Sound Check

In November last year,on a research trip to Germany,he realised how easy it could be. At the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv in Berlin,he found a cache of rare recordings by Salem Godavari,a famed singer and devadasi who lived in Madras and was Gauhar Jaan’s contemporary. The songs,recorded mostly between 1910 and 1925,he says,“were easily accessible,with the time and date of recording along with other details about the artist mentioned,and a copy could even purchased for a price”. Sampath also found other Indian recordings from the early 20th century at the Laut Archive in Berlin.

The source of most of the recordings is a firm set up in London at the tail-end of the 19th century,the Gramophone Company. It sent its representative Frederick William Gaisberg to India in 1902 to locate artists and record their voices — one of the many women musicians to be “discovered” then was Angelina Yeoward aka Gauhar Jaan.

That was also around the time the Berliner Phonogramm-archiv initiated a project to collect recordings from all over the world. As a result,many recordings of Indian singer-courtesans like Coimbatore tayi,Bangalore tayi and Mysore Nagaratnamma travelled to the archive via the Gramophone Company. “These were recorded in India but travelled to various archives in Europe because of the attitude of the countries towards the recordings. They considered them a national treasure because they were the first ones to set up base in India,record and distribute these,” says Sampath.

“American and British recording companies,notably Columbia and Gramophone,established offices in India before 1905 and were actively recording,” says Janet W McKee,reference librarian at the Recorded Sound Reference Center in Washington DC,which provides access to the commercial and archival audio holdings of the Library of Congress,USA. The Indian collection in this library dates back to 1930s and includes recordings by Gauhar Jaan,Salem Godavari and a range of other artistes who recorded for the Gramophone Company.

Such rare works can also be found at the Smithsonian Institution,the national museum of the US,which has gone one step further in making things accessible for music lovers. It allows you to buy rare Indian recordings in album formats or as online downloads from its non-profit record label,Smithsonian Folkways. “I only had to register,and with a click of the mouse,I could get some rare recordings. I am not sure if these recordings are available in India but even if they are,I will have a tough time hunting for them,” says musician Shubha Mudgal,a regular buyer of Indian music from Smithsonian Folkways.

A search for Indian recordings throws up as many as 70 results,most of which are donated collections. Some intriguing results include a recording by devotional singer Balakrishna Travancore from 1957 in which he sings ragas in Tamil,Sanskrit,Hindi and Telugu; The Four Vedas performed by various artistes in 1968; Marathi songs sung by folk singers Madhumalati and Sneha Dhopeshwarkar (1938); and the album,BR Deodhar presents Ragas of India. Deodhar was a disciple of Pandit Vishnu Digambar Paluskar and later became a film composer in the 1940s. Except Travancore’s,none of the other recordings can be found in any archive in India. “We have a reference record library of 78 rpms and there are many Indian recordings here but we can’t put all the recordings online because of copyright restrictions. Wherever that is not applicable,recordings are online,” says Jeff Place,archivist at the Smithsonian.

The MS Subbulakshmi devotee can find something for herself at Harvard University’s Loeb Music Library,which contains the James Rubin Collection of South Indian Classical Music — 1,000 tapes,400 78 rpm records and 30 spiral notebooks detailing the performances Rubin recorded in India of the legendary singer — one of the most comprehensive and significant sources of Carnatic music recordings in the world today. Rubin was an American collector of music who eventually became Subbulakshmi’s student and a close associate,and is still remembered as Rubin mamu in Chennai’s music circles. The archive also has performances by Pandit Ravi Shankar,recorded at Rubin’s Newtonville home in March,1957. “You can hear selected digital audio recordings from the archive online,” says Liza Vick,music reference and research services librarian,Loeb Music Library,Harvard University.

Not surprisingly,this accessibility is a marked contrast to the fusty red tape that greets any researcher back home in India. The country’s biggest and oldest institutional archive,the All India Radio (AIR),boasts of over 5,000 hours of recordings of Indian classical musicians. But rare is the music aficionado who has been able to get past its layers of bureaucratic hurdles. It took us two trips to the Akashwani Bhavan on Parliament Street in Delhi,numerous forms and permissions and meetings with officials before we were turned away. “Nobody is allowed to access these archives and I can’t divulge what we have. You can buy these off our counter outside when these get digitised,” said Indira Kumar,director,AIR archives.

A few years ago,filmmaker Saba Dewan had approached AIR for a famous 1976 recording of Siddeshwari Devi and Rasoolan Bai,which features a conversation between the two legendary singers,in which they sang their favourite thumris and laughed their heart out. It was an AIR property,but she was fobbed off with many ruses — including an explanation that the recording had been erased in an attempt to record something else over the tape. “The babus at the AIR archive,which is supposed to be the largest source of Indian audio recordings,are completely indifferent to our needs,” she said. The HMV (now Sa Re Ga Ma) archive in Kolkata also had several rare recordings but it is feared that a lot of them were gutted in a fire that ravaged its storage vault. Sa Re Ga Ma CEO Apoorva Nagpal’s response seems to typify the secrecy around music collections. “I will never leak the information about what we have and what we don’t. But it is true that many recordings were destroyed in the fire,” he says.

“Documenting and preserving history is perhaps something that we have never been interested in,” says Sampath. “Another issue is that the self-effacing world of artistes of those times ensured that the art was always bigger than the artist,and the latter seldom merited detailed documentation,” he says. Perhaps the inherent oral legacy of Indian classical music where zealously guarded musical principles of a particular school or gharana were passed down the generations without any written record; or a natural disinterest in preservation are to be blames. Whatever the reason,the apathy towards rare musical treasures is apparent.

Hope lies in efforts of preservation by archivists like Dr Amlan Dasgupta of Kolkata’s Jadavpur University,who oversees probably one of the best archives in the country. “There is no single available list of gramophone records made in India,leave alone recordings of other kinds. There is also no public archive of any note in India where sound recordings are stored and are made available to researchers of music,musicology and cultural history,” says Dasgupta,whose efforts have converted a tiny room into a rich treasure of records of Malka Jan,Zohra Bai,Janki Bai,Chandabai Karwarkarin,Lalchand Baral,Imdad Khan and Mallikarjun Mansur. He remains a rare optimist who thinks that we still haven’t struck the final note. “I hope corporates will put in money and do something about the condition of Indian archives. If we all work hard,it can be done.”

(With inputs from Premankur Biswas)