ग़ज़ल — 'दीवान-ए-जानकी' से, जानकी बाई

“Ghazal — from Diwan-e-Janki” represents Janki Bai of Allahabad's late-period recordings of her own Urdu ghazals for the Gramophone Company, c. 1920 in Calcutta — the rare case of a gramophone-era star singing verse she herself had written, on His Master's Voice 78s.

Janki Bai's ghazal sides set her grave, penetrating voice in the standard salon frame — harmonium unison, soft keherwa — but the centre of gravity is diction: a poet's care for her own words, every qafiya placed like evidence.

Janki Bai composed Urdu verse under the takhallus 'Janki', and her collected diwan — Diwan-e-Janki — made her one of the very few courtesan-singers of the era to claim the poet's chair as well as the singer's. Her ghazals work the classical registers of wound and dignity, with flashes of a life that had survived both.

By 1920 Janki Bai of Allahabad was in the last period of her recording life — wealthy, literate in several languages, famous twice over: once as 'Chhappan Chhuri', once as the voice whose discs reportedly sold in the tens of thousands. Performing her own poetry on disc completed the circle: author, composer-in-performance and star in one person. She spent her later years in Allahabad in philanthropy, and died in 1934.

Diwan-e-Janki survives as rare first-person literature from the tawaif world, and her self-authored ghazal sides anticipate the singer-songwriter by half a century. Modern scholarship on courtesan culture treats her as a central case of artistic self-possession.