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Vintage sounds

After several trips to chor bazaars and junk dealers across India, a Carnatic vocalist has managed to digitise over 12,000 rare records and give people free online access to them.

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The voice of Asha Bhonsle and the face of Sadhana may have rendered Jhumka Gira Re a timeless classic, but this was not the first instance of the popular folk number being sung or recorded. Much before the hit film Mera Saya featuring the song released in 1966, a certain Miss Dulari sang it for the Gramophone Company of India in the late 1930s. Little is known about Miss Dulari, except that she was a Hindustani vocalist from Peshawar in present-day Pakistan and specialised in several genres of classical and folk music. But her three-minute, rustic rendition of Jhumka Gira Re, in the characteristic nasal tone of vintage records, shows her as an accomplished artist.

Miss Dulari is among 200 artistes that feature on the Archive of Indian Music (AIM), an online initiative that was launched early this week and hosts digitised sound clips of Gramophone recordings between 1900 and 1950. These were pioneering artistes who took on the challenge of recording music in the 78 RPM format, which meant craning your neck to shout into the recording horn and sounding melodious all the while. Most of all, it meant condensing the compositions to three minutes since the shellac record could hold only that much sound.

“Most noted musicians and singers of the time, especially the men, refused to record since they felt it would compromise on the aesthetics of their music,” says Vikram Sampath, author-historian and founder of AIM. Besides they were also superstitious that they would lose their voice if they sang in front of a microphone. It was left to some singers and musicians to work around these notions and record Hindustani, Carnatic and folk music for the world to listen. “Unfortunately, little is known about these pioneers and most of these classic records lie disposed in flee markets across the country,” says Sampath.

A Carnatic vocalist himself, Sampath began collecting shellacs from the early 19th century in 2007. His interest in the subject grew while researching Gauhar Jaan, a nautch girl from Kolkata who was the first to be recorded in the Indian subcontinent. “Such was her popularity that her pictures appeared on match-boxes made in Austria,” says Sampath.

Several trips to chor bazaars and junk dealers across cities and generous donations have resulted in a collection of over 12,000 rare records. These include a 10-year-old MS Subbulakshmi singing a bhajan; the first ever recording of Jana Gana Mana sung by the Visvabharti Chorus; songs by Bal Gandharva, the legendary Marathi stage actor and singer; and even a speech delivered by M K Gandhi for the Columbia Gramophone Company in 1931, stating in his crisp English that “God is life, truth, light. He is love. His is the supreme good.”

Available on the AIM website — archiveofindianmusic.org — these digitised sound clips are divided into categories like Devotional, Patriotic, Hindustani, Carnatic, Speeches and so on. Music lovers can stream these for free, browse artists by genre, raga or name and even create a playlist on the website.

The idea, says Sampath, was to make these rare gramophone recordings accessible to everyone. “When we think of an archive we think of old, dusty closed rooms. [But] they form part of our collective culture [and] the idea is to share the recordings,” says Sampath, adding that AIM would like to digitise and put up 5 lakh rare sound clips over the next five years.

AIM functions out of a small space in Manipal University where Sampath has one employee, Chetan Kumar, to digitise gramophone records. The equipment that costs about Rs10 lakh and seed capital for starting this venture was given to Sampath by T V Mohandad Pai, chairman of Manipal Global Education and former and former member of the Infosys board of directors. It's a small operation by all counts, but the payouts for the heritage of Indian music, will be huge.

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