ON ALL CYLINDERS
Paul Vernon tells how recording music in India burst into life at the turn of the century.
It is necessary to look at the fascinating world of Indian music from an entirely
different angle of vision than the one used to approach Western music. The differences
between 'classical' and 'popular' styles do not fall into a European framework. The
Classical Indian form is a cultivated art music, fostered and sustained over many
generations, while the Popular form is essentially folk music. There are two fundamental
types of classical music, (referred to es 'Greet Traditions'; Hindustani in the north
and Karnatak in the south), whose essence is still to be found in most current Classical
Indian works. Popular musics in India are a blending of styles that incorporate elements
of either of these Classical musics and fuse them with local folk traditions. By
this process a profusion of regional variations have grown and matured, so that 'popular'
music in Bombay can be significantly different from its Calcutta equivalent.
This complex scenario was generations old by the time the gramophone arrived
in 1900. For the first 30 years, recorded Indian music displayed a great deal of
diverse style because, at first, the gramophone reflected rather than shaped taste.
Those Europeans involved in early recording activities had little real grasp of what
they were dealing with. They only knew it sold well, and they were willing to record
everything that they could.
The first cylinder phonographs traceable in India were those imported by Maharaja
Lal & Sons of Delhi in 1895. Little is known of their activities and no documentary
evidence appears to have survived. In 1898 a Calcutta merchant, Hemendra Mohan Bose,
also commenced cylinder dealing, and in 1900 recorded material that included readings
by the poet Rabindranath Tagore. In 1901, the rapidly- expanding Gramophone Company
of London appointed its first two agents in India, Mutoscope & Biograph in Calcutta,
and Rose & Co., piano dealers, in Bombay. It soon became clear, however, that
neither company was expanding the potential market in the way the Gramophone Company
wished. In consequence a Mr. J. Watson Hawd was despatched from London to investigate
the situation, a move entirely consistent with general record company policies of
the time, right across the world.
Hawd disenfranchised both Mutoscope & Rose, and set up a fresh network operation
based in Calcutta. By May 1902 business in European recordings had increased at such
a rapid rate that Hawd moved to larger premises and continued to advise his head
office, as he had done for eighteen months previous, that embarking upon a programme
of local recording would greatly enhance the sales potential of both discs and, more
importantly, gramophones.
The Bombay Mart in the '30s
Responding finally to Hawd's advice, the pioneer recording engineer Fred Gaisburg
arrived in Calcutta on 27th October 1902, armed with thirty cumbersome cases of recording
equipment. In Gaisburg's autobiography Music On Record he recalls:
"Our agent Jack Hawd had arranged a location and had assembled a collection of artists, who watched us curiously as we prepared our studio for recording. It was the first time that the talking machine had come into their lives and they regarded it with awe and wonderment. The rains had passed and India's glorious dry season was ahead of us. We entered a new world of musical and artistic values. One had to erase all memories of the music of European opera houses and concert halls".
During this first visit, Gaisburg recorded 600 performances in CaIcutta, Delhi and
Bombay. The first 'star' to emerge from these activities was the singer Gauhar Jan,
believed by Gaisberg to be 'a Mohammedan', but who was, in fact, an accumulated Jewish
Armenian. Her ability to perform in over twenty dialects made her an ideal candidate
for the Gramophone Company's commercial aspirations, and her success was immediate.
In the meantime, German Beka and Nicholas records were also starting to appear on
the Indian marketing competition with the Gramophone Company.
Nevertheless it was the Gramophone Company's considerable resources that were winning
the sales wars; less than twelve months after Gaisburg's arrival Hawd had again relocated
to larger premises, and from there he set about the aggressive marketing of his newly
acquired roster. When, in 1903, the Company's first 'vernacular' record catalogue
appeared it offered music in over a dozen Indian and Burmese dialects, in a variety
of styles, on two sizes of disc, 7" and 10". It represents one of the world's
first significant catalogues of authentic vernacular music.
For the next four years a number of European companies vied with each other for the
glittering prize of the Indian gramophone market. While the Gramophone Company continued
to consolidate its foothold, European and American imports on Columbia Edison and
Pathé records competed against both the British and the Germans, as well as
smaller operations, such as the Indian-owned James Manufacturing Co. and the French
Nicole Freres (who issued locally recorded music on celluloid coated brown cardboard
discs!). Faced with mounting competition, the Gramophone Company bit back.
In the early summer of 1906, Fred Gaisburg's brother Will arrived in India. He undertook
a massive tour of the continent, recording in over eight locations, encountering
extremes of temperature - one engineer suffered sunstroke in Amritsar and bagging
a wide variety of regional music. Later, in the Gramophone Company's house magazine,
The Voice, he recalled:
"The most appreciated singers are the young women with very high voices. The male artists are not great favourites, and their parts generally consist of teaching girl singers their songs and making up the orchestral accompaniment. l might add that one never finds written music for these songs, they are handed down from father to son and this has been going on for hundreds of generations. Some of the songs, or one might say poems, being 2000 years old. One rarely hears a male singer, except when his voice resembles a woman's.
The words of some of the poems often take one or two days for the singer to render. Many of them can be traced back to Persian. The singing girls or 'nautch girls' as they are called, rarely become great artists. I know of only one case where one of them became a great artist and that was Gauhar Jan. She sang in several different languages, including Persian. She was a great favourite throughout India, and was one of the very few artists whose records could be sold all over the country."
The Gaisburgs returned again the following two years, Will in 1907 and Fred in 1908;
by the time of Fred's last tour, however, the business had expanded so rapidly that
there was a huge Gramophone Company complex housed in new premises at Beliaghata
Road in Calcutta. Comprising offices, machine assembly shop, cabinet making factory,
recording studio, processing and pressing facilities, it was at that time the largest
gramophone industry complex outside of Northern Europe and America. Indian technicians,
trained in England, were operating the studios, and by 1909 the business was
completely self- supporting, although still ultimately controlled from England. By
1910 The Gramophone Company had won the first round in the free-for-all battle for
market dominance.
In the meantime the scuffle for second place continued unabated. German Odeon, employing
its standard practice, appointed Indian agents to find and record artists for them,
while the Hanover-based Lyra company went into partnership with T.S. Ramchandra of
Bombay to launch the Ram- OPhone label. The German companies, Odeon especially, dug
deeper into regional culture than the Gramophone Company. Their agents, spread throughout
India's immense and diverse population, recorded Bengali Tagore music, examples of
the Tamil tradition and much else besides. Hemendra Bose, the 'father' of Indian
recording, associated himself with French Pathé and started selling cylinder
recordings from his Calcutta base. Investing in the Cylinder business in 1907, however,
was akin to having faith in Betamax or 8-track cartridges in the late 1970s and it
led Bose up a blind alley from which he never returned.
The Gramophone Company's position was by now so strong that challenges from competitors
made little overall impact on its dominance. Locally produced raw shellac, the basic
ingredient of a 78 rpm disc, was in plentiful supply (indeed, it was exported to
Europe), Indian society had completely and enthusiastically absorbed the new medium,
and sales were spiralling upward.
In 1920 Viel-O-Phone records were launched, with local backing, in Bombay, Madras
and Rangoon; in 1921 the Bombay-based Ramagraph Company issued records made locally
but pressed in Germany. Other independent operators also had a stab at the market
but still little impact could be mad upon the Gramophone Company's position.
Columbia Records, the only other international record company, were latecomers to
India. Despite the fact that their European recordings had been available for a number
of years, they didn't initiate any local recording until 1929, when five major distributors,
one for each geographical area, were appointed. However, they almost immediately
became absorbed into the 1931 merger between The Gramophone Company, Columbia, Odeon
and others that created the giant Electrical And Musical Industries company.
Interestingly, the new EMI organisation undertook a number of special pressings for
local distribution throughout the continent at the request of their appointed agents.
Presumably working on the assumption that those agents knew what the local market
wanted and bearing in mind that it was the agents who put up most of the venture
capital anyway, EMI happily pressed up releases on a wide variety of labels for local
distribution. It is worth noting that this practice, as Santosh Kumar De indicates,
helped to frustrate any local competition to EMI's market from remaining contenders.
It also preserved a remarkable cross section of regional music that might
otherwise have gone unrecorded.
Up to this point, the music offered to India by all these companies was a steady
diet of classical, religious, popular, regional, 'theatre and novelty As yet, India's
long musical traditions had largely remained unaltered. Without disturbing the commercial
status quo, however, a major tuning point in style and development occurred in 1931
with the release of Alam Ara, the first sound movie produced in India, The
public's response was ecstatic and the newly amalgamated companies quickly reacted:
although no records were released from that initial film, nor from the second,
Shirin Farhad, interest was so great that the Indian film industry grew
at a comparable rate to its generation-older media sister, and has since grown to
rival Hollywood in output, By 1932 the two industries had worked out financial arrangements
that allowed music from the fourth Indian sound film, Madhuri to be released
on record, although it did not came directly from the soundtrack. Finally, technical
difficulties were overcome and two 78 rpm records by Prof. Vinayakrao Patwardhan,
released by EMI in November 1932, are identified by Santosh Kumar De as the first
genuine Film Music Soundtrack records.
During this period, when most films were produced in Hindi, a significant number
of 'version records' - the same song in alternative dialects - were also produced,
many of them performed by a single artist, Gourkedar Bhattacharya. Throughout the
1930s the market for Film Music records grew rapidly, in tandem with Cinema itself.
This had two major effects upon Indian music. Firstly, it went national and, like
any popular movement, helped to create a homogenous taste among the public. For the
regional styles it meant a blending process that has tended to accelerate the demise
of local variations. To some extent this was counter-balanced by the later rise of
regional cinema and the conscious preservation of older traditions by interested
groups of musicians and historians, but it sowed the seeds of destruction for a number
of archaic traditions. Secondly, it popularised the modern ghazal, a song-form with
some roots in Turkish and Persian culture, that had long been a varied but staple
ingredient of much Indian music. The haunting ghazal provided an ideal vehicle for
film-songs and over the years has developed into a blended format that today remains
one of the cornerstones of popular Indian style.
Unknown Indian artists recording in the '30s
During this early film-music period of the 1930s other smaller companies continued
to attempt a breach in the market that EMI now so successfully dominated. Broadcast
Records, financed by Decca in collaboration with a Bombay business man, started operations
in 1934; at about the same time the Ruby Record Company commenced trading in Bombay
also, with finance provided by a large jewellery company. Perhaps the most interesting,
though, was the Indian-owned and financed Young India label, created by the National
Gramophone Record Company of Bombay.
With money provided by V, Santaram, described at the time as a 'film magnate', Young
India purchased processing and pressing equipment from Japan and set about the vigorous
marketing of film music. Their initial success was considerable, despite the generally
lower technical standard of their recordings and pressings. They provided the younger
generation of Indian film-goers with a steady alternative diet of popular film hits.
Their advertising pitched itself at this new youth market by consciously breaking
away from tradition and recognising the potential of a new market. Young India was,
in essence, a prototype of the grass- roots Indie operations now familiar in current
Western folk and rock. They broke new ground by establishing an overseas branch in
Durban, Natal to cater for the South African Indian population, a bold move for a
small company. Although Young India lasted until 1956, the operation severely contracted
when Santaram pulled out and joined EMI in 1943.
By the outbreak of the second world, war, EMI's position was unassailable. However,
the events of 1939-45 had a deep and significant impact upon the company's structure.
Since the 1920s India had provided the Far East with a base for manufacture and supply
effectively giving EMI a stepping stone into China, Burma, the Dutch East Indies,
Singapore and other lucrative Asian markets. The Pacific war destroyed this arrangement
and, by the time Japan surrendered in August 1945, momentum had been lost, political
boundaries had been redrawn and musical tastes had changed.
EMI was obliged to restructure much of its Asian and Far East operations. The partition
of Pakistan forced the record companies to establish separate and, to some degree,
autonomous new companies there. The political and social changes that accompanied
independence for India also called for a more sensitive restructuring of traditional
Euro-centric business operations. As a result, EMI constructed a new business, The
Gramophone Co (India) Ltd., which, while still affiliated with the English company,
was financially and operationally independent.
By the middle of the century, the Indian record industry had achieved a magnitude
that few other non-western countries could match, and since then both India and Pakistan
have seen their record industries grow consistently. New major international corporations
have invested in every technical innovation and have enlarged their catalogues with
a wide variety of traditional and popular music, although the Film Music genre continues
to dominate. This brief feature can only outline part of the history of a music so
complex, vibrant and rich in tradition that it will surprise and delight you at every
turn.
Advertising for the Young India Label, c. 1935
Further involvement
There are a large number of books on Indian music, many going into specific details
about song-form, style, history, instrumentation, spiritual meaning and context.
Your local library is almost certainly the best place to start. Look for The History
Of Indian Music &- Musicians by Ram Avtar Veer; (Pankay Publishers 1987)
and Indian Music by Peggy Holroyd (Allen Unwin, 1972), both excellent introductions
to this huge topic. Dig into your Folk Roots back issues for No. 98 and a
feature by Ken Hunt.
The earliest recordings available are generally popular film hits from the late 1930s.
There is an excellent two-volume set by Noor Jeehan covering 1939 to 1947. Most large
record shops don't keep any in-depth catalogues, and specialist outlets are by far
the best source. In large urban areas with a significant Asian population there will
be at least one or two such shops and often more. From these you will also be able
to find out about local live performances of traditional music. I urge you to do
so; I know from experience that genuine interest will be warmly welcomed and you
will be delighted by the standard of musicianship and dancing. You should also investigate
the availability of films on video, but don't expect to find too many very early
ones (if you do, let me know!).
Meantime, Rounder have recently issued a sampler CD of Indian music from 1906-20
which should be available from your favourite specialist.
Published sources consulted
F.W. Gaisburg Music On Record Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians
Peter Manuel: Popular Musics Of The Non Western World
Santosh Kumar: De The Gramophone In India (Uttishata Press/Spiritual
Society of India)
The Voice
Thanks also to: British Library, EMI Photos, Michael S. Kinnear, National
Sound Archive, E.V. Samuels, Eva Santus.
This article was originally published in the magazine FolkROOTS.
Copyright belongs to the author.
Electronic edition by Lars Fredriksson, April 17, 1997