heroine coquettishly threatens to desert the hero and flee to Jhumri Tilaiya. Mounto, produced in 1975, featured a song titled Main Toh Jhumri Tilaiya Se Aayi Hun. This obscure town, it seemed, had effectively imprinted itself on people’s consciousness via mass song requests from a handful of its residents.

Sadly, over decades, the popularity of Radio Ceylon, founded in 1923, and Vividh Bharti, conceptualised in 1957 to compete with it, waned, and with it Jhumri Tilaiya too reverted once more, like Timbuktu, to its semi-fictional status.

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