ग्रामोफोन एंड टाइपराइटर लिमिटेड (जी एंड टी)

The Gramophone & Typewriter Ltd. — known to collectors simply as 'G&T' — was the London company under whose imprint the first recordings of Indian music reached the public. Formed in 1900 when the Gramophone Company added a typewriter business to hedge against the uncertain future of recorded sound, the firm kept the unwieldy name until 1907, which is why the earliest and most precious Indian discs all bear the G&T label. It was this company that sent Fred Gaisberg on his 'Far Eastern tour' of 1902, the expedition that recorded Gauhar Jaan and her contemporaries in Calcutta hotel rooms. G&T discs of the period were single-sided, seven and ten inches across, pressed at Hanover in Germany and carried back to India by sea. Their labels — featuring the famous Recording Angel before the dog Nipper and 'His Master's Voice' took over — mark the very first generation of Indian records. For the historian of Hindi song, 'G&T' is shorthand for the cradle years of the industry, 1902 to 1907, when every disc was an experiment and every voice captured was a first.

The G&T catalogue of 1902–07 maps colonial India's listening taste: courtesan thumris and dadras lead, with khayal, ghazals, Parsi-theatre numbers and devotional pieces behind them — every disc exactly as long as three minutes of wax allowed.

From its Maiden Lane, London office, The Gramophone & Typewriter Ltd ran recording expeditions like trade voyages: engineers sailed with horns and wax, local agents booked singers, masters sailed back to Hanover. The Calcutta branch opened in 1901 — a year before any Indian voice was cut to disc.

G&T is the imprint on the birth certificate of Indian recorded music. Under this label the 1902-03 Calcutta matrices were pressed and sold, India's first commercial discs. The company's decision to invest in 'native' repertoire — against the scepticism of the London office — proved that Indian music could sustain a record industry, and its early catalogues fixed the commercial template: classical and tawaif repertoire first, theatre songs alongside, each performance compressed to three minutes. The G&T years also established the supply chain (recorded in India, pressed in Hanover, sold in Indian bazaars) whose costs eventually justified building the Sealdah factory in 1908. When the company simplified its name back to the Gramophone Company and adopted the His Master's Voice trademark, the foundation laid in the G&T years became the HMV empire that dominated Hindi film music for most of the twentieth century.

G&T's India venture became The Gramophone Company (India) — later HMV, today Saregama: the longest unbroken thread in Indian recorded music, running from Gauhar Jaan's 1902 sessions to streaming-era reissues of the same masters.