ये जलसा ताजपोशी का

'Yeh Jalsa Taajposhi Ka' is the felicitation song performed by Gauhar Jaan and Janki Bai of Allahabad at the Coronation Durbar in Delhi, December 1911. A mubarakbadi in the courtly tawaif tradition, it survives as a single documented line and the most storied live performance of the early gramophone era.

A mubarakbadi — a felicitation song in the courtly Lucknow-Banaras manner — composed for the occasion and delivered jointly by the two most famous recording artists in India. No raag or taal attribution survives; period felicitation songs of this kind were typically set in light, auspicious melodic frames with sarangi and tabla accompaniment.

The single surviving line — 'Yeh jalsa taajposhi ka mubarak ho mubarak ho' (blessings on this coronation celebration) — is pure courtly etiquette: the tawaif tradition's centuries-old craft of the salaami and mubarakbadi, refitted overnight from nawabi courts to an imperial one.

In December 1911 King-Emperor George V and Queen Mary were crowned at the Coronation Durbar in Delhi — the same Durbar at which the transfer of the capital from Calcutta to Delhi was announced. For the festivities, Gauhar Jaan of Calcutta and Janki Bai of Allahabad — the two best-selling voices of the gramophone age — were engaged to perform together, and by Vikram Sampath's account each received one hundred guineas for it. Whether the duet was ever cut onto a commercial disc is not established.

The Durbar duet became the emblematic image of the courtesan-singer's last golden hour: artists born of the nawabi mehfil commanding the empire's grandest stage, even as the social order that sustained them had begun to slip. Historians of early Indian recording return to this moment as the summit of Gauhar Jaan's and Janki Bai's parallel careers.