On 1 October 1939, the External Service began with a broadcast in Pushtu. It was intended to counter radio propaganda from Germany directed at Afghanistan, Persia and Arab nations. 1939 also saw the opening of the Dhaka station of Eastern India, in what is now Bangladesh. This station catered and nurtured the pioneers of Bengali intellectuals. The foremost among them, Natyaguru Nurul Momen, became the trail-blazer of the talk-show in 1939. He wrote and directed the first modern radio-play for this station in 1942. When India became independent in 1947, the AIR network had only six stations (Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Chennai, Lucknow, and Tiruchirappalli). The three radio stations at Lahore, Peshawar and Dhaka remained in what became Pakistan after the division. The total number of radio sets in India at that time was about 275,000. On 3 October 1957, the "Vividh Bharati" Service was launched, to compete with Radio Ceylon. Television broadcasting began in Delhi in 1959 as part of AIR, but was split off from the radio network as "Doordarshan" on 1 April 1976. FM broadcasting began on 23 July 1977 in Chennai, and expanded during the 1990s.