Hindusthan Records: How the shepherd boy playing a flute brought music into Indian homes
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In the early years of the 20th century, strollers in Calcutta’s busy Dharamtola area would have found it difficult to miss the gleaming horns of gramophone players in the show window of ML Shaw & Company.
Founded by businessman Motilal Saha, the store sold two kinds of mechanical devices imported from the West: bicycles and gramphones. Helping Saha establish the audio section of the emporium was the British firm Gramophone & Typewriter Limited, which aimed to turn these new “talking machines” into essential features of the drawing rooms of India’s affluent families.
By then, the market for recorded sound was already fiercely competitive. Gramophone & Typewriter Limited had already made a bold move that put it ahead of its rivals. In 1902, on the invitation of the company’s head office in London, an American recording engineer named Frederick Gaisberg landed at Calcutta port.
He frequented the city’s theatres and musical soirees to identify the most admired singers and their songs. He then invited them to his makeshift recording studio. By the end of the year, a corpus of 500 recordings on wax masters were sent off to the Gramophone & Typewriter Limited pressing factory in Hanover, Germany.
The next year, 200 record titles were shipped back to...