23-year-old Shrewsbury graduate Ruth Charlton went to teach in one of the most remote bush schools in the Limpopo Province of South Africa for three months – but stayed for twelve. Her vividly written diaries and letters home chronicle a year of her class’s progress and her own journey from the naivety of an innocent abroad to a woman drawn into the complexities of modern South Africa. (3 x 14′)
First broadcast December 2003 BBC Radio 4
Producer Chris Eldon Lee
Radio 4 Pick of the Week
Can the radical new “Party of the Common People” clean up Indian politics? As the largest democracy in the world goes to the polls, Mukti Jain Campion reports from Delhi on how the Aam Aadmi Party has put corruption under the spotlight. (1 x 28′)
First broadcast April 2014 BBC Radio 4
Contributors include: Yogendra Yadav & Rajmohan Gandhi of AAP, Mukul Kesavan, Political Commentator, Suhel Seth, columnist and brand consultant, Anil Verma of the Association for Democratic Reform, Professor Niraja Gopal Jayal, JNU Centre for Law & Governance, Dr Mukulika Banerjee (London School of Economics), Arnab Goswami, top TV Current Affairs host
Producer Mukti Jain Campion
Mukti Jain Campion explores the new global interest in Indian-style ingenuity. She meets some of India’s most famous jugaad innovators and discovers how their ideas and products may soon be going global. These range from grassroots innovations such as the Royal Enfield Bullet motorbike adaptation that turns it into a plough, the clay fridge that doesn’t need electricity to products developed for cash-strapped consumers everywhere such as the Aakash, the world’s cheapest computer tablet. (1 x 28′)
First broadcast October 2013 BBC Radio 4
Producer Mukti Jain Campion Executive Producer Charles Miller
Radio Choice: The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Daily Mail
Mukti Jain Campion makes really good radio programmes, ones that have an eye for a good story and an ear for the right way of telling it. – Gillian Reynolds, Daily Telegraph
Mukti Jain Campion visits five pioneering projects that are bringing the internet to rural communities on the Indian subcontinent. (5 x 14′)
First broadcast June 2002 BBC Radio 4
Producer Mukti Jain Campion
These stories will amaze – Gillian Reynolds, The Daily Telegraph
1: Putting the I See into ICT Telemedicine comes to a south Indian village bringing eye care to the poor.
2: Making Waves A fishing community near Pondicherry where the internet is helping to catch fish and save lives.
3: Wise Women of the Web A women’s self-help group is connecting the village to the world through an internet centre in the local temple.
4: Browsing the Horizon Kothmale Community Radio has developed an innovative way of giving villages of Sri Lanka’s highlands access to the web.
5: Reducing Bureaucracy to Byte Size The villagers of Dhar are discovering the power of the internet in getting better local government.
Radio Choice: The Times, The Independent, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Sunday Times,The Sunday Telegraph, The Mail on Sunday
Radio 4 Pick of the Week
In early 1942 the Japanese invaded Burma, forcing fifty thousand refugees to embark on a 1000-mile trek to India, mostly on foot. Overcome by the effects of disease and monsoon, more than half of them died. Stephen Brookes, Evan Edwardes and Yolande Rodda, three children who had once been at kindergarten together, did survive the arduous journey. Now in their seventies, they recall their harrowing experience through children’s eyes. (1 x 28′)
First broadcast January 2003 BBC Radio 4
Producer Chris Eldon Lee
Remarkable and moving – WH, The Guardian
Radio Choice: The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, Daily Mail, The Independent on Sunday, The Times, The Sunday Telegraph
Radio 4 Pick of the Week
“This is not a war. It is the ending of the world. This is just such a war as was related in the Mahabharata about our forefathers.” – an Indian soldier’s letter from the Western Front
On Remembrance Day Mukti Jain Campion pays tribute to the contribution of over a million men from the Indian subcontinent who volunteered to fight for the British in the First World War. A fascinating insight into the soldiers’ experiences on and off the battlefields of the Western Front comes from the poetic and poignant letters they wrote home. (1 x 28′)
First broadcast November 1999 BBC Radio 4 & November 2000 BBC World Service
The message powerfully and feelingly conveyed in Mukti Jain Campion’s documentary is that First World War historians have signally failed to acknowledge the part played by those Indian volunteers who fought on Britain’s side. -Peter Davalle, The Times
Contributors include: Dr David Omissi, Professor Linda Colley, Dominic Rai, and Dominiek Dendooven
Letter readings by Vincent Ebrahim, Rez Kempton and Dev Sagoo.
Soldiers’ songs performed by Baluji Shrivastav and the Man Mela Theatre Company.
Producer Mukti Jain Campion
Radio Choice: The Times, The Independent, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Sunday Times, Daily Mail, The Scotsman, The Observer, Evening Standard, Time Out, Radio Times
Radio 4 Pick of the Week
Photograph: IWM photos Q53887
The journey of a lifetime as Hsiao-Ying Tseng travels from Shropshire to south China to visit the two sisters she has never met. Her moving story reveals one human legacy of the Communist victory of 1949 when thousands of Chinese fled to Taiwan, leaving loved ones behind forever. (1 x 28′)
First broadcast Oct 2001 BBC Radio 4
Producer Chris Eldon Lee
Radio 4 Pick of the Week
Reminiscences of life on the polar ice as writer Chris Eldon Lee travels with a party of British Antarctic Survey veterans to revisit the “elaborate garden sheds” in which they spent their winters during the ’50s and ’60s. In near permanent subzero temperatures these huts have become museums, literally frozen in time. (1 x 28′)
First broadcast December 2001 BBC Radio 4
Producer Chris Eldon Lee
A real taste of adventure – Peter Barnard, Radio Times
Radio 4 Pick of the Week
Two travel documentaries in which Mukti Jain Campion accompanies her children back to the childhood homes of their two grandmothers – a rural village in India and a remote crofting community in the Scottish Highlands – and discovers that the two women have more in common than just grandchildren. (2 x 28′)
First broadcast November 1997 BBC Radio 4
Original Music by Nick Sargent
Producers Mukti Jain Campion & Chris Eldon Lee
Two documentaries of the kind radio does well: contrasting social histories told by people who have lived them. The moving spirit in more ways than one is the producer Mukti Jain Campion – Peter Barnard, The Times
Radio Choice: The Times, The Independent, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Sunday Times, The Evening Standard, Radio Times
Radio 4 Pick of the Week
Poet Daljit Nagra revels in the legendary dictionary of British India which brought hundreds of Indian words such as bungalow, shampoo and dinghy into the English language. With a new edition due to be published in 2013, Daljit looks back at its history and how it has seduced countless writers and poets since it was first published in 1886.
First broadcast July 2012 BBC Radio 4
Contributors include: Dr Kate Teltscher, Professor Javed Majeed, Tom Stoppard and Amitav Ghosh.
Readings by Tim Pigott-Smith and Vincent Ebrahim
Producer Mukti Jain Campion
Radio Choice: The Mail on Sunday, The Sunday Telegraph, The Scotsman, The Daily Mail, The Times, The Independent
Radio 4 Pick of the Week
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