ग़ज़ल रिकॉर्डिंग — पीरा साहब

“Ghazal Recording — Peara Saheb” stands for the post-war ghazal sides cut around 1919 by Peara Saheb, the most prolific male voice of early Indian recording, for the Gramophone Company in Calcutta. Sung in the Urdu mehfil idiom with harmonium and tabla, on 78 rpm under the His Master's Voice imprint.

Peara Saheb's ghazal sides ride the standard salon machinery — harmonium doubling the line, tabla in a soft keherwa — but the selling point was always the voice: a high, agile, almost feminine register that cut cleanly through the acoustic horn's narrow window. His diction made every sher land even on a worn disc.

The repertoire was the common stock of the Urdu mehfil — couplets of the beloved's cruelty, the candle and the moth, the wine of separation — chosen for how they sang rather than who signed them. On record labels the poet usually went unnamed; the singer was the brand.

Peara Saheb had been recording since the Gaisberg sessions of 1902 and outlasted nearly everyone — through the war years, when shipping shortages and the exit of German labels thinned the catalogues, into the post-war revival when HMV's Calcutta presses ran hot again. By 1919 he was that rare thing: a veteran brand in an industry not yet twenty years old.

Peara Saheb's two-decade catalogue is the spine of the male voice in early Indian recording — proof that the gramophone star system was not only a women's story. His post-war sides document the ghazal's commercial resilience between the tawaif era and the talkies.