The unsung women who took Hindustani music from the kotha to the gramophone

Vidya Shah recalls feeling vaguely insulted by the words accompanying a gift she received right after a concert in the spring of 2008. An elderly audience member had walked up to the Hindustani vocalist and handed her two mixtapes with the words: “Yeh suno, yeh hai asli gana” (listen to this, this is real music).

The inlay card, however, did something to assuage her pique. On it were names of women singers from the earliest 78RPM era, of whom she knew only two – the ageless Mallika Pukhraj and the star Gauhar Jaan. But who were Kitijaan, Umda Jaan, Kajjanbai or Kamala Jharia?

“The quality of the sound on the tape was really bad, but I was very taken by the familiarity of some of the music,” recalled Shah. “I knew many of the bandishes and ghazals. But there were many I didn’t know either. What was I to make of the boldness of some of the lyrics? For example, the ghazal Tum ek bosa karo inayat [bestow upon me a kiss] by Bai Sunderabai. Who were these women? Who were their ustads? Where did they come from? How did they navigate the hierarchies of gender and status? And what kind of agency did the first recorded musicians have?”

Her curiosity sparked a decade-long quest that opened up a new world for her and for music lovers: the world of fabulously talented women musicians of the early 20th century who fearlessly embraced the unfamiliar realm of recorded music even as ustads and pandits debated whether this new technology was black magic or a vulgar threat to their high art.

Most of these early women on record were courtesans, acutely aware of the precarity of traditional male patronage. They adopted recording technology since it came with the promise of new audiences, wider markets, stardom and freedom. It was an astute move, taken at a time when nationalist fervour was increasingly casting a stigma on their profession.

“By disembodying music from its physical source, the technology could uncouple their music and their persona and thereby could make the music of these morally ‘suspected’ women ‘safe’ for mass consumption, the artist and the audience both would remain physically invisible to each other,” writes researcher Dipannita Dutta in the paper Mechanics, Melody and Matrix: Mettle Takes It All. The new auditory phenomena radicalised not just the patronage but also content, form of presentation and reception of music, she adds.

As collectibles of the era show, these blockbuster records did more than confer respectability – they turned these women into celebrities, their pictures appearing not only on record sleeves but even on matchbox covers in faraway Sweden and Austria. Another thing recording did for them was open pathways into theatre and cinema as singers, actors and producers.

Shah’s research project, titled Women On Record, eventually yielded the book Jalsa: Indian Women and their Journeys from the Salon to the Studio, a traveling music show and an accompanying collection of art curated by her husband, photographer and filmmaker Parthiv Shah. The project documented the stories of entrepreneurial courtesans, early moguls of the indigenous recording industry, and the interface between the two.

The women in Jalsa had arresting life stories – tales of exploitation, poverty and humiliation, but also of amazing triumphs. There was Indubala, who came from a family of circus performers and dreamt of a career in nursing, but instead rose to recording stardom. There was Janki Bai, whose popularity was marred by violence, but whose new record releases drew traffic jams on market streets. And there was Rasoolan Bai, who, despite her undisputed talent, died in penury.

This year marks 15 years of Shah’s work, which will be celebrated with a Women on Record event and the release of a second book. Over this period, the lives and times of these courtesans have become the subject of numerous books and research papers. Many contemporary performers have drawn inspiration from them, recreating their dramatic lives through dance and musicals, even weaving their stories into heritage tourism campaigns. Kotha, mujra and tawaif are now cool cultural buzzwords.

“But I find that some of the real stories are now lost in the retelling,” said Shah. “You have to set their context, so they are not reduced to cliches. For instance, sing ‘Rangi sari gulabi’ from their repertoire by all means, but also make sure you explain to the audience where it came from.”

Natural fit

They came by many names – gaanewali, tawaif, public women, kothewali, domni, nautch girls, among them.

Today, there is extensive scholarship on the public women of the colonial era and the undervalued cultural traditions they left behind. This includes Saba Dewan’s acclaimed documentary The Other Song and book Tawaifnama and Vikram Sampath’s biographies of Gauhar Jaan and Bangalore Rathnamma. There is also considerable research on nautch girls, their communities, their place in elite courts, salons and streets, and the epic lives of figures like Umrao Jaan and Binodini Das.

But when Shah began, little was known about how their voices came to be etched into the hard grooves of music records.

What was available was discographer Michael Kinnear’s painstakingly collated online archive of early recordings (Bajakhan), Suresh Chandvankar’s collection at the Society of Indian Record Collectors, and Amlan Dasgupta’s scholarship. Saleem Kidwai’s knowledge of Lucknow and its arts also served as a source, as did media anthropologist Steve Huges and arts writer S Kalidas.

Shah’s research, covering the early 20th century to the independence years, took her to big courtesan hubs such as Patna, Lucknow, Kanpur, Benares and Kolkata. On her trips, she explored the collections and stately homes of former patrons, interviewed researchers who delved into the lives of local bais, and consulted private collectors of manuscripts, monographs and artworks on music and dance.

“The families living in the baris of the erstwhile zamindar clans did not want to speak of their association with the courtesans,” Shah remembered. “They consider it a taboo topic. But you could see the history on the walls of their salons and jalsaghars where there were handpainted portraits of the legends – from Hirabai Barodekar, Gangubai Hangal, and Gauhar Jaan to Bhatkhande and Faiyaz Khan.”

From these homes to the recording rooms of the 1910s – till the studios arrived these were in hotels and makeshift spaces – it was a long journey for the baijis. Early chapters of Shah’s book capture a frenetic era of technological transition when recording entrepreneurs and amateurs crisscrossed India in search of musical styles and voices that would land them the next big hit.

Among the experts was American sound engineer Fred Gaisberg, whose first recording featured two teenage nautch girls, Soshi Mukhi and Fani Bala, whom he later described as having “miserable voices”. But soon after, he discovered the supremely talented and flamboyant Gauhar Jaan, who, according to Jalsa, went on to record nearly 400 songs in 20 languages.

There are many reasons why courtesan artistes embraced the recording industry so naturally and why the industry sought them out eagerly too. Early recording machines, Shah writes, were more suitable to women’s voices, so much so that the few men who recorded, such as Peara Saheb, had to mimic women to be heard.

Equally importantly, unlike male singers who could afford to be high-nosed about their art, the bais and jaans understood the open market and its insecurities. For all the stardust around them, they remained on society’s periphery, their music labelled “entertainment” and sexualised. What the recording industry did was free them from this ignominy by removing their physical presence from the music and taking their voices into middle-class homes and zenanas, where they were otherwise not welcome.

“These stars seem to have been better known and more popular than any Hollywood or India silent film stars of those days,” Shah writes.

Transformative shift

What kind of music did these women bring to gramophones? Most of them had received formal taleem, though it was often not given generously and whole-heartedly, says Shah. “There was little information available, they were taught mostly by the sarangiyas,” she said. “The ustads taught them bits and pieces. Kesarbai was an example of this. You rarely hear of them in association with a gharana, for instance. Some would not be taught, say the antara, and be left to figure it out on their own.”

Despite this, they entered recording studios armed with a formidable repertoire – khayal, thumri, dadra, chaiti, saavan, hori and more. The non-khayal forms lent themselves more readily to the record, being shorter and livelier. Yet some khayal specialists mastered the art of compressing expansive compositions into the three-minute format. Zohrabai Agrewali was considered the most adept at this skill.

At a more abstract level, the new format upended established ideas of creativity and the aural experience of Hindustani classical music. When performed live, this music was, and remains, ephemeral: a composition is rarely rendered the same way twice and a raag is seldom framed identically even by the same musician. Recorded music, by contrast, invited repeated savouring.

For aspiring musicians, this shift was transformative. “Their first lessons came engraved on the grooves of 78 RPM discs, and the attendance of live performances followed,” writes Shah. Narayanrao Vyas famously quipped that he had thousands of students he had never met.

As anti-nautch sentiment grew, finding institutional expression in the 1952 ban on tawaifs from AIR studios, many of these women made a shrewd transition from recording studios to theatre and cinema, where they found greater acceptance. Among them was the entrepreneurial Jaddan Bai, who moved from Varanasi to Bombay and built a career in films as an actor, singer, and producer. She also famously ran a salon that attracted leading intellectuals and promoted her daughter Nargis in Hindi cinema.

With nationalism at its peak, many made sure to record their own versions of “Vande Mataram” – Mogubai Kurdikar’s in raga Khambavati was one and Siddheshwari Devi’s was another. The women on record were nothing if not resiliently versatile.

Malini Nair is a culture writer and senior editor based in New Delhi. She can be reached at writermalini@gmail.com.