Chicago Radio
Chicago Radio is an Indian maker of public address systems with a long link to the Indian National Congress during the late British era. It began in 1909 as the Eastern Electric & Trading Company, founded by Gianchand Chandumal Motwane in Sukkur, Sindh. The company moved its headquarters to Karachi in 1912 and to Bombay (Mumbai) in 1919, when it was renamed the Chicago Telephone Supply Company. It acted as the Indian distributor for the American Chicago Telephone Supply, keeping the Chicago name even after the American company closed. In 1926 it became the Chicago Telephone & Radio Company. Motwane imported microphones, amplifiers and loudspeakers from Britain and the United States and had a team that reverse engineered equipment in India.
Gianchand’s son, Nanik Motwane, became closely involved with the Congress. He attended meetings and provided public address systems, initially free of charge, into the 1960s. He noticed Mahatma Gandhi’s difficulty speaking to large crowds and helped develop a PA system for the 1931 Karachi party meeting, where the Congress declared its goal of complete independence. Gandhi praised the loudspeaker arrangements. Chicago Radio then supported Congress events across India, often traveling ahead of meetings to set up the gear. At its peak the company had about 100 public address systems nationwide, with factories in two cities and service workshops in many places. It also recorded speeches and filmed events for the party, and even created a system for simultaneous translation.
The Chicago Radio Conference Interpretation System allowed live translations to other languages. For about thirty years, the company covered roughly six Congress meetings a month. By 1936 the business had become a limited company, and in 1937 Nanik and his brother Visharam became partners after their father’s death in 1943. Nanik later joined the underground pro-independence movement in 1942 and was briefly jailed.
After India’s independence in 1947, the company lost its holdings in Pakistan. Chicago Radio equipment was used for Jawaharlal Nehru’s 1947 Tryst with Destiny speech. Nehru thanked the company for the excellent loudspeakers. In the 1960s the company began charging the Congress for its equipment, though it continued to offer it at cost. In the 1970s Indira Gandhi questioned why the firm kept a foreign name; Nanik kept the name but had some microphones marked with both “Chicago” and “Motwane.”
Today the company remains small, selling public address and intercom systems as Motwane Communication Systems Pvt. Ltd., with a factory in Bangalore.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 20:13 (CET).