When Indira Ganesan was a WOMR DJ in the 1980s, she was reprimanded by the program director for playing tracks that he deemed too raucous. “All the early morning shows were called ‘First Light,’ which meant a gentle rise to the day,” she says. But she would play songs like “Love Shack” by the B-52s. After several warnings, Ganesan says, she relented and began adding folk and Brian Eno to her playlists.

Ganesan is still working an early morning shift. Her show, which airs on Sundays from 6 to 9 a.m., is now called Namaste, a Sanskrit greeting associated with yoga and Hinduism. Though the show’s name suggests music from South Asia, Ganesan doesn’t limit herself geographically or by genre. Her playlists include artists she grew up listening to as well as suggestions listeners email to her. The result: a medley of just about every type of music there is.

Her Feb. 2 show featured melancholy folk-rock songs by Marianne Faithfull, country-pop tunes by Beyoncé, and atmospheric, jazzy tracks by Pakistani-American artist Arooj Aftab, among others. Each song flowed into the next without fuss, despite their stylistic differences.

Ganesan was born in Srirangam (now part of the city of Tiruchirappalli) in South India. Her family moved to the U.S. when she was five, and she grew up in St. Louis and Spring Valley, N.Y. At home, the radio was always on. Her favorite rock DJs on WNEW in New York were Dennis Elsas and Pete Fornatale. “I was a radio nerd,” she says. “I was the kid at the party reading liner notes near the stereo.”

After graduating from high school, Ganesan returned to India and spent a year at Stella Maris College in Chennai (previously called Madras). “My high school friends taped a dozen cassettes for me to listen to,” she says, including Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and Joni Mitchell. She came back to the States to get a bachelor’s degree at Vassar and a master’s at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

From 1984 to 1986, Ganesan was a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center. It was there that she finished her first novel, The Journey, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1990. She stayed in town for another year to work as a secretary for artist Myron Stout. He was visually impaired, and she read to him from art magazines.

That was when Ganesan, now 64, got her first gig as a DJ. Her friend Kathy Shorr had a morning show at WOMR, and Ganesan had recently gotten her radio license. When Shorr gave up her show, Ganesan says, she took over the slot. “It was probably the most exciting thing I’d ever done,” she says.

A year later, a friend in New York City invited her to come there and she moved to Staten Island and worked as a proofreader for a graphic design firm. For the next 30 years, she traveled around the country, teaching creative writing in M.F.A. programs at the University of Missouri, the University of California in San Diego and Santa Cruz, Long Island University, Naropa University, and the University of Colorado Boulder.

In 2011, Ganesan moved back to Provincetown. She’s published two more novels: Inheritance and As Sweet As Honey, both with Knopf. Now she’s working on poetry and two more novels while teaching part-time, remotely, at Emerson College. “One of the first things I did when I got back to town,” she says, “was go to the radio station and ask if I could volunteer.”

She’s been making a playlist for her next show. “I’m going to have some Led Zeppelin,” she says — but it turns out to be covers by Rodrigo y Gabriela, a duo from Mexico. “They play a great ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ ” she says. “As does this ukelele player from Hawaii, Jake Shimabukuro. That reminds me a little bit of the band Santana.” As Ganesan assembles the artists, “it all kind of flows together.”

“I’m interested in the way musicians honor each other,” she says. “You’ll get a Japanese band that’s really good at surf guitar. You’ll have a samba musician playing the Beatles, or the Beatles asking Ravi Shankar to help them with sitar.”

Shankar, the renowned Indian sitarist, and his daughter Anoushka are two of Ganesan’s “stalwarts” on her show, she says. But “in a kind of reverse osmosis,” she says, “I didn’t start out listening to Indian music.” It was on in the background at home, but she “tuned it out.” Instead, she listened to the Beatles. “But then I found out that the Beatles listened to Ravi Shankar,” Ganesan says.

Now, she always starts her show with classical Eastern music, with string instruments like the sitar and oud and percussion like the tabla. “I go from there to jazzy fusion and eventually to rock and roll,” she says.

On the air, she says little between songs. “I’m a real believer in not talking too much,” she says, “and just letting the music speak for itself.” Sometimes she’ll play recordings of musicians talking about their music. In a 1971 performance by Shankar in Copenhagen, “Nine Decades, Vol. 7,” he explains that he’ll begin with an evening raga. A raga is a traditional Indian classical melodic framework that musicians may improvise on.

“First you will hear a short solo on the sitar,” says Shankar, “followed by a cut. That’s where the drums join — the tablas, in a rhythmic cycle, known as Rupak Taal, of seven beats.” The sitar sings out with its characteristic mournful twang. Then, as Shankar says, the tablas come in, spelling out a seven-beat pattern. The music is complicated and beautiful — made more so because the audience has an idea of the piece’s inner workings.

Later in the performance, Shankar introduces each instrument that’s onstage — the sitar made of teakwood with its six principal strings and 13 sympathetic strings; the tabla’s two drums, one tuned to the tonic of the piece, the other able to produce different pitches. He teaches with calm authority. When Ganesan played this on her show, she felt no need to add her own commentary: “I’d rather listen to Ravi Shankar explain classical Indian music than me.”

Ganesan’s love of music doesn’t translate to instrumental ability — “I’m pretty hopeless,” she says. “I tried learning guitar and attempted ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ by Bob Dylan, which was pretty funny, because it didn’t sound like that at all.”

It’s listening to music that’s for her, “all the time,” she says. “All kinds.”